Good Teaching Day at LMU

“Right now, as teaching slowly returns to the lecture theaters, this is an exciting time at LMU – a time that is bursting with new ideas,” says Professor Oliver Jahraus, Vice President Tuition. LMU has set aside 15 July 2022 to honor outstanding teaching and student research performance on Good Teaching Day. Awards will be presented to lecturers for exceptional service to the cause of teaching.

Prizes will also be given to students who have written outstanding dissertations and research papers. Professor Jahraus is convinced that a clear correlation exists between current research and good teaching: “Excellent research in the faculties is the embodiment of what we teach. And if we don’t first address the issue of research, we have no way of thinking about teaching.”

Good Teaching Day is an initiative launched by LMU’s Study and Tuition Committee and Professor Oliver Jahraus, Vice President Tuition. The awards ceremony will be supported by the Münchener Universitätsgesellschaft, MUG (Munich University Society).

Preview

The prizes for innovative tuition and outstanding student research will be presented on Good Teaching Day on 15 July 2022 and showcased here.

Looking back: Good Teaching Day 2021

In 2021, too, prizes for excellence in research and innovative teaching were handed out under the aegis of Good Teaching Day. The portraits below give an impression of the work that won accolades last year:

Practical applications of legal tech

An extracurricular workshop entitled “Practical applications of legal tech” gave law students an insight into programming and was one of the teaching projects lauded at LMU in 2021.

“We wanted to overcome students’ fear of technology,” says Sebastian Nagl, who led the course. “They are all digital natives. They all have smartphones and know how to use many of the apps on them. But very few know how the digital technology behind them works.”

Automated killing: Military robots and moral responsibility

“It’s fascinating to follow how new technologies can complicate the meanings of traditional concepts which philosophers would have regarded as clearly defined up to now,” says philosophy student Felicia Kuckertz. In her bachelor’s thesis, she addressed the problem of how moral responsibility can be rationally attributed in cases in which autonomous entities controlled by AI-based software cause harm.

“To sharpen my perception of the issues involved, I consciously decided to focus on the extreme example of a potentially lethal military robot,” Kuckertz explains.

Calculating the course of climate change

Can a rainforest die of drought? Can an ecosystem that once covered an area of six million square kilometers be transformed into a very different one in a comparatively short time? Climatologists say yes, it can.

The Amazon rainforest is now under acute threat owing to a combination of two mutually reinforcing factors: climate change and ongoing deforestation. This raises the possibility that a ‘tipping point’ may be reached, a threshold beyond which a degraded rainforest can no longer maintain itself and inexorably turns into a vast savannah.

In her bachelor’s thesis in geography, Gergana Gulyeva studied the effects of climate change and deforestation on the Amazon rainforest.

Uncovering aspects of the pathogenicity of a novel virus

When the coronavirus pandemic emerged in Wuhan, LMU medical student Alexander Leunig happened to be in Singapore. “We talked a lot about what was happening in China, and we were pretty sure that the pathogen would at some point reach the city and spread further afield. But at that time, no one knew anything about the virus,” he recalls.

On his return to Munich, he was among the first clinical researchers in Germany who were in a position to study the effects of the novel pathogen. He went on to investigate the role of immune cells in the abnormal formation of blood clots that can occur in COVID patients.