Scientific Awards, Memberships and Appointments

Honours for the employees of our institute

2024

Laura König-Mattern, PSE group, will be supported with an "Add-on Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Life Science" by the Joachim Herz Foundation for her interdisciplinary computer-aided research on biomass and lignocellulose.
Dr.-Ing. Ronny Tobias Zimmermann, PSE department, was awarded Best Ph.D. student of the Faculty of Process and Systems Engineering at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg for his outstandig Ph.D. thesis on ”Computer-Aided Catalyst Pellet Design for Load-Flexible Fixed-Bed Reactor Operation”.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern was awarded the Gruson Plaque of Honour by the VDI Magdeburg District Association (VDI Bezirksverein Magdeburg). This is in recognition of his accomplishments and outstanding achievements in process engineering, in particular the establishment of innovative separation processes, his commitment to national and international cooperation and the enthusiasm he has instilled in numerous students for studying process engineering.
Alexander Klimek, Ph. D. candidate in the Process Systems Engineering group, dealt in his master thesis with the computer-aided optimal design and operation of green ammonia plants. He has been honored for his research work with the Funding Award by the VDI Magdeburger Bezirksverein. This work was supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kai Sundmacher and M.Sc. Tibor Svitnič.
Igor Gamm, research assistant at the Chair of Chemical Process Engineering at OVGU, was also awarded the Funding Award by the VDI Magdeburger Bezirksverein for his master's thesis on the “Suitability of enantioselective fluidized bed crystallization for the separation of chiral material systems with needle-shaped crystal morphology”. This work was supervised by Jonathan Gänsch, 1st reviewer was Apl. Prof. Dr. Heike Lorenz and 2nd reviewer Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern
Dr. Techn. Liisa Kaarina Rihko-Struckmann, team leader in the Process Engineering Department, has been appointed Honorary Professor at Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg in the field of "Life Cycle Assessment of Chemical Production Processes" in July 2024.
Prof. Dr. Peter Benner, Director and Head of the Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory department, was elected as the spokesperson of the DFG Review Board 3.31 "Mathematics". The term of office runs from 2024 to 2028

2023

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kai Sundmacher gave the 30^th Annual Roger Sargent Lecture on 7 December 2023 on invitation of the Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering at the Imperial College London on the topic „Integrated Computer-Aided Molecular, Material and Process Design for Efficient Chemical Production Systems”.
Dr.-Ing. habil. Tanja Vidaković-Koch will represent the German institutions and research institutes in the International Society of Electrochemistry from 2024 to 2026. She was elected for this role in November 2023 in an electronic election process. Regional Representatives act as a link between the Society and the members of their countries.
Prof. Dr. Peter Benner, Director and Head of the Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory department, was re-elected to the DFG (German Research Foundation) Review Board: 3.31 Mathematics for the term of membership 2024-2028.
Dr.-Ing. habil. Tanja Vidakovic-Koch, research group Electrochemical Energy Conversion, was elected for the first time to the DFG Review Board (German Research Foundation) 4.21 Process Engineering, Technical Chemistry, Subject: 4.21-05 Systems Process Engineering for the term of membership 2024-2028.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kai Sundmacher, director and head of the Process Systems Engineering department, was honored with the Research Award 2023 of the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg on November 21, 2023. He received the prize in recognition of his cutting-edge research work and outstanding scientific achievements in the field of systems process engineering.
Dr. Sridhar Chellappa, CSC department, was awarded Best PhD Student 2023 of the Faculty of Mathematics at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg for his outstanding Ph. D. thesis on model order reduction of dynamical systems, an increasingly important field of applied mathematics at the interface with the engineering sciences.
Ronny Tobias Zimmermann, M. Sc., Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jens Bremer, Bianka Stein, Markus Ikert and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kai Sundmacher (Head), all members of the Process Systems Engineering Department at the Max Planck Institute Magdeburg, were awarded one of the Environmental Prizes (Umweltpreis) of the state capital Magdeburg on November 16, 2023. They were awarded 1st place in the "Research" category. The prize was given for their invention of novel core-shell catalysts for the load-flexible operation of future Power-to-X processes. These easy-to-produce catalysts can be used to develop efficient, safe and cost-effective reactors and processes that enable the large-scale production of chemical energy sources.
Lars Pelz, scientist in the Bioprocess Engineering group, has been awarded with the ACTIP Fellowship Award 2023 for his Ph.D. project on In-depth characterization and cell culture-based production of influenza A virus defective interfering particles. The project “received an excellent score from the evaluators, based on its novelty, scientific impact, and relevance for the industrial use of advanced cell technologies.”
Shaimaa Monem Abdelhafez, Ph.D. student in the Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory group, won the First Place in the ACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Student Poster Competition for graduate work. Her submission "Improved Projective Dynamics Global Solves Using Snapshots-based Reduced Basis" was impressive in its execution and showed impressive benefits over existing physics-based simulation approaches. The conference is the most important conference in the field of computer graphics, with about 20,000 participants.
Dr. Léa Chuzel, alumna of the Bioprocess Engineering Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems Magdeburg, was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society on June 21, 2023 for her Ph.D. thesis on "Application of functional metagenomics to glycan analysis".
Karyna Oliynyk, Research Group Physical-Chemical Foundations of Process Engineering, was awarded one of the VDI Sponsorship Prizes of the Magdeburg regional group of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) for her master's thesis "Investigation and optimization of crystallization-based purification of artemisinin from the complex plant extract" conducted at Otto von Guericke University.
Johannes Kopton was awarded one of the VDI Sponsorship Prizes of the Magdeburg regional group of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) for his master's thesis within the framework of the research project of the Process Systems Engineering group "ProPhoS - Biochemical production systems using photosynthetic organisms".
Dr.-Ing. Marc Hein, Bioprocess Engineering group, was awarded with the "Outstanding Poster Award - 3rd Place" at the "Cell culture Engineering XVIII", 23 - 28 April 2023 in Cancun, Mexico for his poster with the title "Continuous harvesting of retroviral murine leukemia viral vector particles in a high cell density perfusion cultivation".
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern, Director and Head of the Research Group Physical and Chemical Foundations of Process Engineering, was newly inducted into the National Academy of Engineering of the United States of America in February 2023 for contributions to adsorption, preparative chromatography, and crystallization processes and to development and theory for resolving enantiomeric mixtures.

