16.7.2025
This year, Maria Selina Nitschai has been honored with two major awards in recognition of her outstanding doctoral work, completed at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) under the supervision of Dr. Nadine Neumayer.
Her dissertation, titled “Dynamics of the Milky Way Disk and Spectroscopic Analysis of ?Centauri,”earned her the Wilma Moser Prize from Heidelberg University. This award is given annually to the youngest female graduates in the natural sciences who have earned the distinction summa cum laude. The selection is made across all natural science faculties; the certificate was presented by Vice Dean Stephanie Hansmann-Menzemer. The award includes a monetary prize of €5,000.
In addition, Nitschai was awarded a first-rank Otto Haxel Prize (€4,000), which recognizes the best doctoral theses in the natural sciences at the universities of Göttingen, KIT, and Heidelberg. This distinction marks a remarkable achievement in a highly competitive, cross-institutional context.
Nitschai completed her entire academic education in Heidelberg, from her bachelor's and master's degrees to her PhD – all under the guidance of Nadine Neumayer. During her master’s, she spent time conducting research at the University of Oxford, supported by a DAAD Promos scholarship and the Baden-Württemberg Foundation. Early in her academic path, she stood out for her speed and focus: she completed her bachelor's thesis especially quickly in order to be able to start her DAAD - RISE scholarship for Hawaii on time.
For the past year, she has been working outside of academia. Although she originally hoped to move closer to the coast after completing her doctorate, she discovered her current employer – Rohde & Schwarz, located deep in the Bavarian Forest – at a career fair at the Haus der Astronomie. There, she now works in network technology and software development, collaborating with teams of engineers and electronics experts. Her work today has little to do with the kind of basic astronomical research she pursued during her PhD – including questions about the origin of life or the structure of our home galaxy – but it has offered her a hands-on, applied perspective that she hadn’t experienced during her studies.
Part of what drew her to the change was a desire to do something more technical. Another factor: “I wanted to try something completely new. And what I’m not so good at is the patience required for long, drawn-out scientific collaborations.”
“A real loss for research,” says her doctoral advisor Nadine Neumayer. “Selina was exceptionally focused, very quick, and had already published several first-author papers early in her career. PhD students like her are rare.”
We warmly congratulate Maria Selina Nitschai on both awards and wish her all the best for the future – and perhaps, in time, a bit closer to the sea.
JOHANNA SCHWARZ
