Welcome to the department of Prof. Katharina Landfester
Physical Chemistry of Polymers
The Landfester Group 2021
We view it as our mission to create colloids with increasingly specific and complex properties for new materials and bio-medical applications and to use the confinement of stable nanodroplets to tune chemical reactions and transformation processes. Particles suspended in a liquid, known as a colloid, are versatile and flexible in their uses. They are found everywhere in our daily lives, from mother's milk to adhesives and automobile paint to the most modern technologies. The special properties of colloids can therefore be adapted in each case to the intended purpose. That facilitates the enormous versatility of the miniemulsion process. From the encapsulation of dedicated molecules, like drugs, self-healing agents etc. through to generation of extremely small nanostructures, these simple spheres can be utilised with a highly uniform size and a defined functionality of the surface. The significance of the miniemulsion technique is that it is possible to use a wide variety of polymerization techniques with a wide range of monomers. Hereby important factors like size, shape, degradation, release kinetics, surface functionalization can be precisely tuned as requested. The continual progress in knowledge about the properties of nanoscale objects and their interactions with living tissue like cells or with electromagnetic radiation opens diverse opportunities.
M. de Souza Melchiors, T. Ivanov, I. Harley, C. Sayer, P. H. H. Araújo, L. Caire da Silva, C. T. J. Ferguson and K. Landfester Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2022, e202207998
How can vines be protected from the disease "Esca"? ZDF has now reported on the project around Frederik Wurm (Department Landfester) in the midday magazine. The report can be viewed in the ZDF Mediathek.
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Frederik Wurm stellt das Projekt „Escape“ vor, in dem es um die Bekämpfung der Weinrebenkrankheit „Esca“ geht. Der Film wurde im Rahmen der 75-Jahr-Feier von Rheinland-Pfalz gedreht.
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Was weiß ich eigentlich schon alles über Kunststoffe? Vieles kennt man aus dem Schulunterricht, noch mehr aus den Medien, oft mit dem Ergebnis: Es gibt zahlreiche verschiedene Kunststoffe, aber warum und mit welchen Funktionen? Schlecht für die Umwelt ist ein Argument, das uns ständig begegnet. Aber weiß ich auch, wann genau Kunststoffe umweltschädigend sind und wann sie ein echter Wertstoff sind?
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Science meets art
The guest commentary by Prof. Katharina Landfester on "Chemistry of colours" at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt is now online.
Prof. Katharina Landfester had a TV show appearance at 3Sat Scobel.
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Seminars and lectures
Microfluidics
Prof. Katharina Landfester joined Sarah Köster (University of Göttingen) and Joachim Rädler (LMU Munich) to present and discuss the many possibilities of microfluidics in the field of biomimetic material sciences. This online event was part of the discussion series organized by the Max Planck School - Matter to Life. Now available on YouTube.
