On December 3, 2021, Prof. Dr. Lena Keller held her inaugural lecture at the Neustadt Wine Campus. She dedicated her lecture to the topic "Innovative analytical methods in oenology - Is the chemistry right?". Prof. Keller took up the newly established professorship in the Department of Oenology and Process Technology at Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences at the Neustadt Wine Campus in the winter semester of 2021/22. The 36-year-old pharmacist with a doctorate is thus expanding the team of the German-French master's program in viticulture & Oenology.
Prof. Dr. Keller grew up in the Vorderpfalz region of Germany and began studying pharmacy at Saarland University after graduating from high school in Frankenthal. After her doctoral thesis on "Exploring the Biosynthetic Potential of Cystobacter fuscus - Characterization of New Structures and Studies on their Biosynthesis", she researched new active substances 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. There she taught, among other things, as a guest lecturer. Most recently, she worked as a scientist at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS).
In her research, Prof. Keller was mainly involved in the isolation and structural elucidation of new bioactive natural products using HPLC-MS and NMR. Program director Prof. Dr. Maren Scharfenberger-Schmeer explains, "Prof. Dr. Keller's specialization in the analysis of complex matter is a great asset for wine research at the Weincampus. The metabolomics techniques of natural product research can be transferred well to wine analytics."
The Weincampus Neustadt, the joint scientific institution of the universities of Ludwigshafen, Kaiserslautern and Bingen and the DLR Rheinpfalz, has launched the German-French master's degree program in viticulture & Oenologie in 2020. A new professorship is now being established at the campus as part of the expanded course offering. "We are pleased that the new colleague completes our team. This means that we can now start the new semester with a full complement of staff," says program director Prof. Dr. Maren Scharfenberger-Schmeer.
