On Friday 14th of July 2023, the summer term graduation ceremony of the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology took place at the Garching campus.

Dr. Katharina Wollenberg gave the laudation for the winner of the SAP Student Award, an award given for an excellent and innovative master thesis in the field of informatics. 2023’s awardee was David Schneller with his thesis "Efficient Simulation of Tsunamis Using a Dispersive Shallow Water Model". This is truly remarkable: David completed two bachelor's and master's degrees, one in informatics and the other in mathematics.

In his mathematics thesis, he studied a novel mathematical model (a dispersive wave model) to simulate more realistically the propagation speed of tsunami waves. For this model, he developed a numerical method with particularly high precision.

In his informatics master's thesis, he then efficiently implemented and optimised his numerical method for today's high-performance CPUs. This is achieved, for example, by saving a considerable number of computational steps through the remodelling of higher-order polynomials in his Discontinuous-Galerkin numerical method, and through the use of dynamically adaptive spatial resolution in this simulation.