Super excited to share that I have been awarded the Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation! The Foundation’s motto “We support people, not projects” makes this recognition feel especially meaningful. #humboldtian

Full circle moment: I just became an Associate Editor for Mechatronics (Elsevier), a journal by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) focusing on mechatronics and robotics.

I attended the 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering Medicine and Biology Society in Copenhagen, Denmark, from July 14th to July 17. Our three papers are

• “BlaVeS: A Novel Hand-Labeled Dataset for Improved Bladder Vessel Segmentation with Modified U-Net” by Franziska Krauß. This work tackles the challenges of variable lighting and tissue deformation in endoscopy by proposing a robust U-Net-based model with attention mechanisms, achieving state-of-the-art performance for bladder vessel segmentation. Make sure to check out our corresponding dataset here — the first publicly available dataset for blood vessel segmentation in urinary bladder endoscopy images!
• “Multiphysical Tumor Tissue Modeling for Improved Multimodal Sensor-Based Diagnostics” by Matthias Ege. We introduce a comprehensive tissue model that simulates the electro-mechanical behavior of bladder tumors to generate synthetic, multimodal datasets—laying the foundation for better sensor fusion and real-time tissue classification during surgery.
• “Tumor Margin Estimation through Simulated Impedivity Mappings Using a Multielectrode Sensor Array” by Zoltan Lovasz. Impedance sensor arrays can help to detect tumorous cell aggregations. This study presents a novel impedivity mapping approach that significantly improves tumor margin estimation accuracy over traditional impedance maps, particularly for complex tumor scenarios.

Honored and proud to see our IEEE EMBS Germany Chapter recognized as the Best Regional Professional Chapter! It was a special moment to receive the award on stage at EMBC 2025 in Copenhagen, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to serve as a chair of this great Chapter. Cheers!

I presented research from my postdoc at University of Stuttgart & UC San Diego at the American Control Conference (ACC) in Denver, CO. Drop by session TuB18 Estimation and Control of Distributed Parameter Systems I on Tuesday after lunch to meet me and my co-authors Miroslav Krstic, Mamadou Diagne, Iasson Karafyllis, Cenk Demir, and Oliver Sawodny.

I was featured as Researcher of the month by the Technical Committee on Robot Control of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society! Find the entire interview here.

I officially became the Communications Co-Chair of NextCom, a committee formed by the IEEE Control System Society (CSS) to support and guide students, early career researchers, and young professionals along their way to becoming the next generation of established control systems engineers and researchers.

I was elected to be the Chair of the IEEE EMBS Germany Chapter for the 2025-2026 term, along with Vice-Chair Nicolai Spicher, Treasurer Jannis Hagenah, and Secretary Andre Luka Çakici.