Research Prize Ruprecht Karls Prize awarded to two former IWR PhD candidates

Congratulations to Dr. Letitia Parcalabescu and Dr. Felix Draxler, who were honored by the Heidelberg University Foundation for their outstanding scientific publications. 

Dr. Letitia Parcalabescu studied physics and applied computer science in Heidelberg and received her doctorate in computational linguistics from the Faculty of Modern Languages at Heidelberg University in July 2024. She is being honored for her work entitled “Measuring the Contributions of Vision and Text Modalities in Multimodal Transformers.” Letitia Parcalabescu completed her doctorate in the group of IWR member Prof. Anette Frank.

Dr. Felix Draxler studied physics in Heidelberg and received his doctorate from the Faculty of Engineering at Heidelberg University in October 2024. He is being honored for his work entitled “Architectural Constraints of Normalizing Flows.” Felix Draxler completed his doctorate under the supervision of IWR member Prof. Ullrich Köthe.

The prizes were presented during an awards ceremony held in the Great Hall of the Old University. The event was hosted by the Foundation and the university's rector, Prof. Frauke Melchior, on Friday 24 October 2025.

The Heidelberg University Foundation has since 1990 awarded the the prize to young researchers from Ruperto Carola who have accomplished outstanding research. Generally, the five best doctoral theses are recognized in this way every year. The multi-level, university-wide selection process takes into account early-stage academic work from all subjects.