Beatriz Roldán presents Bertrand Piccard with the Eduard Rhein Foundation's Culture Award
As a member of the jury, Prof. Dr. Beatriz Roldán Cuenya, Director of the Interface Science Department at the Fritz Haber Institute, presented this year’s Eduard Rhein Foundation Culture Award to the Swiss psychiatrist, explorer and environmental pioneer Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Bertrand Piccard.
The Eduard Rhein Foundation, named after its founder Eduard Rhein (1900–1993), the founding editor-in-chief of the German magazine Hörzu, is dedicated to promoting scientific research as well as education, the arts, and culture in Germany and abroad. Established in 1976, the foundation awards various prizes for this purpose, including their Technology Award and the Culture Award. For 2025, the foundation has awarded its Technology prize to Prof. Mathias Fink, Ph.D., and Prof. Mickael Tanter, Ph.D. for the development of shear wave elastography for precise, non-invasive cancer diagnostics, and its Culture Award to Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Bertrand Piccard for his fierce defense of the environment and his commitment to science outreach activities as a bridge-builder between basic science, technology, politics, and society.
Prof. Dr. Beatriz Roldán Cuenya, Director at the Fritz Haber Institute, serves on the awards jury together with Dr. Ulrich Bleyer, former Director of Urania Berlin, and science journalist Dr. Norbert Lossau.
The Culture awardee, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Bertrand Piccard, is a psychiatrist as well as an explorer, and is committed to researching solutions to mitigate climate change and to foster the energy transition toward clean energy. He is currently working on a green hydrogen-powered aircraft with which he plans to fly around the world in 2028. In previous years, together with Brian Jones, he circled the globe in a solar-powered aircraft and was also the first man circling the globe in a balloon in twenty days. Piccard has been fascinated by flying since childhood inspired by his family history. His grandfather, the physicist Auguste Piccard, was a balloonist and the first man who travelled to the stratosphere and his father Jacques Piccard was an undersea explorer and the first to descend to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Piccard approach to life can be resumed as follows: “being told that something is impossible is exactly why we try to do it."
After flying around the world in a solar-powered aircraft, Piccard founded the Solar Impulse Foundation, a non-profit organization established in cooperation with the ETH Lausanne that is dedicated to environmental protection. He is also a co-founder of the “Winds of Hope Foundation,” which supports aid organizations working to combat little-known diseases.
The award ceremony, organized by the Deutsches Museum, took place on Saturday, April 25, 2026, at the Schleißheim Airfield close to Munich. The day before, the Technology Award winners, Prof. Fink and Prof. Tanter, presented their research at a colloquium held at the Technical University of Munich.
