Congratulations! Dr. Margareta Hellmann received the Rectorate’s PhD Award 2025 of the University of Münster for the best doctoral thesis in Biology.

Today, we are extremely proud to have witnessed the central PhD award ceremony of the University of Münster during which our former doctoral and current post-doctoral researcher Margareta “Maggi” Hellmann received the Rectorate’s PhD Award 2025 of the University of Münster. With this annual ceremony, the University thanks all recent PhDs whose theses were evaluated with the highest possible mark – “summa cum laude” – for their extraordinary contribution to science and to the reputation of our university. Among these, one candidate in each Faculty is honored with the Rectorate’s PhD Award as “best of the best”. And this year, in Biology, it was Maggi. No surprise really, given her outstanding record. Her research is aiming to understand how human pathogenic fungi evade the immune system of their hosts – us! – by remodeling their cell walls: they shed some of the acetyl groups of the treacherous chitin on their surface, converting it into innocuous chitosan – a sophisticated molecular stealth mechanism. To unravel this, Maggi had to develop a set of new analytical tools, and testing these on conventional chitosans, she also solved – en passant – one of the decades-old riddles of chitosan chemistry: do these chitosans possess random or block-wise acetylation patterns? Well, neither: the pattern is surprisingly regular. Of course, Maggi’s work built on the decades of research of dozens of doctoral candidates in our group before her, almost all of them very good, some of them excellent. In a way, Maggi received this award on behalf of all of them – even though of course, it remains her very own, individual achievement. Thank you, Maggi!