Ernst Haage Prize 2024 goes to Barbara Lechner

Young chemist from Munich receives renowned award of the Mülheim Max Planck Institutes

Every year, the Mülheim Max Planck Institutes award the Ernst Haage Prize. This year, the award goes to Munich: Prof. Barbara Lechner is honored for her outstanding research. 

Her work in the field of functional nanomaterials has convinced the jury: Prof. Dr. Barbara Lechner from the Technical University of Munich will be awarded the Ernst Haage Prize 2024. This prestigious prize is awarded annually by the Ernst Haage Foundation of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion and the Max Planck Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr. The award is endowed with 7500 euro.

The dynamic restructuring of functional nanomaterials under realistic conditions is what particularly interests Barbara Lechner. Among other things, she and her team use a scanning tunneling microscope with high temporal and spatial resolution directly in gas mixtures for their experiments. They are investigating how the structure of metal particles and oxide carrier materials changes and influences the function of the material.

Lechner, who studied chemistry in Innsbruck, earned her doctorate in physics at the University of Cambridge. As a postdoctoral researcher, she worked in the group of Prof. Miquel Salmeron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CA, before becoming a group leader at the Chair of Physical Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). In 2020, Lechner was appointed Rudolf Mößbauer Professor at TUM and now heads a research group for functional nanomaterials. Lechner has received numerous awards and grants for her work, including the ERC Starting Grant 2019.

In addition to the national award, the Ernst Haage Foundation also presents annual awards for outstanding trainees, doctoral students and postdocs. This year, Tim Schulte, a doctoral student from Prof. Tobias Ritter's working group, and Sheng-Hsiang Lin, a doctoral student from Prof. Dr. Walter Leitner's working group, received the award for young scientists. The awards for particularly outstanding trainees go to the chemical laboratory assistant Elisabeth Glöckler (MPI CEC) and the precision mechanic Hinrich Kludig (MPI KOFO).

Throughout his life, the Mülheim entrepreneur Ernst Haage (1901-1968) attached great importance to promoting young scientists and providing young people with a good education. The Ernst Haage Prize has been awarded in his name since 2006. Haage's daughter Ursula Bonnen, who passed away in 2019, established the Ernst Haage Foundation together with the MPI for Chemical Energy Conversion. Haage had worked as head of precision mechanics on campus for a long time before founding his own company.

The public award ceremony will take place on Friday, November 15, starting at 9:30 a.m. in the main lecture hall of the MPI für Kohlenforschung. The Board of Trustees has secured Prof. Siegfried Waldvogel, who has been working as the new Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion for a year, as keynote speaker.