On Tuesday, September 20, 2016, Dr Martin Oschatz and Dr Martin Heise were awarded the prestigious Starck Doctoral Prize of the Division of Solid State Chemistry and Materials Research of the German Chemical Society (GDCh). The award ceremony took place during the annual meeting of the division, which was held in Innsbruck from September 19 - 21, 2016.
The prize, donated by the company H. C Starck, Goslar, is awarded every two years to the best dissertation in the field of solid state chemistry and materials research. This year, the prize was split on the basis of two equivalent theses of outstanding quality and is endowed with 5000 EURO.
Martin Heise, who is now continuing his scientific career at the institute, carried out his doctoral work from October 2011 to June 2015 in the research group of Michael Ruck. He established a novel resource-saving synthesis method that can be used, for example, to produce superconductors, nanoscale magnetic materials and ionic conductors at low temperatures. Dr Heise is now a project manager at FILK gGmbH, Freiberg, Germany, and works on targeted surface functionalization and thin coating of material surfaces, including for use in medical devices, flexible light-emitting diodes, leathers and films.
From October 2011 to April 2015, Martin Oschatz was a PhD student in the Kaskel research group. He developed nanostructured carbon materials for gas filtration and electrochemical energy storage. In 2013, he conducted a two-month research stay in the group of Prof Gleb Yushin at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, USA). Since May 2015, Dr Oschatz has been conducting research as a DAAD postdoctoral fellow at Utrecht University. In the group of Krijn de Jong, he is developing nanostructured iron/carbon catalysts for the selective conversion of syngas into hydrocarbons.
