Two new Dr. rer. nat.: Soofia Khanahmadi and Naivy Nava turned into Dr. Soofia Khanahmadi and Dr. Naivy Nava today

Today, both Soofia Khanahmadi and Naivy Nava were officially awarded the title ‘Dr. rer. nat.’, the highly renowned German equivalent of the internationally more widespread ‘PhD’ in natural sciences. This time, the ceremony was a completely virtual one, the document will be sent very unceremoniously by post. And we even postponed the mandatory baptism in our inner courtyard’s pond to summer – so the titles do not really count yet, not for us anyway. Both Soofia and Naivy had joined our group towards the end of 2016, both with a doctoral fellowship, Soofia with a German one from DAAD and Naivy with one from Conacyt in Mexico. Both pursued projects which were based on our experience with chitosans in agriculture, but both with biological systems that we had never worked with before, Naivy with a nematode and Soofia with a virus. Thus, both searched and found external support for their projects, Soofia by Dr. Gundula Noll in our institute as well as by Dr. Sybille Unsicker from the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Naivy by Prof. Johannes Hallmann from the Julius Kühn Institute in Münster. Both her projects suffered heavily from the corona pandemic in her final year which is typically the one yielding all the best results. This is why finalizing the doctoral projects took a little longer than anticipated, and why the majority of their works has not yet been published, but we are happy that both will stay with us as post-doctoral researchers for a little longer to tie up a few loose ends and publish their results well. And this, of course, will also give us an opportunity to throw both of them into our doctoral baptism pond – one by one!