New Professors

Since October 1, Prof. Dr. Stefano Mintchev has held the Chair of Agricultural Robotics at the Faculty of Agricultural, Nutritional and Engineering Sciences (AEI) at the University of Bonn.
Prof. Dr. Mintchev studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pisa and earned a PhD in Biorobotics from The BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. Following his doctoral studies, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. From 2018 to 2020, he was co-founder and CTO of Foldaway Haptics, a company focused on developing robotic technologies for immersive human–machine interaction.

In 2020, he was awarded an SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship and became Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich, where he led the Environmental Robotics Lab until 2025. During this time, his research focused on bioinspired aerial robotics and its applications in environmental and forest monitoring. He also co-led the ETH BiodivX team, one of the winning teams of the XPRIZE Rainforest competition in 2024.

Stefano Mintchev’s research lies at the intersection of robotics and sustainability, advancing robotics as a scientific and technological interface with natural systems. He develops robots with rich sensorimotor capabilities for robust operation in complex natural environments. These novel machines enable new methods for observing, understanding, and managing ecosystems at relevant spatial and temporal scales.

At the University of Bonn, his research will extend these approaches to the broader challenges of sustainable agriculture. Major areas of focus will include robotic solutions for biodiversity monitoring, automated harvesting, and precision interventions.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Marc Rußwurm studied Geodesy and Geoinformation at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where he also completed his doctorate in the field of Remote Sensing and Machine Learning. Following his doctoral studies, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He subsequently joined Wageningen University in the Netherlands as Assistant Professor of Machine Learning and Remote Sensing.

Prof. Rußwurm's research lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Earth Observation, and Geospatial Data Science. His work focuses on developing machine learning methods that can learn from large-scale satellite imagery, Earth observation time series, and other geospatial data sources. He is particularly interested in representation learning, foundation models, and neural representations of geographic information, with the aim of enabling more flexible and general-purpose AI systems for understanding our planet.

As the leader of an Emmy Noether Research Group funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Prof. Rußwurm investigates how advances in machine learning can contribute to environmental and climate research, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity monitoring, and other societally relevant challenges. By combining methods from Artificial Intelligence with remote sensing and geospatial sciences, his group develops new approaches for analyzing and understanding complex processes within the Earth system.

After studying biology and ecology and biodiversity at Bielefeld University, she earned her Ph.D. at the Universities of Bayreuth and Bielefeld with a dissertation titled “Water balance and productivity of a Mediterranean oak woodland: Quantifying understory vegetation impacts by developing a stable oxygen isotope partitioning approach.” For her dissertation, she received the “Isotope Prize” from the Dr. Karleugen Habfast Foundation. From 2015 to 2021, she served as a research associate and lecturer at the Chair of Ecosystem Physiology at the University of Freiburg. In 2017, she was awarded the Helmuth Lieth Prize for Environmental Research by the University of Freiburg. Since 2021, she has been conducting research in the “Isotope Biogeochemistry & Gas Fluxes” research group at the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Land Research (ZALF) and has led the group since 2022 (renamed “Ecophysiology of Water and Matter Cycling”). In 2023, she completed her habilitation in the field of “Ecophysiology of Plants and Ecosystems.” In addition to teaching at the University of Bonn, she continues to work at the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Land Research (ZALF).

Maren Dubbert is an expert on interactions between soil, plants, and the atmosphere and focuses in particular on the dynamics of water, carbon, and energy fluxes and their relationship to ecosystem resilience. She investigates how ecosystems respond to drought and climate stress. She uses innovative methods and high-resolution isotope data to track ecohydrological and physiological processes and to break down water and carbon budgets from the leaf to the landscape. During her undergraduate studies, she investigated niche differentiation regarding nitrogen uptake in plant communities and plant-mediated post-photosynthetic carbon isotope fractionation. As part of her doctoral research, she studied Mediterranean agroforestry systems, which rely heavily on a carefully coordinated management strategy to maintain their ecosystem services, such as productivity and biodiversity. She developed a novel allocation approach based on stable isotopes and fluxes to unravel the role of different plant functional groups in ecosystem water and carbon fluxes, thereby linking ecosystem structure and plant traits to the spatiotemporal dynamics of the water and carbon cycles. Since then, her research has expanded to cover a broad spectrum of ecosystems, including wetlands, tropical forests, grasslands, restored peatlands, and, above all, cropland. In this work, she investigates the effects of land management, cropping systems, and climate extremes on water and matter cycles.

