Sponsorship Award "Gender Aspects in Focus 2025"

This year, the "Gender in Focus" prize was awarded for the first time by the Vice-Presidency for Research and Innovation. This prize honours outstanding research work that has taken particular account of sex|gender or gender aspects. The awards were presented at a ceremony on Schiller Day on 27 June 2025 in the auditorium of the University of Jena.

In the category "PhD theses", three female researchers were honoured with a sponsorship award of €750 each:

Riccarda Funk is a speech scientist and in her doctoral thesis entitled "The Development of Gender in the Prepubertal Voice. A Long-term Study", she presented a fascinating investigation into the acoustic and perceptual gender characteristics in children's voices. It was able to prove that the voices of boys and girls show clear differences even before puberty that cannot be given anatomical reasons. Even at primary school age, children therefore construct acoustic characteristics that are interpreted as feminine and masculine in a social context. Riccarda Funk's research thus shows a remarkably close connection between sex and gender as categories of analysis.

The legal scholar Luisa Lehning received the sponsorship award for her doctoral thesis "Multidimensionality in Equality Law Dogmatics. Legal Apprehensibility of Intersectionality and Structural Discrimination Using the Example of Article 3, Paragraph 3 of the German Basic Law". In her work, she develops an innovative dogmatic grid through the application of post-categorical approaches and the transfer of freedom law dogmatics, which identifies multidimensional unequal treatment that has so far been under-considered in law and makes it possible to determine its specific intensity for marginalised groups. As Ms Lehning was unable to attend for personal reasons, Jana George from the "Gender in Focus" project accepted the certificate on her behalf.

The medical scientist Ngoc Dong Nhi Vo received the award for her doctoral thesis "The Role of Collagen VIII in the Ageing Mouse Kidney". As a member of a research group at the Nephrology Research Laboratory of the Jena University Hospital (JUH), Ngoc Dong Nhi Vo has presented an outstandingly independent study on age-related kidney damage. In her research, she showed that collagen VIII contributes significantly to gender-specific differences in kidney ageing. Her results demonstrate the active role of this previously overlooked molecule and open new perspectives for gender-sensitive diagnostics and therapy.

Biologist Ivonne Löffler was awarded the €1000 prize in the "advanced scientist" category for her pioneering work on gender differences in diabetic kidney disease. In numerous studies, she was able to show that endothelial collagen VIII interacts with sex hormones and thus causes a gender-dependent manifestation of diabetes-related kidney damage. These studies are exemplary and emphatic examples of the need for gender-sensitive analyses in biomedical research.