Michael Erhard, who was a part time member of the Systems Control and Optimization Laboratory from 2015 to 2017, received an offer for the professorship of "Automatic Control" at the university of applied sciences Hamburg (HAW Hamburg). Michael Erhard is expert on model based controller design. For more than ten years, he  was control engineer at the company SkySails in Hamburg and made large scale kites fly autonomously under varying weather conditions. In his part time job in Freiburg, he gave lectures in control engineering to students of renewable energy engineering and management (REM) in autumn 2015 and autumn 2016 and supervised master and bachelor theses, within the ERC project HIGHWIND.