Obituary for Prof Dr Sabine Gruber

On June 21, 2021, Prof Dr Sabine Gruber passed away after a long illness.

In her research, Sabine Gruber dealt intensively with old and new crops - the cultivation of lentils in Germany, and the Swabian Alb in particular, owes a lot to her contributions. She also supervised numerous master’s and bachelor’s theses and a dissertation on this topic. Of her almost 80 publications, ten dealt with lentil farming in Germany. Despite her serious illness, she continued to supervise students and doctoral candidates, inspiring enthusiasm for science, plant cultivation and especially lentils. We will miss the joint project meetings and field days, where together we enjoyed technical discussions, tasting lentils and brainstorming about future research.

Sabine Gruber really enjoyed discussions with the lentil farmers – she always returned with a treasure-trove of new ideas from every site visit and meeting with the Albleisa producer group. In addition to her scientific publications, Sabine Gruber also published numerous articles in practical journals and gave interviews in order to bring the lentil back to our fields – dialogue with citizens was particularly important to her, as her research was never at home in the ivory tower.

As project partners, we have known Sabine as an inspiring, creative and honest colleague. Even in the last weeks and months, she has given us many suggestions and approaches for LinSel that we will continue to work on together. We will sorely miss Sabine Gruber, her strength, her energy and her passion for research.