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Otto Hahn Medal for Greta Re­intjes

Jun 13, 2018

For her outstanding scientific work on the bacterially mediated carbon turnover by marine microorganisms, MPI researcher Dr. Greta Reintjes is awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society. The ceremony will take place during the MPG Annual General Meeting on June 13, 2018 in Heidelberg.

 

In her doc­toral thesis, Greta Re­intjes in­vest­ig­ated the man­ner in which phylo­gen­etic and func­tional dif­fer­ence in mi­cro­bial com­munit­ies af­fect the bac­teri­ally me­di­ated car­bon turnover in the oceans. Ad­di­tion­ally, she de­veloped meth­ods to en­able a faster ana­lysis of the mi­cro­bial di­versity on board a re­search ship and in­vest­ig­ated the dis­tri­bu­tion pat­terns and com­pos­i­tion of dif­fer­ent bac­terial com­munit­ies across the At­lantic Ocean. In 2017, Re­intjes gradu­ated with the grade "Summa cum Laude".

„The res­ults of my doc­toral work con­trib­uted to un­der­stand­ing of the role of mi­croor­gan­isms in the global car­bon cycle”, Re­intjes ex­plains. In re­cent years the im­port­ance of so-called mi­cro­bi­o­mes, the com­munit­ies of mi­croor­gan­isms col­on­iz­ing a par­tic­u­lar eco­sys­tem, has come to light. "I want to in­crease our un­der­stand­ing of the struc­ture and func­tion of these mi­cro­bi­o­mes, with a spe­cific fo­cus on the role that mi­croor­gan­isms play in local and global bio­chem­ical cyc­ling."

Greta Reintjes
Greta Reintjes (© MPIMM)

Otto Hahn Medal

This year marks the 40th an­niversary of the Otto Hahn Medal, be­stowed by the Max Planck So­ci­ety to hon­our its best ju­nior sci­ent­ists.
 The medal, en­dowed with 7,500 Euros, aims to mo­tiv­ate the win­ners to pur­sue a ca­reer in re­search.

Like very few oth­ers, Otto Hahn epi­tom­ised sci­entific ex­cel­lence in his own life, along­side the struggle for pro­gress on both a per­sonal and a so­ci­etal level. It was in his late twen­ties that Otto Hahn began his ex­cep­tion­ally fruit­ful co­oper­a­tion with Lise Meit­ner, which led to the dis­cov­ery of nuc­lear fis­sion for which he re­ceived the No­bel Prize in Chem­istry in 1944. As Pres­id­ent he at­ten­ded to the suc­cess­ful trans­form­a­tion of the Kaiser Wil­helm So­ci­ety into the Max Planck So­ci­ety start­ing in 1946.

With the Otto Hahn Medal, the Max Planck So­ci­ety hon­ors its best doc­toral stu­dents. Es­pe­cially gif­ted young sci­ent­ists should be mo­tiv­ated to a uni­versity or re­search ca­reer. "What mo­tiv­ates me is curi­os­ity and my de­sire to un­ravel nat­ural pat­terns and un­der­stand their bio­lo­gical mean­ing", says Re­intjes. Fol­low­ing her oc­cu­pa­tion at the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Mar­ine Mi­cro­bi­o­logy, she will move to Canada, where she will also study the hu­man and ru­minal mi­cro­bi­ome. "In the long term, I would like to es­tab­lish my own re­search group.”

Please dir­ect your quer­ies to:

Head of Press & Communications

Dr. Fanni Aspetsberger

MPI for Marine Microbiology
Celsiusstr. 1
D-28359 Bremen
Germany

Room: 

1345

Phone: 

+49 421 2028-9470

Dr. Fanni Aspetsberger
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