28 September 2026

Top KLU Teachers: Professor Dr. Hanno Friedrich and Dr. Nils Roemer receive Best Teacher Awards

Graduation is not only a time to celebrate the achievements of KLU’s students, but also an opportunity to recognize excellence in teaching. This year, Prof. Dr. Hanno Friedrich, Associate Professor of Freight Transportation, received the Best Teacher Award for faculty members. The award for Best External Lecturer went to Dr. Nils Roemer, co-founder of a software company specializing in the digitalization and automation of supply chains. We spoke with this year’s award winners about what the recognition means to them, what makes great teaching, and how they help students transfer what they learn at KLU into the real world.

What does this award mean to you?

Friedrich: It means a lot to me. I put a great deal of effort into making my teaching relevant and insightful. Receiving an award like this shows me that the students and KLU appreciate that.

Roemer: Recognition from students is the greatest compliment you can receive as a teacher, and I feel deeply honored and grateful. Dr. Tobias Vlček and I designed the kind of course we would have liked to take ourselves as students. It demonstrates how algorithms and problem-solving methods can be applied to everyday decisions, from finding a parking space and dating to self-management and leadership.

What sets great teaching apart for you?

Friedrich: You need to convey your passion for the subject to students and make the content accessible and easy to understand. In addition, especially when your course focuses on applications, you need to demonstrate that what you teach is relevant.

Ideally, you connect the theoretical content taught in class with practice, for example by visiting operations at HelloFresh, Amazon and HHLA or inviting practitioners from McKinsey, Nanno Janssen, K&N and Airbus to discuss real-world challenges. Since I teach courses in transportation, being in Hamburg, with its strong logistics industry, provides a natural setting for doing exactly that.

Roemer: For me, good teaching inspires students to develop their own solutions, understand how different concepts connect, and tackle problems proactively. We therefore designed every programming task around an everyday decision. This makes abstract concepts much more tangible and easier to relate to.

How do you ensure that your teaching transfers beyond campus?

Friedrich: I try to demonstrate the relevance of what we are learning. Beyond that, I try to build on students’ intrinsic motivation for my field and research. This includes specific assignment topics such as TCO calculation for electric trucks, activities outside the classroom—for example, industry events such as LogisticsTech Talks—and involving interested students in my research projects (KRITIS-ENV or FORTE).

Roemer: Our course begins with challenges students already know from their own lives. When we discuss scheduling, for example, we look at how they balance their studies, jobs, and personal lives. Almost everyone can relate to that.

Students first learn how to program themselves. Only afterwards do we show them how to instruct an AI model to program for them. That order is important to us: if you understand what is happening in the code, you are much better equipped to assess an AI-generated result, correct it, and guide the AI in the right direction. Students may even go on to build small programs that help them with their own tasks.