Congratulations to Dr Jonathan Meißner. His doctoral thesis, ‘Contribution to the design of monolithic flat brick masonry in exterior wall-ceiling junctions,’ was honoured with the University Prize at this year's DAfM general meeting.
The award comes with prize money of €2,000 for doctoral theses and €1,000 for master's theses, as well as a one-year free membership in the DAfM e.V. In addition, the award winners have the opportunity to present their results to DAfM members in a short lecture.
The cooperative doctoral programme at OTH Regensburg and the Technical University of Munich investigates the stress situations occurring in monolithic flat brick masonry at the exterior wall-ceiling junction both experimentally and numerically and characterises the resulting special features. Given that the node moments are determined using the simplified frame calculation according to [EN 1996-1-1:2022] Annex C.3 based on elasticity theory, the focus is primarily on determining and quantifying non-linear influences on the node moments at the wall head and wall base.
In his laudatory speech, doctoral supervisor Prof. Dr Detleff Schermer emphasised the value of the work for the entire masonry industry: "It exemplifies that masonry construction is by no means fully researched. On the contrary, with a view to the major future issues of sustainability, climate neutrality and affordability, we will not run out of tasks anytime soon.
Prof. Eric Brehm believes that the DAfM is on the right track with the university award: ‘Once again, high-quality topics were submitted for this year's competition. This shows that our support is being well received by universities. We look forward to the joint competition in 2026!’
