The Athene Award honors the special importance of academic teaching at TU Darmstadt. Each department awards an Athene Department Prize, from which the Athene Main Prize is then selected.
This year's Athene Main Prize, endowed with 5,000 euros, was awarded to Karl Kopp from the Department of Chemistry for his outstanding and student-centered supervision of the Basic Practical Course in Physical Chemistry. Kopp is also the recipient of the Department of Chemistry Prize.
Karl Kopp has been dedicatedly supervising the practical part of the Basic Practical Course in Physical Chemistry since 2009. He teaches students scientific work in a technical laboratory – such as experimenting with the simplest means and setups and subsequently interpreting and evaluating the data independently. At the same time, he enriches and solidifies the learned content by supplementing the experiments with historical and entertaining background knowledge. The jury's reasoning states that he repeatedly succeeds in making the content not only vivid and well-founded for all students but also in inspiring them.
Karl Kopp's open manner and constant willingness to help create a cheerful and pleasant atmosphere in the laboratory, in which students enjoy working and which has a very positive impact on the quality of teaching. Through his approach, he has managed to make the rather dry content of the Basic Practical Course in Physical Chemistry exciting and illustrative, leading to a very positive reception of the course among students.