Ludwigshafen, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
Collaboration with academia has been a core elemenent of my scientific career at BASF from when I first started more than 12 years ago. In the framework of a strategic partnership with my former postdoc-advisor at Harvard University, I transferred microfluidics as a then novel technology platform to BASF. The microfluidics lab in Ludwigshafen has meanwhile daughter-labs in Tarrytown, USA, and Shanghai, China. This experience taught me the importance of early transfer and implementation for impact-driven industry-academic partnerships. When growing the effort, I realized that it is necessary to address the topic in a wholistic and interdisciplinary way for successful research in industry. Consequently, I lead two teams of a total of twenty people in two corporate research departments focusing physical chemistry and chemical engineering respectively. This taught me not only leadership skills, but also the organizational understanding for different research units at BASF that was essential in setting up the current effort on flow chemistry involving scientists and funding from all four corporate research unit and the benefitting business unit. Throughout this time I complemented my internal research activities with some 25 mostly academic collaborations of various formats. These turned out to be the trigger for shifting my professional focus to academic partnership development. I have been a liaison-person to KIT (Karlsruhe), Germany since 2016, and to Imperial College since late 2017, in both cases succeeding in substantially increasing the number of active collaborations. In serving this role, I am convinced that setting up a collaboration must be well prepared and motivated by complementarity, i. e. the match of an industrial need with the corresponding academic competence: our flow chemistry effort is based on a rigorous assessment of the BASF’s lessons learnt and best practice that I summed up in an internal position paper three years ago. The proposed program at Imperial will provide the required interdisciplinary competence and infrastructure, and an appropriate research philosophy. Moreover, focus and prioritization are key to impactful collaboration: flow chemistry already accounts for about half of our collaborations with Imperial College. Finally, I try to ensure management support and select the academic and industrial collaborators based on their personal relationship and enthusiasm: in this sense I am privileged to collaborate with very engaged scientists at Imperial in a field that I feel very strongly about.
Liaison officer for - Imperial College London, Great Britain - Karlsruhe Insitute of Technology (KIT), Germany
Managing two teams in two different units: - BASF's Microfluidics Platform - Emulsification Technology
Setting up BASF's Microfluidics Platform - Managing multiple collaborations with Prof. David Weitz, Harvard University - Transfer and implementation into BASF - Setting up the infrastucture and competence required for applying microfluidics in Formulation, Screening, Flow Chemistry, and Bio-Applications - Networking with external partners and creating a community within BASF - Supporting the setup of daughter labs in Tarrytown (USA) and Shanghai (China)
lecture on "Numerical Programming for Chemical Engineers" key contacts: Prof. Mircea Cristea and Prof. Serghei Agachi
research on Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assays (ELISA) as fast test-kits for fungal toxins (ochratoxins) in wine