A dozen conference name badges bearing Aditya Kumar and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, laid out with their lanyards on a table, among them ICM 2024 Bologna, JEMS 2025 Frankfurt, the Materials Today Conference 2025, the 2024 China-Germany bilateral meeting, an IEEE Magnetics summer school, a CERN visitor pass and a Peking University notebook, alongside a blue DPG "Leading for Tomorrow" volume.

Attended the July workshop of the German Physical Society's (DPG) Leading for Tomorrow programme

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About two dozen participants of the DPG Leading for Tomorrow 2026 programme seated in two rows on stepped wooden benches in a bright room, most wearing name badges, one holding a large stuffed gibbon with outstretched arms, with a yellow-green DPG banner standing at the right.

Attended the July workshop of Leading for Tomorrow, the German Physical Society's leadership programme for physicists, which turned ten years old in 2026. It exists because a physics education trains people to solve problems and then sends a good number of them into positions where the hard part is leading other people. Admission turns on an anonymised letter of motivation, in which applicants set out what they want to develop and where they are currently weak, rather than on a research record.

The first module ran 8 to 10 July 2026: situational leadership and delegation, strategy work and agreeing on goals, leadership as dialogue through asking, listening and feedback, closing on lateral leadership and each participant's own leadership purpose. The programme continues in further modules through November 2026.