Two new Dr. rer. nat. from our groups: Marina Vortmann and Christoph Engwer!

This Friday, Marina Vortmann from Bruno Moerschbacher’s group and Christoph Engwer from the ex-Goycoolea group swore the oath prescribed by the Doctoral Rules of our Faculty of Biology, to keep searching scientific truth in the age of fake news. Families and friends had come to Münster to participate at the convocation, and to celebrate with them afterwards. Christoph had contributed to our last European project, Nano3Bio, i.a. by thorough theoretical modelling of chitosan gel formation and nanoparticle formation, aiming for new antibacterial strategies based on quorum sensing inhibition. Marina almost single-handedly performed all tasks our group had to contribute to our AiF project F2F, namely delivering well-defined chitinolytic enzymes for the bacterial substrate converter strain which she designed together with her close collaborator Anna Stumpf from Prof. Philipp’s group in Microbiology (who also obtained her PhD certificate today!). This project also paved the way for our current funCHI project which aims to develop fungal fermentation wastes as an alternative, clean and non-animal source of high quality chitin and chitosans. Both Marina and Christoph are already well on their way towards their next career steps, and given their independence and creativity, we are sure both will succeed very well. We are sending a big “thank you” again to both of you, and we are looking forward to hearing from you in future.