On 4 December 2024, Freie Universität Berlin celebrated its founding in 1948 with the annual “Ernst Reuter Day 2024.” During the event, Helena Kremp, an alumna of the Berlin Mathematical School (BMS) and a 2023 doctoral graduate of Freie Universität Berlin, was awarded the prestigious “Ernst Reuter Prize” for her exceptional dissertation. Congratulations!

The ceremonial event, held in the Henry Ford Building, marked the university’s 76th anniversary and featured the presentation of the “Ernst Reuter Prize.” Since its establishment in 1985, the award has been sponsored by the Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft (ERG) to honor outstanding doctoral dissertations from young researchers at Freie Universität. Each year, up to four dissertations are recognized—ideally one per subject group—with recipients selected through a competitive process. Eligible dissertations must be graded “summa cum laude”, and each prize includes a €10,000 award. The fourth subject group encompasses fields such as Mathematics and Computer Science, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Pharmacy, and Geosciences.

Helena Kremp earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin before joining Freie Universität as a BMS PhD student under the supervision of Nicolas Perkowski. She contributed to the MATH+ project group “Stochastic Analysis of Particle Systems: Langevin Dynamics and the Dean-Kawasaki Model” in the Life Sciences application area. Kremp completed her PhD in April 2023 with her award-winning dissertation, “Topics in Particle Systems and Singular SDEs.” Following her doctorate, she began a postdoctoral position at TU Vienna and, as of December 2024, has returned to Berlin. She now works as a PostDoc within the CRC/TRR388 project “Rough Analysis, Stochastic Dynamics, and Related Fields” at both TU Berlin and the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS).

The laudatory speech for Helena Kremp was delivered by Hermann Kreutzmann, chairman of the Ernst Reuter Prize selection committee. Portrait videos of the four awardees from different subject groups were presented during the ceremony, followed by a keynote lecture by Jutta Allmendinger, former president of the Social Science Research Center (WZB). Other prominent attendees included Günter M. Ziegler, president of Freie Universität Berlin, and Matthias Dannenberg, chairman of the Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft.


Reflecting on the honor, Kremp shared: “It is a great honor for me to be awarded with such an important prize, which has been granted every year since 1985 on Freie Universität’s foundation day. The award ceremony was also a special experience, as I had the opportunity to meet the three other award winners from different subject groups and learn about their remarkable research. I feel deeply grateful for the unwavering support from my supervisor Nicolas, my family, and my friends, who made it possible for me to focus entirely on my PhD research.”

Her supervisor Nicolas Perkowski praised her work: “Helena’s thesis is an impressive contribution to the field of stochastic and rough analysis. Throughout her doctoral studies, I was struck by her technical strength, breadth, productivity and deep understanding of complex methods. She established several results that I had previously struggled to prove. Her contributions to singular diffusions and to interacting particle systems is already shaping and inspiring new research. I am incredibly proud to see her recognized with the Ernst-Reuter Prize and look forward to her future contributions to mathematics.“