On April 26 all over Germany institutions offer young girls the chance to look into jobs and professions often wrongly considered to be "only for men"... On that day, in three tours between 08:30 and 15:30 h, 75 girls can listen to lectures, have a guided tour and hands-on experience in our Institute.

Professor Frank Neese, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry, was appointed as Associate Editor of the journal "Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics".

The new ORCA version 2.9 has been just released. Besides numerous improvements in the existing code few new features have been added.

Still active in his retirement phase: Prof. Clemens von Sonntag, former group leader at the Institute, received the "Excellence in Reviews"-Award of "Environmental Science & Technology" (a publication of the American Chemical Society).

An international team of researchers led by scientists from our Institute has solved an important problem of biological nitrogen chemistry. As they report on November 18 in "Science", they could establish the chemical structure of the active component which in Nature is responsible for the conversion of dinitrogen to ammonia (see attached press release).

A novel complex with three iron atoms as central active site kann split the very stable dinitrogen molecule and, in reaction with dihydrogen, generate ammonia. The substance was sythesized by American colleagues in Rochester and analyzed by Dr. Eckhard Bill from our Institute. Details were published on November 11 in "Science" (see attached press release).

On October 6, 2011, Prof. Silvia Braslavsky, until her retirement in 2007 group leader at our Institute, will receive in Buenos Aires from the Argentinian Minister of Research Dr. Lino Barañao the Raices Award.

Since 2006 Frank Neese held the Chair of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Bonn - and maintained since 2008 as one of the rare "Max Planck Fellows" a small research group at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry. As of July 1, 2011 he was appointed Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and leads as Director a new department for molecular theory and spectroscopy at the Institute.

Dr. Johannes Messinger, group leader at the Institute, has accepted the offer of a full professorship (Chair) in chemistry at the University of Umea in Sweden. He will leave the Institute end of August, but will continue to cooperate with the research groups.