Never Give Up And Always Be Pragmatic And Optimistic

Katharina Landfester of Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany, has received the 2024 Liebig Memorial Medal from the German Chemical Society (GDCh). She was honored for her remarkable work in the field of organic polymers, particularly, for the development and application of nanocapsules for the targeted drug delivery and as building blocks for artificial cells. The award also recognizes her great commitment to the chemical community and the GDCh.

We met Katharina Landfester in her office in Mainz and talked about the excitement of daily innovation in research, the development of nanocapsules for biomedical applications and artificial cells, the importance of curiosity, mentorship, optimism, and perseverance, and the value of public engagement and interdisciplinary inspiration, for example through art.

Katharina Landfester, born 1969 in Bochum, Germany, studied chemistry at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and at the Ecole d’Application des Hautes Polymères, Strasbourg, France. She completed her Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1995 at the University of Mainz after working with Hans-Wolfgang Spiess at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. This was followed by research stays at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA, before she joined the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Golm, Germany.

In 2002, Landfester completed her habilitation in physical chemistry at the University of Potsdam. In 2003, she took up a Professorship of Macromolecular Chemistry at the University of Ulm, Germany. In 2008, she moved to the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research as Director. She has also served as Managing Director there since 2014. In addition, she has been co-founder of the start-up LigniLabs, Wiesbaden, Germany, in 2022.

Among other honors, Landfester received the Liebig scholarship of the German Chemical Industry Fund (FCI, Fonds der Chemischen Industrie) in 1998 and the Reimund Stadler Prize from the GDCh as well as the Prize of the Dr. Hermann Schnell Stiftung in 2001. From 2007 to 2015, she was a board member of the GDCh Division of Macromolecular Chemistry, and from 2016 to 2023, she served as a member of the GDCh Board.

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