Research at TU Wien combines scientific excellence with social relevance, an aspiration that is also anchored in TU Wien's strategy. Three recent honours exemplify how this combination gives rise to innovation: Rémi Hocq from the Institute of Process Engineering, Environmental Technology and Technical Biosciences receives the Life Sciences Research Award Austria 2025 for his work on the biotechnological use of industrial waste gases, Hermann Hofbauer, long-time head of the same institute, was honoured for his life's work at the World Conference on Engineering Thermochemistry (WCETC), and Djordje Slijepčević, a graduate of TU Wien, is being honoured with the Science Future Prize 2025 for his dissertation on AI-supported detection of gait disorders. Three prizes, three topics and research that makes a difference:

Life Sciences Research Award for Rémi Hocq

On September 25, 2025, Rémi Hocq from the Institute of Process Engineering, Environmental Technology and Technical Biosciences at TU Wien was awarded the Life Sciences Research Award Austria 2025 in the Applied Research category for his outstanding application-oriented research. Rémi Hocq is a member of the Industrial Biotechnology, opens an external URL in a new window research group.

In his award-winning study, published in Nature Communications, Hocq and his co-authors show how a specific strain of bacteria can be adapted to convert carbon monoxide—a component of industrial waste gases—into acetic acid. His findings open up new ways of using microorganisms specifically for the biological utilization of industrial waste gases. This could be an important step toward promoting sustainable production processes.

• Link: Hocq, R., Horvath, J., Stumptner, M., Malevičius, M., Thallinger, G. G., & Pflügl, S. (2025). A megatransposon drives the adaptation of Thermoanaerobacter kivui to carbon monoxide. Nature Communications, 16(1), 1–16
• TUW-News: Turning poison into a source of energy 

Hermann Hofbauer receives WCETC award

Hermann Hofbauer, until his retirement in 2020 Head of the Research Division for Chemical Process Engineering and Energy Technology and of the accredited Testing Laboratory for Combustion Systems at the Institute of Chemical, Environmental and Bioscience Engineering at TU Wien, was honored with the Achievement Award for his lifetime achievements at the 3rd World Conference on Engineering Thermochemistry (WCETC 2025) in Singapore.

This international award recognizes his decades of commitment to research, teaching, and technological innovation in the field of thermochemical conversion of solid fuels.

Hofbauer is considered a global pioneer in fluidized bed gasification. Under his leadership, the Dual Fluidized Bed (DFB) gasification process was developed at TU Wien and successfully implemented in industrial-scale facilities — including the well-known biomass gasification plant in Güssing, as well as further projects in Austria, Germany, Sweden, and Asia.

In his acceptance speech, Hermann Hofbauer emphasized the close connection between fundamental academic research and industrial application — a guiding principle that has shaped his scientific career. He has supervised more than 230 doctoral theses, published around 350 scientific papers, and has been cited over 14,000 times.

He was nominated by Prof. Guangwen Xu.

Science Future Award for TUW graduate Djordje Slijepčević

On 14 October 2025, Djordje Slijepčević (TU Wien, St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences) was awarded the 2025 Science Future Award by the Society for Research Promotion of Lower Austria for his outstanding dissertation at the Lower Austria Science Gala. In his thesis entitled ‘Human Gait Analysis: Machine Learning-Based Classification of Gait Disorders’, he addressed the question of how artificial intelligence can be used in clinical gait analysis to detect and better understand movement disorders. The dissertation was supervised by Christian Breiteneder and co-supervised by Matthias Zeppelzauer.

Slijepčević's explainability approaches for machine learning methods make it possible to make the decisions of such models comprehensible to medical professionals. They contribute to making AI-based diagnostic procedures more trustworthy and usable for clinical applications. The dissertation also includes the publication of a comprehensive dataset (GaitRec), which can serve as a foundation for the development of new methods as well as for the standardized evaluation of the performance of machine learning approaches.

The research was conducted in close cooperation with the AUVA rehabilitation centre ‘Weißer Hof’ in Lower Austria and the Orthopaedic Hospital Speising in Vienna, demonstrating the successful combination of academic research and clinical application.

Congratulations to the winners!