Plant researcher honoured

Lothar Willmitzer, a plant scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, has won this year’s Science Prize from the Stifterverband.

In a press release on 16 June, the Stifterverband, an association of research funders, said that Willmitzer was one of the founding fathers of the research field known as metabolomics, and that he had not only promoted basic research but also founded several companies that had successfully developed the research results.

The primary aim of Willmitzer’s work is to equip crops with improved properties, so that they are, for example, richer in nutrients or deliver higher yields.