02/10/2021 - News en

Hahn-Schickard appoints Professor Boris Mizaikoff as new Institute Director

Strategic cooperation with Ulm University planned

The research and development service provider added a fourth location in Ulm in 2020 to the already existing three institutes in Stuttgart, Villingen-Schwenningen and Freiburg. Together, the Freiburg and Ulm sites form the Hahn-Schickard Institute for Microanalysis Systems. Professor Boris Mizaikoff, who has headed the Institute of Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry at Ulm University since 2007, now joins the Hahn-Schickard Institute leadership with Professors Alfons Dehé, Yiannos Manoli, Felix von Stetten, Roland Zengerle and André Zimmermann. Mizaikoff will retain his professorship in Ulm and, together with Roland Zengerle, professor at the University of Freiburg, will serve as part-time director of the Hahn-Schickard Institute.

“I am delighted to become part of Hahn-Schickard and am eager to continue the success story of the past years. In particular, I aim to establish a close strategic cooperation with Ulm University based on the Freiburg model,” says Boris Mizaikoff. He brings his long-standing research interests in the fields of photonics in liquids and gases as well as biomimetic receptors to the Hahn-Schickard portfolio. Examples of his research include mobile analysis systems for respiratory gas diagnostics based on infrared spectroscopy and quantum cascade lasers. Typical fields of application for such research can be found in medicine, but there are also plans to apply this technology in biotechnology, environmental analysis or agriculture. Mizaikoff, 55, was born in Vienna and is a passionate long-distance runner. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of renowned scientific journals and holds visiting professorships at the universities in Tromsø, Norway, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

“Today, innovation emerges when disciplines intersect,” emphasizes Professor Zengerle, spokesman for the Hahn-Schickard Institute management team. “It is enormously important for us to have excellent connections to basic research at state universities in order to implement this efficiently. Further, it is essential that the team of Hahn-Schickard Institute directors represent key competencies. We look forward to achieving better visibility for companies in the Ulm region, as well as establishing close cooperation with the University of Ulm.”

In addition to the changes effective Jan. 1, 2021, other appointments to key positions at Hahn-Schickard are also on the horizon: a Hahn-Schickard-funded appointment to the professorship for Intelligent Embedded Systems at the University of Freiburg is expected to strengthen research expertise in the field of computer science at the institute in Villingen-Schwenningen. When the six-member team of collegial Hahn-Schickard institute directors expands to seven people, it will be able to live up even more strongly to its own claim as a driver of innovation in the promising research fields worked on by Hahn-Schickard. In addition, Hahn-Schickard maintains close ties with the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, in particular with the professorship of Axel Sikora, who is involved as Deputy Institute Director in Villingen-Schwenningen.

Hahn-Schickard recently exceeded 250 employees. One of several growth drivers is the Hahn-Schickard Institute for Microanalysis Systems, which was only founded in Freiburg in 2016 and currently has around 90 employees. In close strategic cooperation with the University of Freiburg and the joint spin-offs BioFluidix (2005), Cytena (2014), Spindiag (2016) and Actome (2018) and Dermagnostix (2020), this institute forms the core of Freiburg's high-tech network. It comprises more than 200 application-oriented research scientists in the fields of point-of-care diagnostics (rapid diagnostics in patients' homes), lab-on-a-chip, microfluidics and 3D bioprinting (tissue engineering).