Tim Rottleb was awarded the Peter Meusburger Doctoral Prize ‘Geography and Knowledge’ on December 6, 2025. The award ceremony took place with a small group of former students of Peter Meusburger in Heidelberg-Handschuhsheim.

Tim Rottleb's doctoral thesis was supervised by Jana Kleibert at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. It is an outstanding academic work on the creation of Transnational Education Zones (TEZs) in the Arab Gulf as a strategy to develop knowledge-based economies. The candidate explores how TEZs are used to attract offshore campuses of foreign universities and students in order to strengthen their position as international education hubs.

Tim Rottleb earned a bachelor’s degree in Oriental Studies and a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Politics and Economics at Marburg University. After that, he worked as a research assistant at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Erkner, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in the Leibniz Junior Research Group ‘TRANSEDU - Constructing Transnational Spaces of Higher Education’. He then took a position at Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU) Cottbus-Senftenberg.