Professor Bauder is well known for his empirical and theoretical contributions to international migration and integration studies. He is particularly interested in the illegalization of immigrants through state and institutional practices. During his stay in Germany, he will focus on the urban geographical scale to explore the relationship between mobility, governance and the enactment of citizenship.

Professor Yang is an internationally outstanding geo-scientist with special focus on dryland geomorphology and soil geography. He made important contributions to the understanding of the fluvio-aeolian dynamics in drylands with focus on environmental change and human impact. In Germany, he will work on modern methods in order to use soils and sediments as geo-archives for the reconstruction of environmental changes and human-environmental interactions in geo-archaeological contexts.