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Ilia Platzman will receive this year’s Günter Petzow Award from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. He will be honored for the exploration of the capacity of microfluidic techniques and material sciences in synthetic biology.
These new findings could contribute to the creation of biological systems like synthetic cells and allow very realistic mimicry of the cellular environment, which has a significant influence on cell development and regulation. One specific example is to technically imitate the fundamental functional properties of cells of the immune system, specifically T-cells, in order to program these cells to combat diseases like cancer.
Ilia Platzman studied at the Technion –Israel Institute of Technology. Since 2010, he has been conducting his research as a senior postdoctoral fellow in the Department of New Materials and Biosystems at the Stuttgart location of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Department of Biophysical Chemistry of the University of Heidelberg under the direction of Professor Joachim P. Spatz. In 2011, Ilia Platzman was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
Since 2006, the Stuttgart location of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems annually awards the Günter Petzow Prize to a young scientist from the institute for outstanding research in the field of material sciences. The prize is sponsored by the Robert Bosch GmbH and is presented every year at the Günter Petzow colloquium, the institute’s scientific colloquium. Professor Günter Petzow was director at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research (the predecessor of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems) between 1973 and 1994.
The Günter Petzow Colloquium and the award ceremony will take place on Friday, July 25th. It will start off with coffee at 12.30 pm, the talks, which will mostly be held in German, commence at 1 pm. More information can be found on the Institute’s homepage (www.is.mpg.de)