New job: Dr. Maha Attjioui started her post-doctoral position at the Shannon Applied Biotechnology Centre in Tralee, Ireland

Maha Attjioui left us to start her new post-doc position in Ireland. As an agricultural engineer, Maha had supported Nour Eddine El Gueddari in his field experiments in the green houses of Les Domaines Agricoles in Morocco, where we tested our plant strengthening chitosans in tomatoes and many other crops. She then began her PhD at her home university, and she secured a DAAD fellowship for a sandwich year in our group in Münster. The initial plan had been that we would try to make this into a double degree between our two universities, but this eventually failed because the required rules were not yet established. Maha later returned to our lab again and finally decided to submit her thesis at our university, and she obtained her doctoral degree earlier this year. She not only succeeded in translating our research results on structure-function relationships of chitosans in plant protection from the lab to the field, but she also found out why our chitosan exhibits a far superior performance compared with competing chitosan-based products - to be published shortly! After a short post-doctoral stay with us during which she supported Hellen Barbosa, our latest Brazilian sandwich doctoral researcher, and transferred some of her skills to our young Iranian doctoral researcher Soofia Khan Ahmadi, she will now pursue a biomedical research project in Tralee, a job offer she secured due to her analytical competence in glyco-biology and - of course - thanks to her warm and friendly, always supportive personality. Maha, we will miss you, and we wish you the best of success and happiness in Ireland! And the best thing is: as a partner in a collaborative project, she will have to visit us regularly!