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Analytik Jena and Fresenius University of Applied Sciences Open the Rhein-Main Application Center
Idstein/Jena, November 3, 2016 — Analytik Jena AG and the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences celebrated the opening of the Rhein-Main Application Center. Customers, students, and members of the press were on hand to inaugurate the center at the university’s campus in the Hessian town of Idstein, Germany. The high-end lab houses ultra-modern equipment that can analyze water, environmental factors, food, and pharmaceuticals. The measurement instruments on loan to the university from Analytik Jena are valued at over EUR 0.5 million. Thanks to its laboratory space, the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences now is one of the best-equipped institutions of higher education in all of Germany. University and vocational students are superbly prepared for all the facets of analytical chemists’ daily work, and future research will benefit from the high degree of miniaturization and automation this lab equipment possesses.
The lab accomplishes an important goal for Analytik Jena, as well. It gives the measurement-technology manufacturer a centralized application center so the Company can demonstrate its innovative equipment technology and applications to customers from the Rhineland, the Rhine-Main area, or Baden-Württemberg. “We have a lot of quite important customers in the economic region around Frankfurt am Main. So the next logical step for us was to make sure we were represented in this area with our own laboratory and application area. This helps us meet our customers’ needs for consulting, seminars, and continuing professional development quickly and efficiently. This cooperation with the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences positions us well. We can now rely on an existing and excellent infrastructure while at the same time we are supporting the education of the next generation of analytical chemists,” says Ulrich Krauss, Chief Executive Officer of Analytik Jena AG.
“These days we can carry out measurements using only minuscule amounts of a substance,” says Thomas Knepper, Vice President of the Chemistry and Biology Department at the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences. He elaborates with an example from the university’s history. “What the university’s founder, Carl Remigius Fresenius, needed 40 liters of water transported by coach to analyze can be assessed today in a single milliliter.” All imaginable substances can be broken down into up to 65 individual components, in a high-speed process. Result validation has reached a new level. “We are able to be much more certain in our analyses than we were even just a few years ago,” Knepper explains.
The application possibilities in the new lab are extensive. University students, vocational students, and researchers can, for example, determine the concentration of metal ions or the degree of organic impurities in surface water. There are also many important application uses for food analysis and chemical forensics, for example, examining the metal ion concentration in tissue or blood. With the application center, Fresenius University of Applied Sciences is continuing to expand a key focus of its expertise in chemistry and biology, an area where it has already made a name for itself.
As part of the inaugural ceremony for the center, the division of analytical chemistry of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh – German Chemical Society) presented a graduation award in honor of excellent accomplishments of young scientists. Dr. Heike Gleisner, member of the board at the GDCh, presented the award to this year’s recipients, Mr. Marco Wietzoreck (B.Sc.) and Mr. Jonas Bär (M.Sc.).
