Dear Professor Dr. Sid Fauget, as we have heard, our Dean was explaining this already.

She's a full professor for immunology at the School of Medicine at the University of Paris.

And if you hear immunology, you have a clear association.

Immunology is one of the key topics, research topics, of our School of Medicine.

And so it's clear we have a very strong link to your research and we have many joint projects

where people work with you and your team.

So there is a clear link through the topic.

And dear Professor Sittvorger, I would also like to take the opportunity to warmly welcome

you here in Erlangen.

And I appreciate very much that your husband and your son came over for this award ceremony.

So welcome to the Sittvorger family here at the Friedrich-Alexander University.

A few sentences on our university.

Friedrich-Alexander University has its 275th anniversary this year.

So we were founded in 1743.

We have a long tradition and our goal is to combine tradition with, of course, demanding

questions of our society to combine research, international, visible research, with all

the tasks that a university has to perform.

And the university is very special in the sense that we are a comprehensive university.

So we are a full spectrum university covering a wide range of different disciplines and

the strength of FAU is the cross-disciplinary collaboration within the university, within

Bavaria, within Germany, and worldwide.

So let me please express my heartfelt congratulations for your outstanding achievements, Professor

Sittvorger, and for today's award that will be granted to you in a few minutes.

If you look at the criteria that are used to come up with a decision who will be the

awardee, you will find that Jacob Hertz Prize is awarded for outstanding academic achievements

and excellent research.

And there is no doubt that the research committee of the Faculty of Medicine and our faculty

council have once again made a brilliant decision, as you will see later.

And I'm personally very happy that this award is in a row of events at our university that

I personally consider to be very remarkable.

At the second half of 2017, Friedrich-Alexander University succeeded in the application of

a Humboldt Professorship.

The Humboldt Professorship is awarded with 3.5 million euro, and that's the seed funding

for an exceptional researcher from outside of Germany, from a foreign country, coming

in to our university and start research with us as a professor at Friedrich-Alexander University.

And this year this award was granted to Professor Eva Dabrowski, a very strong female researcher.

At the end of the year, we heard about the announcement of the German Research Foundation,

DFG, one of our female professors, Professor Heike Paul.

She is in American Studies.

She was awarded with a Leibniz Prize, 2.5 million euros grant money.

And this is the highest research award you can achieve within Germany, and we are very

proud that we have a second woman in our team here that was granted with this high award.

And now we have Professor Norens Sittfogel being granted the Jacob Hertz Prize to you.

And so we see three strong female researchers in a row that really move their scientific

field.

Congratulations to that.

The dean has already summarized your scientific achievements, and we will have way more details

on this by the laudation that will be given by Professor Mackensen after the greetings

of our mayor.

I will therefore focus on the already mentioned two topics.