Our journey towards this Festschrift started when realizing that our teacher, mentor, and friend Ursula Gather was going to celebrate her 60th birthday soon. As a researcher, lecturer, scientific advisor, board member, reviewer, editor, Ursula has had a wide impact on Statistics in Germany and within the international community. So we came up with the idea of following the good academic tradition of dedicating a Festschrift to her. We aimed at contributions from highly recognized fellow researchers, former students and project partners from various periods of Ursula’s academic career, covering a wide variety of topics from her main research interests. We received very positive responses, and all contributors were very much delighted to express their gratitude and sympathy to Ursula in this way. And here we are today, presenting this interesting collection, divided into three main topics which are representatives of her research areas.

Starting from questions on outliers and extreme value theory, Ursula’s research interests spread out to cover robust methods—from Ph.D. through habilitation up to leading her own scholars to this field, including us, robust and nonparametric methods for high-dimensional data and time series—particularly within the collaborative research center SFB 475 “Reduction of Complexity in Multivariate Data Structures”, up to investigating complex data structures—manifesting in projects in the research centers SFB 475 and SFB 823 “Statistical Modelling of Nonlinear Dynamic Processes”.