Volksbank Weinheim Stiftung and ZEW Grant Research Award for the Sixth Time

The Volksbank Weinheim Stiftung and the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research have granted the research award “Zukunft der Arbeitswelt” (“Future World of Work”) for the sixth time. At the New Year’s reception of the Volksbank Weinheim eG, the award was handed to ZEW researcher Dr. Laura Pohlan (29) for the best doctoral thesis and KIT graduate Viktoria Medvedenko (27) for the best master’s thesis.

In his laudation, Professor Wolfgang Franz, former ZEW President and member of the jury, explained that the jury selected Viktoria Medvedenko’s and Dr. Laura Pohlan’s submissions from a number of strong entries the jury received this year due to the “scientific excellence, practical relevance and strong empirical focus” of their work.

Dr. Laura Pohlan’s work “Essays on Unemployment, Job Search Behavior and Policy Interventions” examines the multiple causal effects of unemployment in the context of social exclusion. In her work, she particularly focuses on how social policies and technological innovation influence individual behaviour in job seeking and in what way they help to reintegrate unemployed individuals into the labour market. The jury’s decision was based above all on the high relevance of the labour market policy issues examined in the doctoral thesis.

Innovative concept for developing a user-friendly language assistant

In her master’s thesis entitled “Development of Language Assistants as Intelligent Human-Machine Interfaces in the Business Context – A Prototype and its Usability”, Viktoria Medvedenko deals with the technical development and social acceptance of language assistants at the workplace. Her results show that this form of artificial intelligence is already so advanced that it is capable of improving numerous workflows. According to the jury, the student’s thesis presents an innovative concept for developing a user-friendly language assistant for the workplace which could easily be implemented as an operational prototype.

“The submissions from Laura Pohlan and Viktoria Medvedenko both represent scientifically rigorous and innovative contributions to solving current social problems,” said Wolfgang Franz, summarising the decision made by the jury, which also included other ZEW members such as ZEW Professor Achim Wambach, ZEW Director Thomas Kohl and Professor Irene Bertschek, head of the ZEW Research Department “Digital Economy”.

Viktoria Medvedenko studied Industrial Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), at Grenoble INP and at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Dr. Laura Pohlan wrote her doctoral thesis at the University of Mannheim and has successfully defended her dissertation. She currently works as a researcher in the ZEW Research Department “Labour Markets and Human Resources” and is involved, among other things, in the evaluation of the government programme “Social Inclusion in the Labour Market”, which aims to increase the level of social integration among long-term unemployed individuals in Germany.

Since 2013, the “Future World of Work” research award has been granted by the Volksbank Weinheim Stiftung and ZEW to honour young economists from the local region. The recipient of the award for the best doctoral thesis receives 3,000 euros, whilst the prize for the best master’s thesis is 2,000 euros.