Christmas party to end and celebrate another successful year

This night saw our Christmas party, as always prepared by the new arrivals to our group. They had decorated the room in a festive mood, food and mulled wine was served, and we happily received a number of alumni guests. This is the time to look back at the year and our achievements. This year, Anna Lisa Niemann, Katharina Eickelpasch, and Ruben Eichfeld finished their Bachelor projects in our group, and Charlotte Schwarzer hers in collaboration with Bex-Biotec. Lena Jünemann finished her Master project in our group, and Niklas Hielscher his’ in collaboration with Bex-Biotec. Marina Vortmann, Sven Basa, and Philipp Lemke finished their doctoral projects in our group, Christoph Engwer and Hao Nguyen his in the Goycoolea and Hensel group, both after having spent some time with us earlier. Less than last year as we are succeeding in slowly decreasing our group size, but each one a success! Still, we again had 13 publications accepted, with all-time highs in cumulative and average impact factors. We successfully finished our AIF-ZIM project F2F and our European ERA-IB project funCHI, as well as Nouri’s German-Tunesian BMBF project Mat-Bio. The NRW Graduate School grEEn and our first Indo-German Bioeconomy International BMBF project smartBioS are performing well. For the first time, a project proposal developed by one of our post-doctoral researchers, Dr. Ratna Singh, was successful and is now our second Indo-German Bioeconomy International BMBF project, Bio-Fun. Importantly also, our post-doctoral researcher Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr has re-started the activities of ChitoProf, the analytical service unit of our group which had been built up by our late and painfully missed colleague Dr. Nour Eddine ‘Nouri’ El Gueddari.