Prof. Dr. Stefanie Dehnen and Prof. Dr. med. Dr. h.c. Matthias H. Tschöp are honoured with the presti­gious award

By award­ing the Hector Science Award to Prof. Dr. Stefanie Dehnen and Prof. Dr. med. Dr. h.c. Matthias H. Tschöp, the Hector Founda­tion II honours the two scien­tists' outstand­ing research in the fields of inorganic chemistry and mater­ial research as well as diabetes and obesity research. The prize is endowed with 150,000 euros each.

Stefanie Dehnen is Manag­ing Direc­tor of the Insti­tute of Nanotech­nol­ogy and Profes­sor of Infor­ma­tion-based Mater­ial Design and Nanoscience and Inorganic Chemistry at the Karlsruhe Insti­tute of Technol­ogy (KIT). As an expert for highly innov­a­tive, extremely sophis­ti­cated, and also sustain­able inorganic and organoele­ment synthe­sis, she has made signif­i­cant contri­bu­tions to the chemistry of cluster compounds and their creative exten­sions to mater­ial science. Clusters can help to solve future problems regard­ing energy trans­fer or storage and sustain­able synthe­sis, but given their atomi­cally-precise nature, they also serve to eluci­date relevant funda­men­tal knowl­edge of chemi­cal bonding and reactiv­ity. The under­stand­ing of both is criti­cal to a sustain­able design of innov­a­tive functional materi­als for future applications.

Matthias Tschöp is the Chief Execu­tive Officer and Scien­tific Direc­tor of Helmholtz Munich, Alexan­der von Humboldt Profes­sor at the Techni­cal Univer­sity of Munich and Adjunct Profes­sor at Yale Univer­sity. He has made pioneer­ing discov­er­ies in the diabetes and obesity research fields. His achieve­ments include the discov­ery of the hunger hormone ghrelin as well as the discov­ery of gut hormone polyag­o­nists, a group of active agents that can signif­i­cantly improve weight reduc­tion in obesity as well as blood sugar control in type 2 diabetes. With the drug tirzepatide (Mounjaro) from Lilly, the first version of the polyag­o­nist drug class has been approved in the USA since May 2022.

The execu­tive board of the Hector Founda­tion and previ­ous award winners met at the "Europäis­cher Hof" in Heidel­berg for the award ceremony on Friday, January 24, 2025. Founder Dr. h.c. Hans-Werner Hector welcomed the two new awardees to the circle of now 32 Hector Fellows, who are jointly commit­ted to inter­dis­ci­pli­nary cutting-edge research in Germany.