Congratulations! Katharina Eickelpasch received the First Young Researcher Lecture Price and Sirikan Pongnan the First Poster Price at ICCC / SIAQ.

As important as talks are posters at any scientific conference. The huge advantage of poster over oral presentations is that the people who performed the work are actually presenting it themselves – while oral presentations are all too often given by the professors who supervised, but did not carry out the work and, thus, are often ignorant of the details. Unfortunately, there is often very limited time for the poster sessions, but not so during ICCC / SIAQ in Mexico. There was enough time, and many people visited Sirikan Pongnan’s poster in which she presented the detailed structural characterization of a bacterial chitin deacetylase which she had done at VISTEC in Thailand under the supervision of Prof. Wipa Suginta and Prof. Tamo Fukamizo, before she joined us for a sandwich doctoral year in Münster. This excellent work, and its presentation, impressed the jury, and she won the First Poster Price! Ten years ago, in 2015, when we organized the ICCC in Münster, we introduced a Young Researcher Symposium as a forum for doctoral and young-post-doctoral researchers to present their work. This has been taken up since by other chitin and chitosan conferences, including this year’s ICCC / SIAQ. The – alas! – last doctoral researcher from our group, Katharina Eickelpasch, had been asked to act as a co-chairperson for the event, and she also presented her current work, a detailed investigation into the structure-function relationship of chitosans inducing disease resistance reactions in plants. This also convinced the jury, and she won the (shared) First Price for Oral Presentations of Young Researchers! Did I say we are proud? We are!