News

October 2024 - Chiang Mai University

After the symposium at VISTEC, we visited the bioplastics lab at Chiang Mai University. Volker Mailänder and me gave talks about our research. It was great to see the labs and talk to many researchers. Thanks to Robert Molley and the entire team for the warm welcome.

October 2024 - VISTEC-MAX PLANCK-NIMS Symposium on Colloid and Interface Science

On October 17 and 18, the international Symposium on Colloid and Interface Science took place at Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology (VISTEC) in Thailand. Volker Mailänder and me represented MPI-P with two talks about "Cascade Reactions in Confined Polymeric Modules" and "Multifunctional Nanocarriers: Enabling Tumor Vaccination by Co-encapsulating Antigen and Adjuvants for Tumor Vaccination in vivo. Thanks to Daniel Crespy and Makoto Ogawa from VISTEC for their great organization. It was also nice to see so many young reseachers and discuss with them science!

October 2024 - Liesegang Prize

I feel very honoured to have been awarded the Liesegang Prize. The award ceremony took place at the 52nd Biennial Assembly of the German Colloid Society is scheduled for Monday, September 30, 2024 in Dresden. Thanks a lot to the German Colloid Society and Andreas Fery for the organization of the great event.

Picture: Emanuel Richter/IPF Dresden

October 2024 - cryoNET Symposium

Congratulations to Francesca Mazzotta, from my group at the MPIP, for having her abstract selected for a talk at the cryoNET 7th symposium in Aarhus University. The symposium was interdisciplinary focusing on structural biology as well as novel methods to improve structure investigation inside and outside the cell. Thanks to the organisers!

October 2024 - PhD General Meeting

Doctoral researchers from different institutes of the Max Planck Society gathered in Mainz for the annual PhDnet General Meeting. We were happy to contribute to this event by offering guided tours of our Polymerpath and sparking interesting discussions about polymers and our research within the Max Planck community.
Thanks to the organizers and everyone who attended!

October 2024 - Fun game while waiting for the Nobel Prize press release

It is that time of the year when scientists are anxiously waiting for the Nobel Prize press release! This year my group turned the event into a fun game. We gathered to discuss and predict the winners leading to an exciting scientific discussion. One of the teams successfully predicted protein design and prediction.

Congratulations to the Nobel laureates in Chemistry for the award!

October 2024 - Exchange program with Fortaleza

This is the first day of this year's MPIP/UFC exchange program. It is great having scientific exchange and meeting with former colleagues who were at MPIP. Now Katja, Max and Florian are in Fortaleza and visit the lab.

September 2024 – Opening of the outdoor seminar room!

Thanks to the initiative of our group, the outdoor seminar room is now available to all MPIP groups. The tent can be hired, as well as the large outdoor screen for presentations.

September 2024 – 3 anniversaries!

Congratulations to three anniversaries: Angela Hördt for 10 years, Anke Kaltbeitzel for 25 years, and Christoph Sieber for 40 years in public service. Thank you very much for your many years of collaboration!

September 2024 - MSE2024

Francesca Mazotta presented at this year's Materials Science and Engineering Congress (MSE2024) in the characterisation symposium how single particle CryoEM can unravel atomically resolved structural information of synthetic peptide nanofibrils. At the international congress held in Darmstadt there was the great opportunity to listen to fanstatic talks and to discuss science in detail.

September 2024 - GCSB

Prijanka, Gabrielle and Zhicheng presented their work at the GCSB 2024 – German Conference on Synthetic Biology in Regensburg. Thanks to the organizers for this fantastic conference with many discussions and inspiring talks! It was a great experience

September 2024 - Familientag Zitadelle

Kreisläufe“ war das Thema am KinderUni- und Familientag auf der Zitadelle. Initiiert von der Wissenschaftsallianz. Neben NatLab, Grüne Schule und dem MPIC war auch das MPIP mit einem Stand vertreten: PET-Recycling zum Selbermachen!

September 2024 - Team building activity

Our BIOFABLAB at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Reaserch experienced a beautiful team building activity based on black light mini golf.
It's great to create bonds within the team!

