The German Chemical Society (GDCh) has awarded our alumna Dr Mona Haase the GDCh Prize for Biocatalysis. The award ceremony will take place on 1 October 2026 in Dortmund as part of GDCh-SusChem 2026, the annual conference of the GDCh’s Sustainable Chemistry Division.
Mona Haase completed her PhD at our institute with the distinction ‘summa cum laude’ and, in her thesis, developed a novel chemo-enzymatic synthetic route for the pyrroloindole alkaloid Lansai B. Through the specific use of C-methyltransferases, she was able to establish an efficient and scalable process that opens up new possibilities for the sustainable production of active substances.
Her interdisciplinary research, which covered areas ranging from molecular biology and organic synthesis to structural biology, was reflected in five first-author publications and numerous conference presentations.
We warmly congratulate Mona on this honour and thank all project and collaboration partners for their support. Her success underscores our institute’s forward-looking research in the field of biocatalysis and demonstrates how enzymatic methods can enable resource-efficient and highly selective syntheses.