Effective July 1, 2026, Prof. Dr. Lisa Biber-Freudenberger has been appointed Professor of Biodiversity and Global Environmental Change at the Faculty of Agricultural, Nutritional and Engineering Sciences (AEI) of the University of Bonn. The professorship is jointly affiliated with the Center for Development Research (ZEF), further strengthening the close collaboration between the faculty and ZEF's internationally oriented development research.

Lisa Biber-Freudenberger's research focuses on the interface between biodiversity, land use, and sustainable development. Her work integrates natural and social science approaches to better understand the complex interactions between human development, biodiversity loss, and global environmental change. Her main research interests include sustainable land use, natural resource governance, and the science–policy interface in the context of international biodiversity and sustainability agendas.

After earning a Bachelor's degree in Biology from Osnabrück University in 2006, she completed a Master's degree in International Nature Conservation at the University of Göttingen and Lincoln University, New Zealand, in 2009. She received her doctorate in Biodiversity Research from the University of Potsdam in 2013 through a collaborative program with the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Following several years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn, during which she contributed to a range of research projects and successfully secured competitive third-party funding, she served as Junior Professor and Head of the Biodiversity and Sustainable Land Use (LAND) research group at ZEF from 2020 to 2026. In this role, she established an internationally recognized research profile and coordinated numerous interdisciplinary projects on biodiversity, land use, and sustainability transformations. She is also actively engaged in international science–policy processes, including serving as an author for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

With her appointment, Prof. Dr. Biber-Freudenberger not only assumes the professorship in Biodiversity and Global Environmental Change but is also designated to succeed Prof. Dr. Christian Borgemeister on the Executive Board of the Center for Development Research (ZEF). She is expected to take up this position in 2029, ensuring the long-term continuation of the University of Bonn's strategic commitment to biodiversity research, sustainable land use, and global transformation research.

Since June 1, 2026, Daniel E. Rico has held the Chair of Metabolic Health in Livestock at the Institute of Animal Science, University of Bonn. He studied Animal Science at the National University of Colombia (Bogotá) before moving to Pennsylvania State University, USA, where he completed his Master's degree under Gabriella Varga and his PhD under Kevin J. Harvatine, focusing on dairy cow nutrition and physiology. He then joined the Department of Animal Science at Université Laval, Québec, Canada, first as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Rachel Gervais and Yvan Chouinard, and later as Adjunct Professor teaching ruminant nutrition and physiology. From 2017 to 2026, he served as Research Director and Scientist at the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Animales de Deschambault (CRSAD), Québec, where he led a research program spanning both ruminants and non-ruminants, with a particular interest in how dietary lipids shape metabolic disease risk. Since 2023, he has also served as Associate Editor of the International Journal of Dairy Technology.

With his new Chair, Daniel Rico investigates how diet shapes the health, resilience, and productivity of farm animals, and how these three goals can be pursued together rather than traded off against one another. A central theme of his work is how nutrition can help dairy cows cope with heat stress, using targeted nutrients such as vitamin D₃, calcium, amino acids, and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids to blunt hyperthermia and its metabolic consequences as farming adapts to a warming climate. He also studies the metabolic roots of common peripartal diseases in dairy cows, seeking dietary strategies that prevent fatty liver and related disorders before they start. His work further extends to the nutraceutical quality of dairy products, examining how diet can enrich milk with beneficial fatty acids and other bioactive components for human and animal health. Increasingly, his group is developing and applying novel in vitro and ex vivo models, reducing the need for animal experimentation while still capturing the mechanistic detail needed to translate findings into practice on the farm.