Spetember 2024 - Schulprojekttag

Am Schulprojekttag kamen Schüler:innen des Campus Klarenthal und der Diltheyschule aus Wiesbaden zum Kunststoff Bildungspfad. Eingangs hielt Katharina Landfester einen Vortrag über „Nachhaltigkeit von Kunststoffen“. Danach folgten das Quiz und eine Challenge: wer schafft es, das Ei am besten zu verpacken, damit es den Wurf aus dem Fenster standhält!

September 2024 - ECIS conference in Kopenhagen

Sarah Lembke, Carina Jung, and Zhicheng Wang represented the Landfester department from the MPIP at the ECIS 2024 Conference - European Colloid and Interface Society.

August 2024 - MPIP delegation at ACSFall2004 meeting

It was an intensive week of presentation, discussions and meetings in Denver. Mischa Bonn was organizer of a session, Tanja Weil and me gave talks about our recent research activities at the 25th anniversary of Biomacroleculs. Volker represented his excellent work about protein corona and extracellular vesicles in two talks. Our senior postdoc Seunghyeon Kim was awarded the 2024 PMSE Future Faculty award. It was a great week and it was fantastic to catch up with so many people to discuss science.

July 2024 - Great Group Retreat Week on Water

This year, the group retreat of our AK Landfester from the MPIP was on water, either on a huge sailing boat or in small canoes. In both cases, the team spirit was fantastic. We intensively discussed sustainable ideas for the group and the institute, and interacted in many different ways to further strengthen the group. Thanks a lot for many helping hands and a great week full of new ideas. I am very proud of my group and I am looking forwards to our next research challenges.

July 2024 - RaMa-Projekttage

3 Tage war eine Schülergruppe des Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasiums Mainz in ihrer Projektwoche am MPIP. Es gab zahlreiche Workshops zu Recycling und Biokunststoffen. Am Schluss wurden noch die chemischen Reaktionen beim Backen unter die Lupe genommen. Ein Blick in die Labore gehört immer zu den Highlights.

July 2024 - Students from Daejeon Science High School visit MPIP

A delegation from Daejeon Science High School for the Gifted in South Korea visited the MPI with 93 students. Svenja Morsbach, Christine Rosenauer and Ulrike Schneider guided them along the Polymer Path and Seunghyeon Kim presented the institute and its research in the lecture hall. The delegation was thrilled to have been here.

July 2024 - „Zukunftsgestalter im Weinberg“

Katharina Landfester (MPIP) und Alexander Throm, LigniLabs, gaben Einblicke in die Nanotechnologie und ihre Chancen. Es folgten ein intensiver Dialog mit Gästen einzelner Disziplinen der Biotechnologie-Branche und ein informativer Spaziergang über den Kunststoff Bildungspfad. Danke an biomindz für die Mitorganisation.

June 2024 - 40th anniversary of MPIP

Great to celebrate with so many collegues and alumni the 40th anniversity of the institute. A special symposium on Friday with scientific contributions related to the institute and a reunion day on Saturday let us reminisce about former days at MPIP. Fantastic to welcome so many alumni of AK Landfester. Thanks to the many helping hands to make this event possible.

June 2024 - Defense time!

Congratulations to Laura Dietz who successfully defended her PhD thesis about the exocytosis and about exosmes for nanoparticle delivery.

June 2024 - Pupil at the MPI-P

The winner of our Science Day photo competition on 28 April visited us today and redeemed her prize: a day at the MPI-P. Nora is in the 4th class and was amazed at how much technology there is in such an institute and how many researchers work here. The visit to the glassblower was a highlight for her.

June 2024 - Bee adoption

Yesterday a swarm of bees visited the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. Stanislav Balouchev, project leader in our department at MPIP, rescued them and gave them a new home. We will be able to study them and establish their health with our homemade setups. We are also looking forwards to some tasty honey. Welcome bees at your new home!

June 2024 - Kai Zhang memorial symposium

On June 14, we celebrated at MPIP the life of Kai Zhang who passed away untimely on May 24, 2023. Supervisors, former PhD students, collegues, and friends shared memories and impressively demonstrated the influence that Kai's research had and still has on their own research. Thanks to Peter Skabara, Long Chen, Wenxin Wei, Run Li, Martijn Zwijnenburg, Alexander Kühne, Rob Dawson, Paul Blom and Yan Zhao for their great talks, thanks to Calum Ferguson for co-organization. We are glad that Kai's mom and cousin and many friends could be present. It was an emotional day. Kai will never be forgotten.