2022

Somayeh Zarai M. Sc., Research Group Physical and Chemical Foundations of Process Engineering, won the first poster prize at the 3rd Twitter Poster Conference on Adsorption organised by the International Adsorption Society on 14 December 2022 for her poster on "Determination of Adsorption Isotherm Parameters "from Multi-component Breakthrough Curves"
Dr. Francesca Cascella has been selected as the best Ph.D. student in the period 2021-2022 within the Faculty of Process and Systems Engineering at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg for her thesis on “Resolution of enantiomers of chiral compounds using crystallization processes: from fundamental studies to process development". She received the award during the annual Academic Ceremony held by the university on 29 November 2022 in the Johanniskirche of Magdeburg city.
In recognition of Magdeburg's achievements in the field of adsorption (PCF group, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern), a special session was held with internationally leading speakers under the title „Adsorption and Ion Exchange - In Honor of Prof. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern” on Nov. 14, 2022 during the AIChE Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. AIChE is the world's leading organization for chemical engineering professionals, with more than 60,000 members from more than 110 countries.
Teimurazi Gochitashvili, Ph. D. student at the research group Process Systems Engineering, was awarded together with his students team of the French university University of Évry-Val d'Essonne (Paris – Saclay University) a gold medal at the iGEM, a prestigious competition in synthetic biology on the iGEM Grand Jamboree from 26 to 28 October 2022 on Paris Expo, Porte de Versailles.
Lisa Wenzel M. Sc., doctoral student in the Synthetic Glycobiotechnology team of the Bioprocess Engineering Research Group, was awarded one of three prizes for the best poster at the Saccharides conference in June 2022, a symposium on the chemistry and synthesis of sugars and carbohydrates, glycobiology, glycans and health, structure and analysis of sugars. Her poster on "Synthesis of Synthetic Lipid-Linked Oligosaccharides for the In-vitro Glycoengineering of Peptides" was awarded.
PD Dr. Yvonne Genzel, team leader of the Upstream Processing team, received one of the three ESACT Medals for her contribution to the ESACT Course Series and her commitment being an active member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for Animal Cell Technology (ESACT).
Tilia Zinnecker M. Sc., Ph. D. student in the Upstream Processing team, was awarded with one of the Poster Awards at the Vaccine Technology Conference, from June 12-17, 2022 in Sitges, Spain. She was honoured for her poster presenting her research on “Automated single-cell cloning in chemically defined medium for new suspension MDCK cell lines and scale-down of influenza A virus production into ambr^®15 microbioreactors”.