SFB 1313 postdoctoral researcher Felix Weinhardt receives Humboldt Research Fellowship

Our SFB 1313 postdoctoral researcher Felix Weinhardt receives a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship for Postdocs from the Humboldt Foundation. Congratulations for this huge success!

In this context, he will be staying at the Center for Biofilm Engineering of the Montana State University (USA) from April to September 2025 for a research stay of six months. He will be hosted by Joseph Seymour, SFB 1313 external partner Robin Gerlach, and Stephan Warnat. He will be working on the research project "Quantifying and controlling the motility of ureolytic bacteria for engineering applications of biomineralization".

About the Research Project

Microbially Induced Calcium Carbonate Precipitation (MICP) has been proven to be useful for various engineering applications ranging from generating building materials, sealing cracks in the subsurface, or strengthening soils. It relies on the hydrolysis of urea, catalyzed by the enzyme urease, and the subsequent precipitation of calcium carbonate. The bacterium S. pasteurii is extensively employed for MICP application due to its high urease content and, thus, ureolytic activity. Particularly in the realm of producing construction materials, MICP poses challenges concerning the precise location of the precipitating calcium carbonate which directly impacts the strength of the resulting material. As the bacteria not only contain the enzyme urease but additionally act as nucleation sites for the subsequent precipitation process, their spatial distribution is crucial for the successful implementation of MICP. This project aims to quantify the motility of the ureolytic bacterium S. pasteurii and identify strategies to control the spatial distribution of the bacteria.

Felix Weinhardt joined SFB 1313 in October 2018. Since then, he has supported us extremely competently first as a doctoral student and later as a postdoc in the framework of the SFB research projects “C04: Pore-scale and REV-scale approaches to biological and chemical pore-space alteration in porous media” and “B05: Hydromechanics of fractures and fracture networks: A combined numerical multi-scale and experimental investigation”. Unfortunately, he will leave our team at the end of August 2024 in order to join the Department of Technical Biogeochemistry at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig as a postdoc with the goal of establishing a research group. We thank Felix for the very pleasant and fruitful collaboration over the past six years. For the future we wish him continued enjoyment and success in his new job in Leipzig!