Eva Regel successfully defended her PhD thesis

Today, Eva Regel successfully defended her doctoral thesis – our first (and hopefully only) full Corona doctor! She was supported by the three members of her doctoral committee, Profs. Bruno Moerschbacher and Dirk Prüfer from our institute, and Prof. Joachim Jose from the Institute for Pharmaceutical and Medical Chemistry of the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy, as well as colleagues, friends, and family. Eva had been successful in winning a doctoral fellowship with the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) for her project which aimed to further develop the biotechnological production of chitosans for sustainable agriculture. Her project built on the doctoral thesis of Tobias Weikert, also supported by DBU, who had compared the plant strengthening activities of the products of different chitosanases. Eva now used the most efficient one of these enzymes and developed biotechnological ways to subtly change its properties using enzyme engineering techniques. While this was successful and her mutant enzymes are improved in different properties, the resulting products proved to be rather less efficient as plant biostimulants than those of the original wildtype enzyme. Still, we learned a lot about these enzymes and how to use them, and we are currently in the process of filing a patent which will allow us to design more readily useful agro-biologics based on enzymatically modified chitosans. During her time with us, Eva co-supervised a number of students, among them one Bachelor and two Master theses, and her work already resulted in three publications and three oral presentations at international conferences. And more is to come! This may have been a fully virtual defence, but the ‘Dr. rer. nat.’ title is real – as promptly verified by the traditional baptism in our doctoral pond.