Inaugural lecture by Prof. Dr. Lena Keller
On December 3, 2021, Prof. Dr. Lena Keller will give her inaugural lecture at the Wine Campus Neustadt. She will dedicate her lecture to the topic "Innovative analysis methods in Enology - is the chemistry right?". Prof. Keller took up the newly established professorship in the Department of Enology and Process Technology at Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences at Wine Campus Neustadt in the winter semester 2021/22. The 36-year-old pharmacist, who holds a doctorate, is thus expanding the team of the German-French Master's degree program in Viticulture & Enology.
Prof. Dr. Keller grew up in the Vorderpfalz region and began studying pharmacy at Saarland University after completing her A-levels in Frankenthal. After completing her PhD on "Exploring the Biosynthetic Potential of Cystobacter fuscus - Characterization of New Structures and Studies on their Biosynthesis", she researched new active ingredients from blue-green algae at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (University of California, San Diego, USA) as part of a 2-year research fellowship from the German Research Foundation. She taught there as a guest lecturer, among other things. Most recently, she worked as a scientist at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS).
Prof. Keller's research focused mainly on the isolation and structural elucidation of new bioactive natural products using HPLC-MS and NMR. Programme Director Prof. Dr. Maren Scharfenberger-Schmeer explains: "Prof. Dr. Keller's specialization in the analysis of complex matter is a great enrichment for wine research at the Wine Campus. The metabolomics techniques used in natural product research can be easily transferred to wine analysis."
The Wine Campus Neustadt, the joint scientific institution of the Ludwigshafen, Kaiserslautern and Bingen Universities of Applied Sciences and the Rural Area Service Center (DLR) Rhenish Palatinate, launched the German-French Master's degree course in Viticulture & Enology in 2020. As part of the expanded range of courses, a new professorship is now being established on campus. "We are delighted that the new colleague completes our team. We can now start the new semester with a full team," says course director Prof. Dr. Maren Scharfenberger-Schmeer.