May 2024 - SoftComp annual meeting in Lyon

It was a great pleasure to give a plenary lecture about our recent work on "Cascade Reactions in Artificial Cells" (Max-Planck-Institut für Polymerforschung) at the 20th Annual Meeting 2024 of SoftComp Consortium in Lyon. Happy 20th anniversary of SoftComp! Thanks to Flavio Carsughi and Stefan Förster for their great organization of the meeting in Lyon. It was fantastic to discuss about so many soft matter challenges.

May 2024 - Administrative heads meeting

The administrative heads of all Max Planck Institutes came together at the MPIP and met for 3 days. A visit to the polymerpath was part of it. Christine Rosenauer explained to the guests when the history of polymers began. And much more.

May 2024 - MINT Week, SMG Ingelheim

With questionnaire and pencil on the polymer path. More than 200 pupils from Sebastian-Münster-Gymnasium in Ingelheim were with us this week and tried to solve the quiz with 16 questions about polymers. Many stations were visited in small groups - with a focus on sustainability. Where can natural polymers be found, where are fiber-reinforced plastics used, for example in wind turbines, and what role do biopolymers play in today's research?

May 2024 - Naurod Retreat

Directors, group leaders and senior postdocs of the entire Max-Planck-Institut für Polymerforschung meet in the middle of the woods close to Naurod to intensively discuss about pressing issues at the institute and looking towards the future how to create a modern, competitive institute. AK Landfester is actively involved in the discussions with other scientists of the institute.

May 2024 - Historians4Future visit polymer path

The Historians4Future with Dr. Andreas Frings on the Polymer Path of our institute. One of the questions of relevance was: How relevant were historical references for the invention and further development of polymers in the 1930/40s and what is the situation today? Interesting new insights!

May 2024 - Joint meeting of the Max Planck Center for Complex Dynamics in Bad Boekelo.

We had a highly stimulating joint meeting with the partners about all kinds of fluids. From our department, Thao Phuong Doan Nguyen, Tsvetomir Ivanov and Yuri Avlasevich gave talks. Thanks to the organizers for a great event.

April 2024 - Science Day

Around 250 visitors attended the Family Day and made use of the wide range of different activities, including a Kids' University, guided tours, speed dating and a photo competition for school children. The numerous visitors showed that children and their families are grateful for such an opportunity to learn more about polymers and the research at the MPIP.

April 2024 - Girls' Day

On 25th of April, 20 girls visited the MPI-P. They got the opportunity to carry out experiments on the topics of superamphiphobic surfaces, chromatography and superabsorbers and they also learnt how to come up with a conclusion starting with a hypothesis by means of observation. After the lunch break, they visited the Polymer Path. The girls were really impressed about the many different research topics at the MPI-P.

April 2024 - Farewell

Goodbye to Shoupeng. We will miss him in our group and wish him all the best for this professorship at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China.

March 2024 – The season for our tours can start

Fresh woodchippings and the Polymer Path shines in new splendour! We would like to draw your attention to the Science Day on 28 April with a programme for the whole family! more

March 2024 - Biomolecular corona workshop

We had a very intense and intersting biomolecular corona workshop in Kopenhagen. Thanks to Professor Ben Boyd for the great organization.

March 2024 - Preparing for the audience discussion-Workshop

Everybody knows how difficult it can be to answer questions after a talk. We had a great workshop with Ric Oquita from Impulsplus to get prepares for the Audience Discussion. Thanks Ric for all your helpful advices!

January 2024 - 25 years anniversary

Congratulations to Ingo Lieberwirth for 25 years of great electron microscopy work at MPIP!

January 2024 - Intuitive Archery-Workshop

A two-day workshop in the Staudinger Lecture Hall with Annette Birkholz from the Bogenakademie in Berlin: "Archery as a Blueprint for Leadership – Hitting the target without targeting". How can leaders focus on their own strengths and adopt an inner attitude in order to lead the team better. Intuitive archery was a real experience!

December 2023 - Tree of Wishes

This year, the Landfester department once again took part in the MPIP's "Tree of Wishes" campaign. We have bought gifts for five children who live in the institutions of the Juvente Foundation. As these children cannot live with their families for various reasons, we hope to create a magical Christmas for them by fulfilling their Christmas wishes. Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible!

