A year without a Christmas party…

A year without Christmas party is like a Christmas tree without family – simply sad. Of course, like everywhere else, our research and teaching were heavily influenced by Corona. Labs were closed for students part of the year while research was allowed to continue. This included doctoral projects, with the unfair exception of our international candidates with a fellowship. Our Advanced Module “Molecular BioEngineering” in Spring had to be replaced by a new module “In Silico BioEngineering” which our bioinformatician Dr. Ratna Singh created on the go. With very good success, as seen by the number of Master students who have since started their theses with us because they appreciate the combination of bioinformatics and biochemistry we can offer. And Bruno Moerschbacher had to give his introductory lecture to the BSc students in Fall as an online lecture – it worked, but it was less fun than usual. In spite of Corona, we had again three successful BSc candidates: Carolin Potthoff, Lasse Middendorf, and Jonas Sobierey; and Hannah Kiesewetter finished her BA thesis with us. Margareta Hellmann, Max Evers, and Michael Sulk finished their Master projects in our group, and Lea Hembach and Eva Regel defended their doctoral projects. The NRW Graduate School grEEn ended at the end of the year, while our Indo-German Bioeconomy International BMBF projects smartBioS and Bio-Fun continue successfully, though slowly. The Public Private Partnership AIF project nanoControl almost came to a complete halt as our partner, altona Diagnostics, is concentrating all his energy on producing corona test kits. While unusually, we were not successful this year to win financial support for new projects, we again had 13 papers published, just like last year, though with a slightly lower average impact factor. Given the ongoing shift from doctoral to Master projects in our group, this is perhaps not surprising. If we compare our situation with that of colleagues in other countries, we cannot complain, and though the current lockdown will certainly test our nerves for weeks to come, we are confident that things will slowly improve in 2021. Let us hope that we will succeed in moving ahead to a better world instead of simply returning to our old one.