December 1, 2022: Finally, another Christmas party!

While Corona certainly is not yet a thing of the past, it would seem that we have started to learn to live with it. What a blessing that molecular biology and nanobiotechnology have joined forces to create the mRNA vaccines in almost no time. It allowed for an almost normal year in teaching and research. We had four excellent Bachelor students, Thomas Willenborg and Melanie Schöpker, Evelyn Tchoub and Antonia Miersch. And we had the largest number ever of Master students successfully defending their theses in a single year: Merle Diekmann, Katharina Eickelpasch, Naike Schwenner, Denis Qoray, Gian Luca Marongiu, Sonja Raetz, Anika Jürß, and Judith Ryll! And all of them continued to work with us for a while as post-graduate assistants to try and finalise open ends of their exciting projects while searching for a suitable and challenging position for their further careers, either as a doctoral candidate or in Industry, or planning their own start-up! The Indo-German Bioeconomy International BMBF project Bio-Fun of our post-doctoral researcher Dr. Ratna Singh and the German-Norwegian Bioeconomy-in-the-North BMBF project LignoLIPP of our post-doctoral researcher Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr, supported by our post-doctoral researcher Dr. Carolin Richter, as well as their parallel projects BYPROVALUE (NRC) and co-Fun (DAAD) have continued successfully, picking up speed and nearing their completion. Our post-doctoral researcher Philipp Lemke left us to go for a one-year around-the-world trip with his wife, and Dr. Vânia Horta de Passo joined us as a post-doctoral researcher, bringing in external expertise. Another highly satisfying development is the granting of the DFG Priority Programme Codeχ on structure-function relationships of partially deacetylated chitins and partially acetylated chitosans – with the Chitosan Code, which we have been proposing since more than a decade, as the central topic of all projects to be submitted. This will certainly create a highly stimulating environment for the coming last years of our research group!