Prof. Vincenzo Busico will hand over his duties as Scientific Chair of the Polyolefins Programme to Prof. Bernhard Rieger. Prof. Busico acted as Scientific Chair of the area for more than fifteen years. DPI is very grateful for these many years of service to DPI and the international polymer community. During the period in which Prof. Busico was Chair of the Polyolefins programme, the programme generated more than 275 scientific publications and nearly 50 theses. The Executive Board of DPI appointed Prof. Rieger per 1 October 2020.
Prof. Busico
Busico is leader in the field of heterogeneous polyolefin catalysis with a very broad network in the Polyolefin research community. As a project leader of numerous projects in the field of catalysis, he (introduced and) applied the high throughput experimental approach in the programme. Gradually he also engaged into the field of rheology. Last but not least, he was also a very strong advocate of the DPI approach and was very instrumental in bringing new industrial and academic partners to the DPI network.
Ernst Jan van Klinken, Managing Director DPI ‘We are very grateful for the many years of dedicated service of Prof. Vincenzo Busico to DPI. Together with the DPI Programme Area Coordinators Dr. Jan Stamhuis, Dr. Jan Smook and Dr. Claude Bostoen, he built a very strong Polyolefin community which has proven to be very beneficial for the interaction between industry and academia. This has significantly impacted and accelerated fundamental research in this area. Also his initiative in the DPI Blue Sky Conferences and the DPI Polyolefin course has had a great impact in the creativity and the knowledge base in the community.’
Prof. Rieger
Prof. Rieger is currently the WACKER Chair of Macromolecular Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich and director of the Institute of Silicon Chemistry founded in 2006. He obtained his PhD in 1988 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in München. After postdoctoral research at the University of Massachusetts, he joined the University of Tübingen for his habilitation. In 1995 he accepted a professorship for Macromolecular Chemistry at the University of Ulm, Germany.
A number of awards honor the originality and quality of his research achievements. In addition to his doctoral and post-doctoral scholarships, he received the award for “Advanced Student Education” of Baden-Württemberg in 1997 and the award for “Exceptional Cooperations between Academia and Industry” of the University of Ulm in 2000. He was the Philip Morris Foundation laureate in 2006. Since 2007 his chair has been a selected place in the competition “Germany, Land of Ideas”. From the same year forward, he holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki. The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters appointed him as full member in 2008 and the European Academy of Science, Belgium in 2011. He received the renowned Wöhler Award from the German Chemists Society (GDCh) for Sustainable Chemistry in 2013 and was elected as member of the National German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) in the same year.
Ernst Jan continues: ‘DPI welcomes Prof. Rieger as Chair of the Polyolefins programme and wishes him a lot of success. Not only does he have “big shoes to fill”, but together with us, he is also faced with pressing societal & industrial challenges in the areas of circular economy and the growing complexity of functional demands for polymeric materials. We are confident that Prof. Rieger is up to the task at hand and that he will aid to steer the international DPI Polyolefin community in new directions of research and creative inventions.’