Award  |  09/22/2025

Writing Scholarship for Liza Herrmann

Living and working like Max Planck in the physicist’s summer house on Lake Tegernsee: what could be better than going into writing retreat during the final phase of your dissertation? Liza Herrmann, a doctoral researcher at the Institute, has successfully applied for a writing scholarship from the Max Planck Foundation and is working on completing her doctoral thesis in rural seclusion in September.

Liza Herrmann in the sunny pre-Alpine landscape
Doctoral Researcher Liza Herrmann. Photo: private
Postcard with photos of the Max Planck Foundation building and surroundings at Lake Tegernsee
Greetings from Lake Tegernsee

Liza Herrmanns’s research focuses on whether bots should be considered a competitive threat and how they should be regulated by lawmakers.


Thanks to the Max Planck Foundation and its sponsors, Max Planck scientists can apply for a writing scholarship at this beautifully located site almost directly on the lake. And where better to write a scientific paper such as a dissertation than at the “Grundner,” where the quantum physicist and Nobel Prize winner spent his holidays every year from 1885 to 1943?


With a little luck, scholarship holders may also meet Gabriele Taylor, Max Planck's great-granddaughter, who lives in the attic of the former farmhouse on Lake Tegernsee and rents the lower rooms to the foundation. The house, which has no immediate neighbors, belongs to the municipality of Bad Wiessee and is suitable for peaceful scientific work in any season: located about 50 km south of Munich, it offers enough space for up to three scholarship holders at a time, with a total of 150 square meters, three workrooms, three bedrooms, common rooms, a terrace, and a kitchen.


Information about the writing scholarship is available at the webseite of the Max Planck Foundation.