In mid-November, first-year graduate student Uli Dobramysl will travel to his alma mater, the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, to receive the Erwin Wenzl Prize for his diploma thesis on "Finite difference time domain studies of split-ring based metamaterials". Each year, three diploma and three Ph.D. students from the State of Upper Austria are selected for this award. In the past academic year, 178 theses were submitted to the competition. Uli Dobramysl joined the physics graduate program at Virginia Tech in August, and plans to pursue his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics.