Junior professor from Berlin Adlershof receives Bunsen Kirchhoff award 2010

Janina Kneipp junior professor for Optical Sepctroscopy and Process Analytics in the Chemistry Department of Humboldt-Unversität zu Berlin and head of working group at BAM Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, receives the Bunsen Kirchhoff award 2010 for analytical spectroscopy. The award is given by the German Chemical Society (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker) for extraordinary accomplishments of young scientists and pays 2500 Euro.

In particular her research on sensitive Raman spectroscopic methods for examining micro-structured materials and complex biological systems such as living cells will be recognised. This includes the development of new sensors and tracers based on Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy, SERS.

Additionally, Janina Kneipp's work also showed for the first time that hyper-Raman scattering, another Raman method, combined with SERS can be used as a potential tool for analytical applications. This combination of methods delivers additional information about the structure and composition of complex molecules which cannot be obtained using other spectroscopic methods.

Janina Kneipp studied biology and physics at Freie Universität Berlin and obtained a doctorate (thesis on characterisation and identification of prion diseases using infrared spectroscopic examination) from the Robert Koch Institute. After that Janina Kneipp spent time at Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam and the Chemistry Department of Princeton University, where she started working with Raman spectroscopy. During her postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School she investigated complex biological systems with particularly sensitive Raman methods. In 2005 she returned to Berlin and assumed a position as junior scientist at BAM in Adlershof. In 2008 she was appointed Junior-S-Professor.

Source: Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM)