Scientific Awards, Memberships and Appointments

For the members of staff of our institute

2021

Dr.-Ing. Simon Bechtel, alumnus of the Process Systems Engineering group and the IMPRS Magdeburg, has been distinguished as the best Ph. D. student 2021 by the Department of Process and Systems Engineering of the Otto von Guericke University for his Ph.D. thesis on the Development of a novel, energy efficient process for the gas phase electrolysis of hydrogen chloride to chlorine.
ContiVir, a planned spin-off from the Max Planck Institute Magdeburg, has been awarded the 2021 "Innovation Prize of the German BioRegions" with regard to their research on and development of a purification tool to tackle vaccine bottlenecks. This national award honors outstanding ideas and patents with high economic potential in the field of modern biotechnology.
Laura König-Mattern, Process Systems Engineering group, was awarded with one of the prizes of the Bioöokonomie-Camp 2021 within the context of the Germany-wide Wissenschaftsjahr 2020/21 dedicated to bioeconomy.
Ruben Goldhahn was honoured for his master thesis on „Depolymerization of polyamide 12 with customized ionic liquids“ by the Magdeburg regional group of the Association of German Engineers (VDI). He is a master student of Process Engineering at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and team member of the Max-DePoly project in the MPI Process Systems Engineering goup.
Prof. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern has been appointed by the DFG, German Research Foundation, as a member of the Selection Committee for the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Programme. The decision on the prizewinners is made by the Joint Committee on the basis of a recommendation submitted by this Selection Committee for the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Programme. The members are particularly respected and experienced scientists and academics with a broad overview of the research landscape.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kai Sundmacher has been elected as member of the "Technical Class" of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) in honour of his achievements in the engineering sciences in June 2021.
Prof. Dr. Alexander Zuyev, Senior Scientist in the research group Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory, has been elected as Corresponding Member of the "Department of Mathematics" of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
The International Adsorption Society (IAS) has appointed Prof. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern as IAS Fellow, in honour of the significant contributions he has made to the adsorption science community and for his longtime leadership in the IAS and for the FOA meetings.
Prof. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern held the Annual "Cary Lecture" on "Chromatography and crystallization: Competitors and partners to provide pure enantiomers and plant ingredients" as a virtual talk on 31 March 2021 at the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA).
The School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering invites distinguished scholars in fields of significance to chemical engineering to speak as a visting lecturer in the "Ashton Hall Cary and Freeman H. Cary Lectureship Series".
Laura König-Mattern, Ph.D. student in the Process Systems Engineering group, has been granted a monthly 400 Euro scholarship by the Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Foundation, who supports talented young women with children in their scientific career.
Prof. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern, together with Prof. Peter H. Seeberger, MPI of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, and Prof. Kerry Gilmore, University of Connecticut, USA, will be awarded with the ACS Science Award for Affordable Green Chemistry by the American Chemical Society for their outstanding success in developing continuous chemical processes to produce artemisinin based combination therapies, important malaria medications, from plant waste material, air, and light.

2020

Dr.-Ing. Marcus Wenzel, alumnus of the Process Systems Engineering group, has been awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society in June 2020 for his research on the syngas production from CO₂.
Honorable mention by the Householder Prize Committee has been awarded to Dr. Pawan Goyal, research group Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory, for his thesis on "System-theoretic model order reduction for bilinear and quadratic-bilinear systems". The Householder Prize is awarded for the worldwide best Ph.D. theses in the field of "Numerical linear and Multilinear Algebra" for the past three years.
apl. Prof. Dr. Heike Lorenz, team leader in the research group Physical and Chemical Foundations of Process Engineering, has been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of the Section Industrial Crystallization of the Open Access Journal Crystals. Thus, she is also a member of the Editorial Board of the journal. Her term started in March 2020.
Dr. Jens Saak and Steffen W. R. Werner, research group Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory (CSC), have been awarded, together with Dirk Wolfram (nee Siebelts, CAU Kiel), for the best paper in the category applications of the journal at-Automatisierungstechnik in the year 2019 for their contribution "A comparison of second-order model order reduction methods for an artificial fishtail".
Dr. Matthias Stein, head of the research group Molecular Simulations and Design, has been appointed a honorary professor at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg in January 2020.
Prof. Dr. Peter Benner, Director and Head of the Research Group Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory (CSC), has been elected into the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) Review Board for the committee of „Mathematics“ for the period from 2020 to 2023. The election was held in October / November 2019.