DECHEMA Prize for Felix Löffler

Felix Löffler, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPIKG), Potsdam, Germany, has been awarded the DECHEMA Prize 2023. The award honors his groundbreaking and pioneering work on the development of multi-materials using 3D printing techniques. The prize is endowed with EUR 20,000 and is awarded annually for outstanding research work in the fields of technical chemistry, process engineering, biotechnology, or reactor engineering. This year, the award was presented at the DECHEMA FORUM 2024 in Friedrichshafen, Germany, on September 12, 2024.

Löffler’s research interests include the production of complex microarrays that have many different biomolecules or materials on the surface. These arrays are intended to be used, e.g., to find new biomarkers for diseases and to develop new catalysts for a decarbonized future. New technologies for the production of microarrays, such as a multi-material nano-3D printer developed by Löffler, can enable high-throughput analyses for disease research, diagnostics, and materials research. His work shows a high degree of interdisciplinarity, combining aspects of chemistry, materials science, engineering, physics, biology, biotechnology, and bioinformatics.

Felix Löffler studied physics and biophysics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. During his Ph.D., he was a scholarship holder at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. He worked as a junior researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, and spent some time in 2014 working at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Since 2017, he has been a Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces.

In addition to other honors and funding, Löffler received the Gips-Schüle Prize in 2014, a postdoctoral scholarship from the Carl Zeiss Foundation, a KIT internal scholarship from the Karlsruhe House of Young Scientists, and one million dollars in project funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He also won the BMBF NanoMatFutur young talent competition, endowed with EUR 2.25 million, with the project “cLIFT – a high-throughput synthesis method for on-demand molecular libraries”. Löffler has filed nine patents, six of which as lead inventor. Since 2020, he has been a member of the Early Career Advisory Board of the journal Chemistry – A European Journal, and since 2021, he has been a member of the selection committee of the Nexus program of the Carl Zeiss Foundation.

Selected Publications