Chemie IOCB News

Poster Award

2026-09-02T13:04:07+02:00

Jana Löwe won the molecular catalysis poster award for her poster entitled, "Replacing co-substrates by carbon dioxide, water and light: A novel perspective towards bulky amines" at the 1st Biocascades Symposium & 8th International Cebitec Research Conference 2018 (ICRC 2018).

Poster Award granted

2026-09-02T13:02:57+02:00

During a SusChemSys 2.0 meeting at the RWTH Aachen on the 6th of April, Alessa Hinzmann and Tobias Betke were awarded both with a Poster Award out of 25 different posters for their contributions to the meeting. The committee og the award consisted of several industrial partners within the SusChemSys 2.0 cluster, which encourages us to pursue our focus on the process development for biocatalysis even further in the future.

Hajime-Hoshi-Price

2026-09-02T13:02:00+02:00

On 27 January, the German-Japanese Society Bielefeld (DJG) awarded the Hajime Hoshi Prize 2017 to biotechnologist Keiko Oike (27) from the Faculty of Chemistry at Bielefeld University. Keiko Oike was honoured for her outstanding scientific achievements and her commitment to supporting and integrating Japanese guest students. Gesa Neuert, President of the DJG Bielefeld, presented the certificate for the 1,000 euro prize. Keiko Oike comes from Toyama, on the north coast of Japan, and completed her Bachelor's and Master's degree in Biotechnology at Toyama Prefectural University, for which she received the university's best student award in 2013. Since 2016, she has been working on her doctorate in the field of biocatalysis in Professor Dr Harald Gröger's research group at Bielefeld University. The Hajime Hoshi Prize, awarded jointly by the DJG Bielefeld and Bielefeld University for the third time, is named after the important Japanese science patron Hajime Hoshi (1873 to 1951).

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Green Chemistry

2026-09-02T12:48:42+02:00

Producing the active ingredient for a drug is a complex and lengthy endeavour: It often requires around a dozen production steps, reaction stages in which the respective product has to be isolated, separated and purified again and again. "This should and can be done in a more environmentally friendly way," says Prof Dr Harald Gröger from Bielefeld University.

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Otto Roelen Medal for Harald Gröger

2026-09-02T12:39:22+02:00

Professor Dr Harald Gröger from Bielefeld University has been awarded the Otto Roelen Medal 2014 by DECHEMA and the German Catalysis Society in recognition of his work on the coupling of chemo- and biocatalytic reaction steps in the enantioelective synthesis of drug building blocks. By combining chemical and biotechnological processes, Harald Gröger links two worlds that were previously considered separately.

13th International CeBiTec Symposium “Multi-Step Syntheses in Biology & Chemistry - An International Young Investigator Conference”

2026-09-02T12:38:11+02:00

Biocatalysis is one of the key technologies, that will shape not only the industrial landscape, but also our daily lives in the future. This interdisciplinary field of research, which combines biology and chemistry, opens great perspectives for basic research as well as industrial applications. This was part of the occasion of the 13th International CeBiTec Symposium “Multi-Step Syntheses in Biology & Chemistry - An International Young Investigator Conference” that was held at Bielefeld University on December 2019. Head speakers have been Prof. Shuji Akai from the Osaka University in Japan, Dr. Daniel Fitzpatrick from the University of Cambridge, Prof. Julia Frunzke from the Research center Jülich and Dr. Matthias Höhne from the University of Greifswald. Fields of tailor-made bio-catalyst design and applications thereof, combination of biocatalysis and chemocatalysis and synthetic biology towards multi-step syntheses from both, an academic and industrial perspective, were part of this symposium. In addition, emerging recent trends mostly done so far out of the area of biocatalysis, which, however, are expected to have a strong impact on biocatalysis in the future will be addressed such as, for example, flow-chemistry, machine learning self-automatization. A further focus of this symposium were contributions of young researchers to present their research achievements and latest results in the plenum as well as lectures and poster presentations. They had the opportunity to present their work and to discuss on the future prospects of biocatalysis in order to promote the networking of the next generation of biocatalysis researchers.