Katharina Landfester

Director at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz

Katharina Landfester is married and the mother of two children (ages 7 and 10). She studied chemistry at the Technical University of Darmstadt and did her diploma thesis at the Ecole d'Application des Hautes Polymères in Strasbourg. In 1995, she received her doctoral degree from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz after working with Prof. H.W. Spiess at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. Then she moved to a postdoctoral position at Lehigh University and returned to Germany in 1998, joining the group headed by Prof. M. Antonietti at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Golm. In 2002, she obtained her habilitation in physical chemistry at the University of Potsdam. In 2003 at the age of 34 years, she accepted a chair (C4) of Macromolecular Chemistry at the University of Ulm. She has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research since 2008.

From 2002 to 2007, she was a member of the Junior Academy (Junge Akademie) of the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina. She has been a member of the Academy of Technical Science (Acatech) since 2010. She has published more than 500 papers and holds more than 30 patents. She is also very active in advising young women on how to combine work and family (please see chapter in the book in "Professorin und Mutter - wie geht das?", Spektrum-Akademischer Verlag, B. Piechulla (Hrg), 2011, 121 - 138; and this video). She initiated and is speaker of the Elisabeth-Schiemann-Kolleg of the Max Planck Society aiming to foster the careers of excellent female scientists after their postdoc phase, helping them to succeed on their way to an appointment as a tenured professor or as a director of a research institution. Her hobbies are playing the flute and the saxophone, swimming, skiing and gardening.

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