One of IBB’s post-docs, Bastian Oesterle, received this year’s prize of the “Verein der Freunde der Universität Stuttgart”, a nonprofit organization of friends and supporters of our university. The endowed prize is valued at 5,000.- € and it is awarded every year to three selected doctoral dissertations in recognition of their scientific excellence. Oesterle’s thesis entitled “Intrinsically locking-free shell formulations” (translated from the German title) presents innovative formulations for mechanics shell theories that avoid numerical problems (namely locking) in computer simulations a priori, i.e. on the theory level, rather than proposing remedies for the underlying numerical solution methods.