An engineer and her element: TUM Alumna Ulrike Dackermann under a wooden bridge in Myanmar (Picture: private).
World trip after graduation: from Chile to Australia and Hong Kong
At that time, female civil engineers were already needed on every continent and Ulrike Dackermann had wanderlust anyway. A combination that worked. After graduating from TUM, she first did an internship at a construction company in Santiago de Chile. She then traveled through South and North America as well as the Pacific before working as a research assistant at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia. “One year turned into a little more time,” she says, laughing as she talks about her travels at the time. In 2006, she was offered the opportunity to do a doctorate at UTS. Ulrike Dackermann accepted. The topic: vibration-based damage detection on buildings using artificial neural networks. “Back then, I was one of the first researchers to explore the use of artificial intelligence in the field of structural health monitoring.” Almost twenty years later, AI has become a matter of course and the field is currently exploding,” she says. Influenced by her previous travels, Ulrike Dackermann also frequently took time for volunteer work. With “Engineers without Borders”, she implemented projects in Nepal (Ilam) and Tanzania (Moshi), where she developed efficient cooking stoves from local building materials and trained local craftsmen.
TUM Alumna Ulrike Dackermann during her volunteer work in Tanzania (Picture: private).
I always thought that a doctorate and academic work weren’t the right thing for me. But I was wrong.
Memories of university days: the civil engineers’ drawing room
The Blue Mountains, where the TUM Alumna lives with her family, are about two and a half hours by train from UNSW. The lecturer travels to Sydney about twice a week for her lectures and research, the rest of the time the three screens in her home office help. Many of her students come from Asia, especially China and India, and she sometimes receives mooncakes from them as a small thank-you. This always reminds Ulrike Dackermann of her time as a student at TUM. She didn’t bring the lecturers any pastries, but she still appreciated the teaching. The preparation for this took place in one location in particular: the drawing room. An elongated room in Arcisstraße, with a refrigerator, posters and her “university boys”, as the TUM Alumna calls them. She was one of only a few women on her degree course. She still remembers that her male fellow students mainly put up posters with female motifs – so she was happy to ensure some equality on the wall. The atmosphere was good. “I had a lot of fun as a TUM student,” Ulrike Dackermann remembers. There was learning, partying, suffering – and always together.
I want to stay in contact with TUM.
Ulrike Dackermann (Picture: UNSW)
Diploma in Civil Engineering 2003
Ulrike Dackermann has civil engineering in her blood: from her brother to her parents and grandfather, they all ended up in the engineering profession. She studied this profession at TUM.
After graduating, the TUM Alumna completed her doctorate at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. She was a postdoc there from 2011 to 2014 and then a lecturer until 2016, when she moved to the University of South Wales in 2017. Here she teaches at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and at the Centre for Infrastructure Engineering and Safety (CIES).
She has used her expertise several times in volunteer projects for Engineers Without Borders in Tanzania and Nepal. After completing her studies, Ulrike Dackermann registered as the 10,000th member of the TUM Alumni Network, which spans over 140 countries and now has more than 100,000 members.
