On 20 January 2026, the Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics hosted the inaugural lectures of Prof. Dr. Marcel Campen and Prof. Dr. Martin Ulirsch in lecture hall O2. At the beginning of the event, the dean of the faculty, Professor Dr Jürgen Klüners, welcomed the two lecturers and the numerous guests.
Prof Dr Marcel Campen opened the event with his lecture "Reliable Foundations for Geometric Data Processing". In it, he addressed fundamental issues in computer graphics and geometric processing, in particular the handling of solution spaces, which include both hard requirements for validity and soft criteria for the quality of results. Using current research results, he showed how a consistent separation of validity and quality aspects can help to avoid reliability gaps and create formal guarantees in increasingly automated data processing procedures.
Prof Dr Marcel Campen studied at RWTH Aachen University, where he completed his diploma in 2008 and his doctorate in 2014. After postdoctoral positions at New York University and RWTH Aachen University, he was a professor at Osnabrück University from 2017 to 2025. Dr Campen has been a professor at Paderborn University since April 2025.
Prof Dr Campen has received numerous awards for his scientific work, including the Best PhD Thesis Award from the Eurographics Association in 2016 and the Young Researcher Award from the Eurographics Association in 2020. His research focuses on the fields of geometry processing, geometric modelling, computer graphics and visual computing.
Prof Dr Martin Ulirsch then spoke on the topic of "What is the combinatorial shadow of a matrix?". In his lecture, he gave an introduction to combinatorial structures that can be obtained from matrices and explained these as an illustrative example of the process of tropicalisation. He presented new results on logarithmic concavity and highlighted its surprising connections to algebraic geometry.
Prof Dr Martin Ulirsch studied mathematics at the University of Regensburg, where he graduated in 2010. He completed his doctorate at Brown University (USA) in 2015. This was followed by academic positions including Hausdorff Postdoc in Bonn, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fields Institute in Toronto and Postdoctoral Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. Further academic positions took him to Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Warwick, where he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, before he was appointed to Paderborn University in 2025.
In his research, Prof Dr Ulirsch focuses in particular on algebraic and discrete geometry, tropical geometry, moduli spaces, logarithmic and non-archimedean geometry as well as matroids, buildings and combinatorial algebraic geometry. His work has been sponsored by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship and projects in the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 326 "Geometry and Arithmetic of Uniformised Structures (GAUS)".
Both lectures were held in English and met with great interest from the audience. At the end of the event, the Faculty hosted a small reception.
