Prof. Dr Klara Nahrstedt is honoured with the Robert Piloty Prize for her significant scientific achievements in the development of multimedia systems and networks. Her contributions accelerated the first use of telepresence systems in telemedicine and distance learning. Nahrstedt researches and teaches as a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA). She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) and is a member of the Commission of Excellence appointed by the Joint Science Commission of the Federal and State Governments. Klara Nahrstedt has been a Fellow of the IEEE, the global Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, since 2008. In 2012, the researcher received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award ‘for pioneering contributions to end-to-end quality of service and resource management in wired and wireless networks’. In the same year, she was honoured as a Fellow of the ACM for her ‘contributions to quality-of-service management for distributed multimedia systems’. The scientist has been closely associated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt for many years – including as project leader in the German Research Foundation's Collaborative Research Centre 1053 (MAKI).

Prof Dr Wolfgang Dahmen receives the award for his outstanding fundamental research on constructive approximation theory, which has led to new applications in computational geometry, as well as his pioneering contributions to adaptive multiscale methods for operator equations and variational problems. His complexity and convergence results on new algorithms, achieved in diverse international collaborations, have triggered numerous scientific advances. Dahmen has taught and researched as a professor of mathematics at several German universities since 1981 – for example at RWTH Aachen University from 1992 to 2017. In 2002, he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Since 2005, Wolfgang Dahmen has been working as International Research Director at the Interdisciplinary Mathematics Institute of the University of South Carolina (USA) on the topics of imaging, mathematical learning and compressed sensing. He has also held the Williams-Hedberg-Hedberg Endowed Chair of Mathematics at the university since 2017.