ASU student selected to participate in Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany

Michelle Stuhlmacher, a doctoral student in geography at Arizona State University, has been selected for the prestigious Heidelberg Laureate Forum. Only 200 of the most qualified young researchers in the world are selected for the forum.

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum is a one-week event combining scientific, social and outreach activities.

The recipients of the most prestigious awards in mathematics and computer science — the Abel Prize, the Fields Medal (including the Nevanlinna Prize for contributions in mathematical aspects of information science), the ACM A.M. Turing Award and the ACM Prize in Computing — are invited to participate in the forum. According to the organization's website, the Heidelberg Laureate Forum brings these laureates at the apex of their careers together with 200 high-achieving graduate student and postdoctoral counterparts from around the world.

The forum gives early career researchers an opportunity for interaction that is typically not available within the normal university environment or in their home university department, whereby the laureates provide formal plenary lectures and lead small group discussions with topics driven by a combination of prepared presentations by the laureates as well as student questions. Connections will be made between young researchers and future collaborators; these relationships will bridge the gap between the generations of computer science and mathematics researchers.

"It is an honor to be selected to attend the Heidelberg Laureate Forum," Stuhlmacher said. "My research in geography involves the application of big data, image processing, and machine learning to remote sensing. Despite my application of methods from computer science, I very rarely have the opportunity to interact with the scholars that produce the image processing and machine learning scholarship that I build my remote sensing analysis from. Attending the week-long meeting in Germany will give me a chance to interact with those at the cutting edge of these fields in computer science and mathematics. Additionally, learning about how I am applying their methods to questions of environmental sustainability could be of potential interest to many of the leading scholars in computer science."

Stuhlmacher will head to Heidelberg, Germany, in September for the weeklong forum.