Erasmus Prize 2026 awarded by the University College Freiburg
Freiburg, 16/07/2026
The award ceremony for the Erasmus Prize 2026 of University College Freiburg (UCF) took place on 15 July. The prize was given in honour of Dr Lisa Zacharski and Martha ‘Millie’ Lemke for their interdisciplinary approach to scientific work. Zacharski studied attitudes to gender-inclusive language and other related aspects, Lemke the use of fight metaphors in relation to immunology.
Award recipients Dr. Lisa Zacharski and Martha “Millie” Lemke. Photo: Patrick Seeger / University of Freiburg
On 15 July 2026, the University College Freiburg (UCF) at the University of Freiburg honoured life scientist Martha ‘Millie’ Lemke and cognitive scientist Dr Lisa Zacharski with the Erasmus Prize for the Liberal Arts and Sciences 2026.
The UCF awards the prize for the exemplary use of interdisciplinary aspects in academic work that forms a bridge between different disciplines. UCF is a interfaculty platform that promotes interdisciplinary teaching at the University of Freiburg and offers an English-language Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The UCF’s Erasmus Prize is awarded in two categories annually, for Bachelor’s or Master’s Theses (1,500 euro prize money) and for a Dissertation or Postdoc Work (3,500 euro prize money). The prize money is donated by Sparkasse Freiburg-Nördlicher Breisgau.
Martha ‘Millie’ Lemke: Bachelor’s thesis studied fight metaphors in immunology
Lemke received the prize for her Bachelor’s thesis ‘Ceasefire! Investigating Values, Limitations and Alternatives of Fight Metaphors in Immunology and Rewriting Textbook Passages’, which she wrote in the course of studying Life Sciences at University College Freiburg. Her thesis analyses sources that look at the use of fight metaphors in immunology research, teaching and clinical practice. Lemke considered the advantages and disadvantages of the use of fight metaphors in the scientific and social context.
She also rewrote passages from a current textbook, revealing how this can significantly change how the content is read and its effect, if fight terms are replaced with other formulations such as balance metaphors.
Dr Lisa Zacharski: Doctoral thesis studied aspects of gender-inclusive language
Dr Lisa Zacharski was awarded the prize for her cumulative dissertation ‘The Nonbinary Gender Star (Genderstern) in German: Attitudes, Mental Representations, and Readability’. It consists of three published studies into attitudes towards gender-sensitive language, the readability of nonbinary personal designations, and gender-related associations. Zacharski took her doctorate with this paper in connection with the German Research Foundation (DFG) project ‘Gender related practices in person reference: Discourse, grammar, cognition’ under Professor Dr Evelyn Ferstl of the Department of Cognitive Science and Gender Studies at the University of Freiburg.
In her first study, Zacharski developed a questionnaire and surveyed roughly 300 people about their attitudes to gender-inclusive language. It separately considered the variety of forms (e.g. using both male and female terms, neutralisation, ‘gender star’), so as to be able to depict any differences between feminist and queer-feminist attitudes.
In a psycholinguistic experimental study, Zacharski looked at the interpretation of the ‘gender star’. To do this, she used a word/image association task, which tested the mental representations in language comprehension. She was able to show that the ‘gender star’ evoked more inclusive mental images in the students sampled.
In another study, Zacharski researched the readability of the ‘gender star’. The results indicate that the symbol is already so established among younger readers that it can be processed easily. In an older comparison group, the time to access words were at first slightly longer for the ‘gender star’, however this difference disappeared over the course of the experiment.