In 2025, five young researchers were able to start their doctoral projects at the university. One of them is Emanuel Schütz who is being supervised by Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Frank Dziock (Faculty of Agriculture/Environment/Chemistry). We asked him a few questions to get to know him and his research better.

Tell us briefly about yourself and your PhD topic.

I studied Environmental Monitoring here at the HTW Dresden for my Bachelor's degree and Landscape Development for my Master's degree. It then made sense to continue my Master's thesis in the form of a doctorate. I am working on passive acoustic monitoring of biodiversity - which is based on automatic audio recording devices – especially with the analysis of the data with various methods and their implementation in software.

How did you come up with the idea of doing a doctorate and what motivated you to do it?

Ultimately, it was the professor supervising my Master's thesis who drew my attention to the ESF+ scholarship and as I was looking for a way to continue my Master's thesis anyway, especially in software development, it was a great opportunity for me I caught after thinking about it for a while.

What resources and networks help you the most during your doctoral studies and research?

At the moment, I still often draw on the network I built up during my studies. I also have contact with individuals from the field, e.g. from environmental planning and nature conservation. I think establishing contacts with people from my specialism is something that I can still expand significantly.

What does your typical day look like at the moment? 

Since I have two children, my day is usually quite structured. I start my day early and try not to let it end too late. Within a day, I simply do the most unpleasant thing right in the morning according to the motto ‘eat the frog’. Then it's done and you feel like you've already done something. Otherwise, there's a lot of movement in my day.

What would you have liked to have known earlier or before the doctorate?  

I underestimated the amount of bureaucracy involved and how it sometimes pushes me to my limits. But it's also good that nobody told me that, otherwise I might have changed my mind.

Do you already know what you want to do afterwards?  

Not really, at the moment I'm in the here and now. Of course, I have very rough ideas about myself and the world, but it's all very vague.