A new Dr. rer. nat.: Eva Regel today turned into Dr. Eva Regel

This Wednesday, Eva Regel was awarded the title “Dr. rer. nat.”, the prestigious title of a Doctor of Natural Sciences. This is typically an event to be celebrated, with friends and family joining and congratulating the new graduate in the “Aula” of the “Schloss”, the Baroque castle which is the main seat of our university. In Corona times, no guests are allowed and so, the event was a bit less festive, but no less important. This is when the new doctors take the solemnly pledge to seek and confess the scientific truth to the best of their knowledge and belief at all times. With Eva, there can be no doubt that she will use her skills in some way or other to the benefit of our planet and its inhabitants. She had successfully applied for her own doctoral fellowship with the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt, to take the next step in the development of chitosan-based agro-biologics for a sustainable agriculture. Using state-of-the-art biotechnology and enzyme engineering methodology, she greatly expanded our knowledge on how to use nature’s tools to improve the performance of chitosan oligosaccharides as plant biostimulants and biopesticides. Her work has not only led to several oral presentations at scientific conferences and several publications in scientific journals, but also strongly contributed to our next patent application which we are in the process of preparing. In the coming months, she will support us by using her fresh knowledge on the pertinent scientific literature to define a set of rules to improve the scientific quality of publications concerning the structures and functions of chitosans. We want to start a global discussion within the chitosan scientific community aiming to define standards to be adopted by national and international Chitin and Chitosan Societies such as the European Chitin Society EUCHIS or the Ibero-American Chitin Society SIAQ. We are grateful, Eva, for your past and current support in exploiting the potential of this best of functional biopolymers, chitosan. And we wish you the best of success for your future career.