Opportunities for Early Career Researchers

Flood events belong to the most frequent and most consequential natural disasters in Germany. Flooding also affects children and adolescents. For a long time they were regarded above all as a risk group — in doing so they themselves can do much to protect themselves and to inform others. In Germany there is so far a lack of age-appropriate and appealing formats that make flood risks understandable.

As part of the PhD Impact project ‘Troubled Water School’, the Institute of Psychology, on behalf of Leonie Terfurth, is testing an augmented reality prototype developed through its own research, which enables users to experience a virtual flood directly in their own surroundings. The immersive representation of flooding is intended to make abstract risks tangible and emotionally experiential. There are plans to test the prototype in non-school settings — combining the dissemination of knowledge about flood risks and protective measures with the opportunity to gain valuable insights into adaptations tailored to specific target groups.

Long term is the goal to provide a format that improves adolescents’ risk perception and preventive behavior regarding flood events and can be employed in a low-threshold manner in the school context.

Cities face, due to the increasing heat burden in summer, rapidly growing challenges. To do justice to these challenges, cities must be redesigned so that the urban space remains livable, above all for future generations. Young people, however, are seldom involved in the idea and decision-making processes for such redesigns.

The project “Our city should become cooler” therefore aims, together with students, first to identify particularly heat-burdened locations in the urban area and to create a heat map for Braunschweig from the collected data. Thereafter, the students’ ideas about how they would redesign these locations in the future are gathered. These ideas are jointly visualized and exhibited in cooperation with the Sustainability Center in Braunschweig.

Alongside the heat map and the collection of ideas, the project’s goal is a stronger inclusion of young demographic groups in urban future questions. In the project, they can expand their knowledge about the climate crisis and the urban climate, gain expertise in scientific data collection and interpretation, and sharpen their awareness of the links between urban design and quality of life. Moreover, the project is intended to strengthen the dialogue between schools, science, and urban society and to develop new formats of participation for young people, since sustainable urban design should be carried by both young and old.

Johanna Gelhaus, Institute of Geoecology, Raphaela Nickel, Institute of English and American Studies and Rebekka Walter, Institute of Applied Mechanics are collaborating on the PhD Impact-project.

With TechHeritage, the PhD student Clemens Janke from the Institute of History aims to preserve and, in the long term, (re)activate the material cultural heritage of TU Braunschweig by cataloguing the “Technical Heritage” collection, the “Measurement Technology Collection” of the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, and the “Educational Map Collection” of the Institute of History.

Through cross-generational exchange between the academic and non-academic stakeholder groups involved in the project, organised in a citizen science format, knowledge that is only uncovered and made accessible through scholarly engagement with the collection objects will be shared with future generations. 

A preparatory course and an interdisciplinary workshop (in April 2026) will form the content-related and methodological framework for the exhibition of the collection objects (July 2026). The project will conclude with a publication featuring essays on the history of the objects by students from the respective collections. 

The exhibition and publication are being developed in cooperation with Claudia Doms (Institute of Visual Communication) and students from the Braunschweig University of Art. During the summer semester, conceptual and design ideas will be developed collaboratively; these will be realised in both a curated exhibition and the publication, and made accessible to the public.
Through interaction with the collection objects, historical interconnections between the city, the economy and science are brought to light, whilst simultaneously opening up new intergenerational spaces of possibility for an equitable, multifaceted and conscientious future.

Sustainability is not only taught through additional content, but also through the perception of sustainability-related situations in educational activities. The decisive factor is whether teachers recognise when an opportunity arises.

This is where the project by Yulia Edeleva and Gina Do Manh (Institute of German Studies, TU Braunschweig) comes in. A new professionalisation format for the "BNE Safaris" is being developed: with the help of a structured card game and an optional AR-supported observation environment, teachers can identify teaching situations in which ecological, social, economic or ethical issues are addressed implicitly or explicitly. These moments are documented and made available for reflection and professionalisation processes. This allows helpful situation-specific advice on aspects of sustainability to be given.

The aim of the project is to reduce the so-called belief-practice gaps, i.e. the discrepancies between teachers' sustainability-related beliefs and their concrete implementation in the classroom. In addition, the project aims to systematically strengthen institutional learning processes through immersive reflection formats. In addition to school contexts, language education, adult education and international continuing education formats (CerleS Teacher Training Week, University of Namur, Belgium) are also included. The project thus opens up perspectives for scalable, transferable internationalisation formats in the field of sustainability-oriented education.   

Land.Komm.Digital addresses the issue of participation in rural areas often coming to nothing: communication channels provide information, but too rarely encourage actual participation. In a design workshop with local stakeholders, specific communication formats are therefore developed to promote participation.

These results are used to create a practical toolkit with design principles that is tested in several organisations and refined iteratively after a few weeks based on a brief impact assessment. This process is scientifically supported by the Chair of Service Information Systems at the Institute for Information Systems.

The aim is to have a demonstrable and tangible impact on communication practices: a more participatory approach that strengthens self-efficacy, promotes engagement and thus provides sustainable support for social participation in rural areas.

How can cultural infrastructure in rural areas be established, maintained and developed in the long term?

The project by Ludger Voigt, PhD student at the Institute for Corporate Management and Organisation, and Julia Beideck, PhD student at the Department of Cooperatives at the University of Cologne, in collaboration with the theatre cooperative Traumschüff e.G., is dedicated to this question.

The aim of the project is to show how cultural services can be provided in rural areas and at the same time enable cultural participation. In addition, the project examines how cultural offerings can promote social exchange in rural regions - especially in places that have not had access to theatre to date.

With PORT-O, PhD student Cindy Demuth from the ITL is developing an interactive learning setting that gets girls interested in STEM subjects. A simulated harbour hinterland scenario is created on a mobile table using Lego, in which Ozobots are programmed to playfully implement real logistical challenges.

In workshops at schools, girls in particular learn through practical programming tasks and direct insights into research that technology and logistics are not male domains.

PORT-O thus combines the early promotion of young talent with the aim of making sustainable transport solutions visible and tangible - and boosts the self-confidence of young women to go their own way in engineering.

The social relevance of "Questions of building research and monument preservation" will be explored using examples from the Institute of Architectural History's research projects on libraries, churches and a school. Research methods and interim results will be discussed in a workshop with keynote speeches, an exhibition and an information trail.

What aspects of the projects will be considered in terms of a shared responsibility for the built heritage? The aim is to strengthen the perception of the project results in the community, to recognise the values of the built environment and to ensure the preservation of knowledge about building as a shared cultural heritage for future generations.