Lars Wienbrandt, postdoctoral researcher in the group of  Andre Franke, was awarded the price for the best doctoral graduation at the Faculty of Engineering of Kiel University (CAU) in 2016 by the "Förderverein der Technischen  Fakultät e.V.". His thesis "FPGAs in Bioinformatics - Implementation and Evaluation of Common Bioinformatics Algorithms in Reconfigurable Logic" shows how the general problem of long runtimes in bioinformatics tools can be tackled with alternative hardware, focused on FPGAs (field programmable field arrays). Depending on the problem and data size FPGA technology is able to reduce algorithm runtimes from days to minutes.