First female doctoral candidate and a dedicated engineer
Eleonore Diessner
Eleonore Diessner was the first woman to take a doctorate in an engineering subject at Karl-MarxStadt College of Technology. During her long career, she made an important contribution to materials research in East Germany. Today, the Eleonore Diessner Award encourages young female researchers at Chemnitz University of Technology to excel. Eleonore Diessner was born in 1934 in the town of Georgswalde (now Jiříkov in the Czech Republic) as the daughter of a master mechanic. In August 1946, the Diessner family were expelled from their homeland and settled across the border in Ebersbach. After leaving high school in 1953, Eleonore Diessner was one of the first women at the newly founded College of Mechanical Engineering in KarlMarx-Stadt (now Chemnitz University of Technology). Studying the technology of mechanical engineering, she graduated in 1959. As a research assistant at Karl-Marx-Stadt College of Technology, Eleonore Diessner mainly studied steel processing. She also completed a distance learning course in Japanese for scientists and technicians at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1969, Eleonore Diessner became the first German woman to be awarded a doctorate in a technical subject, and only the third woman to receive a PhD from Karl-Marx-Stadt College of Technology. She then went on to work successfully at a number of research institutes in the East German Academy of Sciences. In 1990, Eleonore Diessner joined the VDI Association of German Engineers and became actively involved in the reestablishment of the VDI in Saxony. In 2013, Chemnitz University of Technology introduced the annual Eleonore Diessner Award. It is presented by the Equal Opportunities Commission at Chemnitz University of Technology for outstanding masters theses and undergraduate dissertations by females in the five STEM faculties at Chemnitz University of Technology.
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