December 2023 - MPC Meeting

From December 11-12, the Max Planck Center for Complex Fluid Dynamics Mainz - Twente held a symposium to exchange ongoing research and discuss joint projects. We were happy to have the meeting in Mainz and already look forward to the next one! more

November 2023 - Kalkhof-Rose award

Excited to announce that last week our postdoc Seunghyeon Kim received the Kalkhof-Rose award for his work on photocatalytical nanoparticles. Congratulations! May many new achievements come in the following year!

November 2023 - Poster prize

Julian Heuer and Tsvetomir Ivanov, together with Heloisa Bremm Madalosso and Thao Phuong Doan Nguyen, both received a MPIP poster prize for their work on photocatalysis and synthetic cells, respectively.

November 2023 - MPIP art contest

Here is our own "Beauty at MPIP" art contest winner! Congrats to Daksh for submitting "Bert from Sesame Street".
Check out the beautiful SEM image!

November 2023 - Stay at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Francesca Mazzotta and Maria Micheva are back form an exciting exchange with our collaborator Pablo Froimowicz at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. It was a great learning experience to exchange knowledge overseas. More updates on this exchange are soon to come so stay tuned!

November 2023 - Teacher training on recycling and bioplastics

We hosted the Regional Conference by the Network of Education for Sustainable Development Schools. The full-day programme with a guided tour along the Polymer Path and two workshops was very intensive. There were many discussions on both thematic modules. The aim was for the teachers to deepen their basic knowledge so that they could pass on what they had learnt to their pupils or even plan their next trip to the Polymer Path.

November 2023 - Visit of two recycling plants

A group from several working groups and service points travelled to Gernsheim and Grünstadt on November 2nd. In Gernsheim there is a large sorting plant that sorts the waste from the Yellow Bag or Yellow Bin in a complex process and with large facilities. The second plant, "Kunststoff Recycling Grünstadt", takes the pre-sorted plastic packaging and uses the most modern technology to produce regranulate of the same quality as virgin material. After the visit it was clear: recycling is a science in itself.

October 2023 - New paper

We are happy to share our newest paper, which is online now in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces! Explore our latest research article to discover how polymer vesicles and coacervates can be used to develop hierarchical materials that mimic the structure and dynamic properties of cells. more

October 2023 - Stay at UFC Fortaleza, Brasil

Tsvetomir Ivanov and Julian Heuer visited our collaboration partner lab of Prof. Dr. Nagila Ricardo at UFC Fortaleza, Brasil. It was a great experience for the two PhD students who also presented their work and gave an overview about our department work at MPIP.

October 2023 - Defense time!

Congratulations to Dr. Jenny Schunke for successfully passing her defense of her PhD thesis about adjuvance-loaded nanocapsules that induce effective antitumoral immune response.

October 2023 - CLINAM conference

Two great poster prizes for our group at the CLINAM conference in Basel! Congratulations to Laura Dietz and Carina Jung! Thanks to to organizers for an inspiring conference.

October 2023 - NanoBrain

We are excited to have had the kick-off meeting of NanoBrain. It is great to be part of the Leibniz ScienceCampus about targeted delivery of therapeutics to the brain: advancing translational nanomedicine to decode, prevent, and fight mental disorders. Let's get started!

October 2023 - Concept paper online!

Our concept paper about "Assembly of Multi-Compartment Cell Mimics by Droplet-Based Microfluidics" is online! It highlights and reviews the progress made in the construction of hierarchically organized cell-mimics using droplet-based microfluidics methods. more

October 2023 - BOW Meeting

Great BOW meeting of the EU project in Rostock! It was again great to see that different groups with their expertise in different fields work together towards a common goal. more

September 2023 - Grape harvest at the MPI-P

For the second year now we had a great grape harvest - free of ESCA - to produce world famous MPI-P wine again. The weather was fanstatic for the harvet. We are looking forward to a tasty wine.

