Thomas Hagspihl has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Essays on Optimization of Airport Infrastructure”. In his thesis, Thomas addressed three airport infrastructure planning problem: The location for vertiports, where vertical take-off and landing aircraft can provide a shuttle service to the airport, optimal positions and orientations of contact gates along the facade of a given terminal, and the dynamic configuration of contact gates with passenger boarding bridges. The committee, which consisted of Stefan Minner (chair), Rainer Kolisch, and Florian Jaehn (Helmut-Schmidt-Universität) congratulated Thomas on his achievement and wished him all the best for this future career. Currently, Thomas is research associate at Bauhaus Luftfahrt, an aviation think tank located in Munich.