Hamann’s teaching and research focuses on contract and corporate law, with a particular emphasis on digital transformation and data-driven methods. His pioneering studies combine legal questions with methods of empirical legal research, law and economics, and legal corpus linguistics. For this research Stanford Law School awarded him a graduate degree in the Science of Law, and the world association of University-Based Institutes for Advanced Study (UBIAS) appointed him to its Intercontinental Academia on “Laws: Complexity and Dynamics.” In addition, Hamann works with children and young people on a voluntary basis, engages in the area of copyright law (open access), and serves as an academy fellow of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

“The fascinating thing about Hanjo Hamann is that he is both an excellent lawyer and a competent language scholar. How he combines these two different disciplines to arrive at new insights has truly impressed the jury,” says Rainer Esser, Managing Director of the ZEIT publishing group.

Dr. Pao-Yu Oei, junior research group leader of the CoalExit research group at Technische Universität Berlin, was awarded second place. The CoalExit research group is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Alexander Grünberger, a junior professor of microfluidics and bioprocess development at Bielefeld University, was awarded third place.

The official award ceremony will take place on May 31, 2021, as part of the digital “Science Gala” of the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers (Deutscher Hochschulverband, in short DHV). The academics Rising Researcher Award will be presented together with the award for the “University Professor of the Year 2021,” which this year goes to virologist Prof. Dr. Christian Drosten, Director of the Institute for Virology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, and virologist Prof. Dr. Sandra Ciesek, Director of the Institute for Medical Virology at the Frankfurt am Main University Hospital.