ORCHEM Prize 2024 awarded to Malte Gersch
 

The ORCHEM Prize 2024 of the Liebig Association for Organic Chemistry of the GDCh was awarded to Malte Gersch in Regensburg

Every two years, the Liebig Association for Organic Chemistry within the German Chemical Society awards the ORCHEM Prize to young scientists who have done groundbreaking work in the field of organic chemistry. This year, Malte Gersch (TU Dortmund/MPI Dortmund) and Golo Storch (TU Munich) were honoured. The prize was awarded to Malte Gersch in recognition of his fundamental and pioneering work on the investigation of proteolytic enzymes of the ubiquitin system. The award was presented at this year's ORCHEM conference in Regensburg.

Malte Gersch is a chemical biologist and heads an independent research group at the Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at TU Dortmund University and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology. He studied chemistry and biochemistry at LMU Munich and, after a stay abroad at Stanford University, completed his doctorate with distinction at TU Munich in 2013 under Prof Dr Stephan A. Sieber. After a post-doc in the group of Dr David Komander in the Department of Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry at the MRC LMB in Cambridge, UK, he came to Dortmund, where his research has been funded by the Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation since 2019. His group combines methods from chemical biology, protein chemistry, mass spectrometry and structural biology to elucidate mechanisms of the ubiquitin system. The award particularly recognises innovative contributions in the field of bioactive electrophiles as molecular probes for deubiquitinases (DUBs). His research has previously been honoured with the Friedrich Weygand Prize, the Hans Fischer Prize and the BioMedicine Prize.

The ORCHEM prize

Every two years, the Liebig Association for Organic Chemistry in the Society of German Chemists awards the ORCHEM Prize for young scientists who have qualified through new, original and pioneering scientific work in the field of organic chemistry and who do not yet hold a leading position or have only recently been appointed.

The prize is endowed with EUR 5000 and is supported by BASF. It is usually awarded to two people and includes an award certificate and prize money of € 2,500.00 per person. 

The ORCHEM prize is traditionally awarded at the ORCHEM conference. The prize winners present the results of their honoured work in a lecture.