Last week, our colleague Johannes Mast received the Bernd Rendel Prize for Geosciences from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The award recognizes his innovative early-career research, which integrates cross-disciplinary approaches to deepen our understanding of human-environment interactions. Our heartfelt congratulations to Johannes!
The award ceremony took place at GeoMin2026 in Bochum, an annual conference organized by the Deutsche Geologische Gesellschaft (DGGV) and the Deutsche Mineralogische Gesellschaft (DMG). The event provided a fantastic platform for interdisciplinary outreach. Johannes notes that, while geographers typically study the surface of the earth and geologists investigate what happens below, remarkable parallels emerge upon closer look. For example, analyzing microscopic grain alignment in rock transects can utilize a similar computer vision toolkit that urban geographers use to analyze macro-scale street networks and urban morphology.
Bochum felt like the perfect backdrop for these conversations. The Ruhr region is a living case study of human-environment interaction: early geological discoveries sparked the industrial surge that turned this valley into one of Europe’s largest and most industrialized urban landscapes. Even today, long after the last coal mines closed, that history still shapes the region’s land surface, urban structure and human society.
