Your Stepping Stone for Your Career
The UTN School of Students and Young Researchers (StaRs) offers you a structured, inspiring, and supportive environment to successfully complete your doctorate. We accompany you on your journey with targeted further training, individual mentoring, and valuable career advice.
The UTN School of Students and Young Researchers (StaRs) serves as the Graduate School of the University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN). It provides a structured, inspiring, and supportive environment for pursuing a doctorate at UTN. The School offers targeted training opportunities, individual mentoring, and tailored career support.
StaRs is part of a vibrant research community and promotes interdisciplinary exchange. In addition to an excellent doctoral program, it offers innovative qualification formats, individual supervision, and targeted career development. Networking events provide valuable opportunities to connect with experts from academia and industry.
StaRs combines academic excellence with practice-oriented training and prepares candidates for careers in research, industry, and other professional fields. The doctoral program is continuously developed to ensure optimal conditions for high-quality research.
Application
All information on approval and requirements.
Doctorate
Current doctoral topics.
Research and Support
Discover our interdisciplinary research areas.
Doctoral Research Guide
Discover our structured doctoral program.
Doctoral Researchers
Expandable list of current doctoral researchers and their research topics.
- Abdalla Ayad
Robotic Touch in the Age of Learning (Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard) - Abhijeet Kishore Nayak
- Adrian Göß
Nonlinear outer approximation for non-convex mixedinteger programming (Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin) - Agniv Sharma
- Alexander Müller
- Andrea de Santiago
Enhancing Student AI skills through Improving Teachers’ Instructional Strategies (Prof. Dr. Isa Jahnke) - Andreas Zimmerer
Efficeint Semantic Query Processing (Prof. Dr. Andreas Kipf) - Benedikt Schilling
Collective Memory and future Thinking (Prof. Dr. Magdalena Abel) - Carina Ziegler
Toward New Research Methods for Learning Experience Evaluation in Higher Education (Prof. Dr. Isa Jahnke) - Christian Greisinger
- Dawid Kopiczko
Beyond Single-Policy Reinforcement Learning: Population-Based Data Search for Self-Improving Language Models (Prof. Dr. Yuki Asano) - Débora Nunes Pinto de Oliveira
Open-World Robotics using Foundation Models and Generative Artificial Intelligence (Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard) - Ermelinda Kanushi
Technonationalism and Technoglobalism: A Comparative Analysis of Strategic Approaches in China, the USA, and the EU (PD Laura C. Mahrenbach, TUM) - Hesham Abdalla
- Iuliia Burtceva
Examples in Plato´s Dialogues (Prof. Dr. Gyburg Uhlmann) - Jan Kobiolka
Meta Learned in-Context Sequencing Models (Prof. Dr. Josif Grabocka) - Jan Krause
Network Optimization in Production and Transport Logistics: Models, Methods, and Applications (Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin) - Janosch Gehring
Predicting Plausibility of Ambiguous Sentences in Context (Prof. Dr. Michael Roth) - Johannes Hahn
Multidimensional Auction Design with Mixed-Integer Network Constraints (Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin) - Jona Ruthardt
Efficient and Scalable Multimodal Learning (Prof. Dr. Yuki Asano) - Jonas Kälble
Label Efficient Machine Learning on Multi-View Image Sequences (Prof. Dr. Eddy Ilg) - Kristin Braun
- Kristina Rolsing
Robust and Bilevel Optimizaiton on Potential-Based Flow Networks (Prof. Dr. Johannes Thürauf) - Laura Zeidler
- Louisa Warzog
Cognitive Offloading and Its Interplay with Learning, Memory and Metacognition (Prof. Dr. Magdalena Abel) - Lukas Knobel
Exploiting Temporal Dynamics for Self-Supervised Learning in Videos (Prof. Dr. Michael Roth) - Max Engelhardt
Using Sat Solvers to Exploit Conjunctive Normal Form Structures in Mixed Integer Linear Programming (Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin) - Mihail Stoian
Robust Query Optimization and Processing (Prof. Dr. Andreas Kipf) - Mohamed Sayed
Robot Learning in Mulit-Robot Systems (Dr. Tanja Kaiser) - Moritz Stargalla
Mathematics of Neural Networks (Prof. Dr. Christoph Hertrich) - Nisarga Nilavadi Chandregowda
Collaborative Perception and Manipulation Techniques (Dr. Tanja Kaiser) - Noor Ahmed
- Pierre Krack
Combining Reinforcement Learning and Foundation Models in Robotics (Dr. Florian Walter) - Rafiq Kamel
- Raza Yunus
- Samiran Gode
- Seongjin Bien
- Sonja Weiland
Integer-Programming Under Uncertainty Applied to Hospital Planning Problems (Prof. Dr. Alexander Martin) - Sophia Regopoulos
Zum Eigentumsbegriff in der griechischen Antike mit einem verlgeichenden Ausblick auf die weitere Begriffsentwicklung (Prof. Dr. Gyburg Uhlmann) - Subhadeep Roy
- Tobias Jülg
Multi Modal Robot Cross Embodiment Learning from Human Demonstrations (Dr. Florian Walter) - Tobias Kuen
- Tom Fischer
- Valentinos Pariza
FRANCA: Nested Matryoshka Clustering for Scalable Visual Representation Learning (Prof. Dr. Yuki Asano) - Xiaojie Zhang
- Yannik Blei
Applications of AI Foundation Models in Robotics (Prof. Dr Wolfram Burgard) - Yanran Chen
Interplay Between Emotions and Argument convincingness (Prof. Dr. Steffen Eger) - Zhipin Wang
Graduates
Expandable list of UTN graduates.
Steering Committee of the Graduate School
The Graduate School’s steering committee is the central unit at UTN for strategic decision-making on degree programs as well as doctoral/Ph.D. issues and processes. The chair is the Founding Vice President for Education and International Affairs.
Central responsibilities
- Examination-related matters (degree programs)
- Review of applications in doctoral/Ph.D. procedures (case-by-case decision)s
- Fundamental issues relating to education, teaching, and doctoral/Ph.D. issues (including the handling of academic adjustments and the use of AI tools in teaching, etc.)
Members
The steering committee is composed of the following members:
- Prof. Dr. Isa Jahnke (Chair and Founding Vice President for Education and International Affairs)
- Prof. Dr. Gyburg Uhlmann (Founding-Chair Department LiAS)
- Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard (Founding-Chair Department CSAI)
- Carl-David Reese (Representative of the students)
- Ulrike Pfefferer (Representative of the academic staff, Dep. LiAS)
- Dr. Birgit Stelzer (Industry representative with a background in education and research).
Contact
Any further questions? Our StaRs team will be happy to help!
Whether it’s about the application process, specific topics or general information – we are here to help.

