Novel bio-based polymer: Young Academics Award for Scientist of TU Braunschweig

08-27-2010: Stefanie Kind, PhD student at the Institute of Biochemical Engineering of the Technische Universität Braunschweig, was awarded with the prestigious “Young Metabolic Engineer Award” During the Metabolic Engineering Conference in Jeju, South Korea, an international jury selected five most excellent papers out of 200, among these the work by Stefanie Kind. In a “best of the best” competition with short presentations she stood up to top-class competitors from the USA and Asia. The award is endowed with 500 US Dollar.

Stefanie Kind, graduated in biology, received the award for systems wide metabolic engineering of the soil bacterium Corynebacterium glutamicum into a tailor-made cell factory for production of diaminopentane as building block for the innovative bio-polyamide PA5.10. The “2010 Young Metabolic Engineer Award” recognizes her research, supervised by Prof. Dr. Christoph Wittmann, as groundbreaking model project towards a bio-based economy for the production of chemicals, materials and fuels.

Her work is part of a joint collaboration of the Institute of Biochemical Engineering with an industrial consortium including BASF SE, Daimler AG, Fischerwerke GmbH and Robert-Bosch GmbH. The project supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research within the initiative BioIndustry21. Stefanie Kind is further sponsored by the Max-Buchner Foundation of the German Society for Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (DECHEMA)