During the graduation ceremony on 8 May 2026, the previous year’s graduates from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Darmstadt Technical University were honoured. As every year, this event provided an excellent opportunity to catch up with the students who graduated last year from TU Darmstadt in the field of geotechnical engineering under the supervision of Prof. Hauke Zachert and Prof. Jan Machacek, and to hear about their first steps in their careers.

Particularly pleasing was the award for the best Master’s thesis in the department: Alina Behrendt received the prize for her thesis ‘Zum Einfluss geologischer und hydrogeologischer Randbedingungen auf das Energiepotenzial von Abwasser’, which was written under the supervision of Prof. Zachert and co-supervised by Simon Siegel.

We warmly congratulate Alina Behrendt on this outstanding achievement. Congratulations also to all the other geotechnical engineering graduates, who have all performed exceptionally well.