New job: Dr. Anne Vortkamp started her post-doctoral position at the Department of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition of Geisenheim University

Anne Vortkamp starts today in her new post-doctoral research project in the Rheingau, one of Germany’s renowned wine growing areas. Anne had studied Viticulture and Enology - Wine Making - there and had also worked in different wineries during and after her studies before she decided that she wanted to understand things more deeply, wanted to dig deeper into research. She did a Master in Agriculture at Gießen University and then joined us for a doctoral project in the framework of our Indo-German CuChi-BCA project on developing novel plant protectants based on synergistic combinations of chitosans, copper fungicides, and Trichoderma fungi acting as bio-control agents. She also became a member of the first Indo-German graduate school on Molecular and Cellular Glyco-Sciences MCGS between the universities of Münster and Hyderabad. Her work opened up a new area of chitosan research for us, namely to understand how chitosans promote plant growth and development - where we had previously focused only on how chitosans induce plant disease resistance. Based on her results, we are now lobbying for a category of “dual-use biostimulants” for European agriculture - certainly still a long way to go. And she is not only a very good scientist, Anne is a networking genius: she meets people no matter where in the world, makes contact, and keeps contact - amazing. But she is also selective - choosing just the right job for herself. Already during her doctoral project, Anne would have liked to investigate the influence of the rhizospere and its rhizobiom on the chitosan we use for seed coating - in Geisenheim, she will be in an ideal position to do so, if she can convince her new colleagues. We are looking forward to keep collaborating with you, Anne!