The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the Max Planck Society in 1948 in honor of its former president, theoretical physicist Max Planck. The society is funded by the federal and state governments of Germany.
Feodor Felix Konrad Lynen was a German biochemist. In 1964 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Konrad Bloch for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism while he was director of the Max-Planck Institute for Cellular Chemistry in Munich.
The Humboldt Research Award, also known informally as the Humboldt Prize, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of Germany in recognition of their lifetime's research achievements. Recipients are "academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge academic achievements in the future". The prize is currently valued at €60,000 with the possibility of further support during the prize winner's life. Up to one hundred such awards are granted each year. Nominations must be submitted by established academics in Germany. As of 2023, over 2,000 awards have been granted.
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany bestowed the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award from 2002 to 2020. Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850–1891) was the first major Russian female mathematician, who made important contributions to mathematical analysis, differential equations and mechanics, and the first woman appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe. This prestigious award named in her honor was given to promising young academics to pursue their line of research in the sciences or arts and humanities. The foundation encouraged applications from all areas of the academy so long as the investigator had received a Ph.D. in the previous six years and could be categorized as "top flight" by their publications and experience as commensurate with age.
The Gay-Lussac–Humboldt Prize is a German–French science prize. It was created in 1981 by French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt based on the recommendation of the German and French research ministries. The prize money is €60,000.
The Ernst Schering Prize is awarded annually by the Ernst Schering Foundation for especially outstanding basic research in the fields of medicine, biology or chemistry anywhere in the world. Established in 1991 by the Ernst Schering Research Foundation, and named after the German apothecary and industrialist, Ernst Christian Friedrich Schering, who founded the Schering Corporation, the prize is now worth €50,000.
Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. As of 2015, she has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, she founded an independent research institute, the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. In 2020, Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing". This was the first science Nobel Prize ever won by two women only.
Ilme Schlichting is a German biophysicist.
Sigfried Bethke is a German physicist and science manager.
Alois Fürstner is an Austrian chemist. He is director of Organometallic Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim, Germany.
Bettina Valeska Lotsch is a German chemist. She is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany.
Rupert Huber is a German physicist and university professor. Huber is known for his research in terahertz technology and semiconductor physics.
Katja Loos is professor at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands holding the chair of Macromolecular Chemistry and New Polymeric Materials.
Christian Hertweck is a German chemist, deputy director and head of the department of biomolecular chemistry at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology.
Andrés Fabián Lasagni is a scientist and laser expert. He is professor at the Technischen Universität Dresden and leads the Chair for Laser-based Manufacturing.
Karl Martin Wolf is a German experimental physicist specializing in electron and optical spectroscopy and their use for studying the dynamical processes in solid state materials, surfaces, and interfaces. He is the current director of the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany.
Gerhard "Gerd" Leuchs is a German experimental physicist in optics. He is the Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and an adjunct professor in the physics department at the University of Ottawa. From 1994-2019 he was a full professor of physics and since 2019 has been a senior professor at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU).
Paola Andrea Pinilla Ortiz is a Colombian astrophysicist whose research concerns the accretion of interplanetary dust clouds into protoplanetary disks as part of the formation of exoplanets. Educated in Colombia and Germany, she works in England as associate professor in exoplanets at the University College London Department of Space & Climate Physics, affiliated with the university's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.
Patricia Schady is a British astrophysicist specalizing in gamma-ray bursts and their host galaxies. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Bath.
Karin Lind is a Swedish astronomer whose research involves spectroscopy of stars in order to determine their chemical composition, and the use of this information to understand the origin of heavy elements in supernova explosions and the way radiation and energy moves through stellar atmospheres. Her work has in particular clarified the roles of Big Bang nucleosynthesis and supernovas in producing the quantities of lithium observed in early stars. She is an associate professor in the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University, and a participant and survey builder in the GALAH collaboration, which uses the Anglo-Australian Telescope's HERMES instrument to map the chemical compositions of stars in the Milky Way.
