PhD Award from the GDCh Division of Sustainable Chemistry

Deadline: May 1, 2024

Objective
The Division of Sustainable Chemistry of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) awards a prize in even years for the best doctoral thesis in the field of sustainable chemistry.

The price
The award comes with a certificate of award and prize money of 2,000 euros. The prize will be awarded on the occasion of the 12th/13th. The annual meeting of the Division , which will take place in Mülheim in September 2024, was awarded. The award awardee will be invited to present the award-winning work in a short lecture as part of this event. An expert committee appointed by the Division Board decides on the awarding of the prize. The price can be shared.

Nomination/application
Nominations can be made by the academic supervisor, but applications are also possible. The dissertation must have been completed with the examination between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2023. All proposals consist of an informal cover letter, a concise justification from the academic supervisor (max. 1 page), the CV of the person to be nominated (including contact details) and the dissertation itself.

submission
Please send your suggestions in electronic form and summarized in a PDF file to the GDCh Office for the attention of Maike Fries.

The 2022 PhD Award from the GDCh Division of Sustainable Chemistry , donated by Evonik, was awarded to Dr. Joel B. Mensah and Dr. Ruth D. Rittinghaus on December 1, 2022 on the occasion of the "Sustainable Chemistry Online Symposium 2022".

Dr. Joel B. Mensah: awarded in recognition of his dissertation entitled “Chemo-Catalytic and Electrochemical Deoxygenation of Bio-Derivable 3-Hydroxydecanoic Acid – Production of Drop-In Fuels and Fine Chemicals”. " Dr. Mensah's doctorate demonstrates in a special way the interdisciplinary development of new value chains for sustainable fuels and fine chemicals based on biomass. The focus was on the conversion of biotechnologically efficiently accessible 3-hydroxy fatty acid esters (HAAs). Mr. Mensah succeeded in developing both an efficient chemocatalytic as well as to demonstrate a direct electrochemical process to selectively produce either pure hydrocarbons, secondary alcohols or an oxygenate mixture starting from 3-HDS. The work impressively builds a bridge from biotechnology via chemo- and electrocatalysis to internal combustion engines along the entire value chain."

Dr. Ruth Rittinghaus: awarded in recognition of her dissertation entitled “Iron Guanidine Complexes as Polymerization Catalysts for ROP and ATRP”. " As part of her dissertation, Dr. Rittinghaus dealt with biocompatible catalysts for the ring-opening polymerization of renewable lactones to produce bioplastics. In doing so, she not only managed to beat the previous industrial, toxic standard in terms of polymerization speed. Dr. Rittinghaus also demonstrated very successfully through copolymerization experiments, that her iron-guanidine catalysts both catalyze multimechanistic polymerizations and precisely control the microarchitecture of the resulting copolymers. She thus shows that intelligent catalyst design opens up completely new paths for sustainable polymer chemistry and will enable tailor-made bioplastics to new fields of application. She has already published four publications in high-ranking journals as first author."