Inaugural lecture by Prof. Dr. Mareike Dirks-Hofmeister at University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück: “Keine Lust auf Heuschrecken?”

Today, our alumna Prof. Dr. Mareike Dirks-Hofmeister  gave her inaugural lecture as Professor of Food Biotechnology at the University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück. Mareike had been one of the very few students in the first batch of Bachelor students ever at our University. She had done her BSc thesis in our group on fighting a bacterial disease in strawberries using chitosans; later, she joined us for her MSc thesis on the heterologous expression of dandelion polyphenoloxidases in Arabidopsis. She continued for an equally excellent doctoral project on structure-function relationships of these enzymes, then taking over as post-doctoral leader of the PPO research from her supervisor, Dr. Carolin Richter, who had initiated this sub-group within our group. After a two-years post-doctoral research stay abroad in Ghent, Belgium, where she worked as an enzyme engineer to develop enzymatic glycosylation reactions of polyphenolics, she became R&D project leader, and later R&D director, at the German biotech company WeissBioTech. There, she was responsible for the entire research regarding enzymes for food sciences, including a joint project with our group which started our journey into chitin and chitosans from fungal cell walls. In 2020, she was appointed Professor in Osnabrück, but Corona delayed her Inaugural lecture until now. Mareike has always been a pioneer, in whatever she did: obtaining a BSc and MSc instead of the then traditional Diplom, working on bacteria in strawberries instead of on fungi in wheat like the rest of us, investigating PPOs rather than chitosans, using molecular genetics and biotechnological tools in addition to biochemical ones… - and always successfully so. So we do not doubt that she will do exceedingly well in her (not so) new job in Osnabrück which is close enough to Münster to keep collaborating in future. We are very much looking forward to it – and we wish you the best of success!