PhD mission successfully completed!

On 24 October, Alex Pürzel had the honour of presenting his PhD thesis not only to his supervisors Hans Kainz and Arnold Baca, but also to two other luminaries in the field of sports science: Sophia Nimphius and Roland van den Tillaar.

First and foremost, his biggest “thank you” goes out to the person who guided and supported him throughout his studies: his supervisor Hans. Hans’s support, his regular and always positive and constructive feedback, his dedication to research, and his incomparable balance of encouragement and challenge, helped Alex a lot to complete his project. 

He would also like to thank Arnold for his thoughtful, pleasant, and visionary leadership in developing the Department of Biomechanics, Kinesiology and Computer Science in Sport into a respected centre for biomechanical analysis in sport.

There is not enough space here to express his gratitude to his wife, Martina.

The wonderful support of numerous members (especially Willi, Paul, Elias, David, Lukas) of the Neuromechanics Research Group (NRG) for this project can be summarised as follows (there may be certain parallels to the movie ‘300’…):

“Just there the scientific challenges, sheer terror gripping tight their hidden results with icy fingers – knowing full well what merciless research they encountered at the codes and labelings of the NRG. Yet, those scientific challenges stare now across the laboratory at a new member of the group. From this day on we rescue a world from mysticism and esotericism, and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine. Give thanks, men, to Hans and the brave NRG. TO SUBMISSIONS!!!”