01.07.2015: On July 1st, two scientists take up their joint appointments as Professors between the GFZ and Potsdam University. Prof. Taylor Schildgen now holds a Professorship on the topic „Landscape Evolution and Climate Interaction“, Prof. Emmanuel Müller on the topic „Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery“.

Since 2012, Prof. Taylor Schildgen heads a DFG Emmy-Noether Group „Geologic reconstructions of changes in erosion rates and hillslope processes in response to climate forcing” that she will bring with her from the University of Potsdam to GFZ. Prof. Schildgen has received her PhD from the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), having graduated from universities in Scotland and USA.

As a Professor, she will work on the variability of erosion rates and hillslope processes in response to climate shifts. The methodological approach will integrate field and monitoring data with numerical modeling, to work towards predictive understanding of how landscapes throughout the world will respond to future global climate change. Taylor Schildgen: “With modern stream and weather records, I aim to decipher the role of short-term climate variability, while parallel work on sedimentary deposits will reveal how such signals persist in large sedimentary basins over longer timescales.” The five-year funding of the professorship was awarded within the competitive Helmholtz Programme for excellent female researchers.

Before his appointment, Prof. Emmanuel Müller headed a junior research group on the topic of data mining algorithms in heterogenic data rooms at Karlsruhe Institut of Technology (KIT). Emmanuel Müller did study computing science at RWTH Aachen University, where he received his PhD in 2010 on „Efficient Knowledge Discovery in Subspaces of High Dimensional Databases“. This was followed by positions as Research Assistant, and Senior Researcher and Lecturer at KIT. Since 2014, Prof. Müller was Associate Fellow at KIT, in collaboration with University of Antwerp/Belgium.

At GFZ, Prof. Müller works with the section “Geoinformatics” and heads the working group “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery”. At the same time he is a professor at the mathematical-scientific faculty of the University of Potsdam in a joint appointment with Hasso-Plattner-Institute and GFZ. The aim of his professorship is to join computing science with geoscience. Methods from computing science like modelling and efficient analysis of correlations between different sources of information and their dimensions are to be transferred  and adjusted to geoscience and developed further. New methodes of informatics in complex geoscientific data sets identify and describe unknown and unexpectes patterns to support geoscientists in an automatic or semi-automatic extraction of knowledge. By this transdisciplinary research, new methods of information gathering are to be developed for the growing amount of geoscientific data. The professorship of Emmanuel Müller will be financed by the Hasso-Plattner Foundation for five years.