September 2023 - Visit to the exhibition "Plastic World"

We went to the Schirn in Frankfurt, the art gallery for current topics and for national and international artists in Germany. "Plastic World" shows a collection of art from several decades. Especially in the 60s/70s, the versatile material influenced many artists. They experimented with PUR foam or epoxy resin. Plastic was as fascinating then as now because it has been either highly formable, transparent or elastic. But it was also used for socio-critical statements: the role of women in society with inflatable Nanas by Niki de Saint Phalle or the beginnings of mobile work with the blow-up office made of transparent PVC foil by Hans Hollein in 1969.
And of course art has always dealt with the opposites of artificiality (Daksh's new favourite word!) and nature: on the one hand, cold, sterile plastic in garish colours, which has just shaped the Pop Art movement, and the destructive force in our environment according to the motto "plastic has come to stay". For example, Otto Piene's walk-in installation with its giant inflatable sea anemones and lobsters shows that plastic is fascinating and omnipresent at the same time, even in the ocean.
more

September 2023 - Award time!

Congratulations to Heloísa Bremm Madalosso for winning the Best Lecture Award at the 14th International Workshop on Polymer Reaction Engineering (September 5-8, 2023 - Potsdam, Germany). Heloísa presented her work entitled "Molecular weight distributions and thermal properties of polyesters synthesized via enzymatic ring-opening copolymerization of macrolactones".

September 2023 - ECIS conference

Francesca Mazzotta, our PhD student, is participating at the ECIS 2023 conference in Naples. Here she presented a poster on the work done during her industrial secondment titled: "Dual colour imaging for the detection of polymeric NP composition".

August 2023 - Well deserved retirement

After 25 years of service, our LEO Gemini SEM is retiring. It has seen over 80.000 samples and taken more than 700.000 images. On the bottom, you can see its very last image.
Thanks for working with us for such a long time and farewell!

July 2023 - Conference talk M&M

Ingo Lieberwirth gave a presentation about „Correlative Microscopy for the Identification of Intracellular Nanoparticles and their Cellular Processing“ at the Microscopy & Microanalysis 2023 event, which took place in Minneapolis, US from July 23 - 27. more

July 2023 - Defense time!

Congratulations to Dr. Mareike Deuker for successfully passing her defense of her PhD thesis about the Interaction of anti-PEG antibodies with PEG and their presence in the protein corona.

June 2023 - Summer school DLCV

Daksh joined the summer school Deep Learning and Computer Vision (DLCV) at Genova, Italy. It was a great opportunity to meet new people and learn new technologies with hands on experience. Finally, in the group project presentations, his group won the award for the most novel idea and best presentation.

March 2023 - BOW Meeting

Ana Mateos Maroto and Svenja Morsbach joined the next consortium meeting of the European project BOW „Biogenic Organotropic Wetsuits“ in Santiago de Compostela from March 20-22. It was great to meet partners at USC and as always very productive! more

March 2023 - Guest visit

Visit from scientists from Costa Rica. To study the extraordinary properties of the skin of the velvet worm (Epiperipatus biolleyi) native to Costa Rica, the AK-Landfester had three scientists from CeNAT as guests.

March 2023 - The Sense-Compute-Response Paradigm Workshop

Tsvetomir Ivanov gave a talk at The Sense-Compute-Response Paradigm Workshop in Darmstadt about his work on adaptive multi-compartmentalized microreactors obtained by oleyl alcohol-assisted polymersome assembly. It was a great opportunity to meet and discuss ideas with the leading researchers in the field. more

March 2023 - Defense time!

Congratulations to Dr. Richard da Costa Marquez to the successful defense of his PhD thesis about Proteomic studies on intracellular nanocarrier trafficking and regenerative bone substitute materials.

February 2023 - SuperCol meeting

Francesca Mazzotta, Iain Harley, and Ingo Lieberwirth joined a SuperCol meeting in Fribourgh in February, where they discussed new aspects of super-resolution microscopy for the localization of functional groups on nanoscaled colloids. more

February 2023 - Defense time!

Congratulations to Dr. Jennifer Oberländer to the successful defense of her PhD thesis about the effect of temperature on the protein corona around nanoparticles and the exocytosis of nanoparticles from cells.

February 2023 - Group retreat

We had a great time at our first group retreat after a long time! Lots of aspects about sustainability were discussed in the middle of the snowy hills around the Tegernsee. Of course, we also did not miss a good snowball fight!

January 2023 - Stay in Waalwijk

Francesca Mazzotta, working for the SuperCol project, started her industrial secondment at Covestro! For the next 10 weeks she will have the opportunity to see and understand how a company works and give her contribution to their scientific project. We wish her lots of luck!

News | Dept. Landfester

2024