Meet the Unite! Award winners 2026
The Unite! Award 2026 ceremony took place last week during the closing plenary session of the KTH Dialogue, hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Every year, the Unite! Awards recognise outstanding contributions to the alliance, honoring nine recipients in this edition. The awards have become a moment to celebrate the people whose ideas and commitment help Unite! grow.
Meet the winners of this edition
Teemu Kokkonen (Aalto University)
As Aalto’s representative in the Unite! Seed Fund project Digital Solutions for Sustainable Water Management, Teemu has played a key role in driving academic collaboration. He has actively enhanced Unite’s teaching initiatives by piloting the Metacampus platform for coursework and contributing valuable proposals for platform development.
Barbara Guyomarch (Grenoble INP - UGA)
Since joining the Alliance in 2023, Barbara has dedicated her expertise to structuring and developing Community 6, making Unite! accessible and engaging for academic and administrative staff. As co-Chair of the FOREU4ALL group on Community Engagement, she actively organises key events and strategic reflections across partner institutions.
Kjartan Gudmundsson (KTH)
Kjartan has significantly advanced international cooperation within Unite! through educational and research initiatives. He led the Seed Fund project Circular Architectural Engineering, integrating sustainability into curricula, and has continuously fostered academic connections by coordinating doctoral collaborations, joint student activities, summer schools, and shared project proposals.
Alberto Godio (Politecnico di Torino)
Alberto is recognized for his long-standing dedication and valuable contributions to the Alliance. Serving as Deputy KLO, SLO, and an active member of the Unite! Academic Forum within the Student Activity Evaluation Board, his ongoing commitment has been vital to driving student engagement and institutional collaboration.
Gernot Kubin (TU Graz)
Professor Kubin has leveraged Unite!’s potential from the start, uniting educators and researchers across all nine member universities. Notably, he successfully secured EU funding for a European Graduate School for Speech, Language, and AI Technologies through the highly competitive Erasmus Mundus Design Measures program to shape joint Master’s programmes.
Carolin Bock, Sabine Remmert, and Jessica Retzlaff (TU Darmstadt)
The TU Darmstadt team is recognised for its valuable contribution to the U!Train 2025 Blended Intensive Program (BIP) titled "Entrepreneurship with a Focus on Sustainability and Multicultural Collaboration", organised by TU Graz in close collaboration with TU Darmstadt. This innovative teaching format combined online prep with sessions at TU Darmstadt and TU Graz, utilising a joint train journey as a learning space.
Community 3 Team, coordinated by Eduarda Camilo (ULisboa)
The Community 3 management team is awarded for its outstanding work coordinating partners across the Alliance. Their sustained efforts have delivered essential inclusion and support frameworks, including the Welcome Kits, the Inclusion Office, Wellbeing initiatives, and the centralised Unite! Welcome Centre.
Josep Bordonau (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
Since the founding of Unite!, Josep has exemplified the impact academic leadership can have on the Alliance. Through his commitment, enthusiasm, and leadership—particularly within the Unite!.H2020 project and Community 8—he has demonstrated how senior expertise enriches both Unite! and academic career development.
Bartosz Stec (Wrocław Tech)
Bartosz has consistently fostered local awareness of the Alliance by driving the Let's UNITE! promotional campaigns in Wrocław in 2025 and 2026. He efficiently bridges student and academic environments, manages complex international training projects, and builds lasting collaborative networks between partner universities.