Welcome everybody, my name is Nicolas Vogel from the Department of Chemical and Biological

Engineering and what I want to tell you today is why you should study advanced materials

and processes.

So this is our international and interdisciplinary program that is jointly hosted by the Department

of Chemical and Biological Engineering and also the Department of Materials Science.

So all of you of course know that materials are important.

You see this pretty much every day if you wear functional outdoor clothes that are very

lightweight and still very functional, keep rain from you and so on.

Or if you use non-stick frying pans, where you can make your fried egg without having

to scratch it off the pan or if you compare the very old wooden records that Boris Becker

used to win Wimbledon to a tennis racket that you can nowadays buy in a supermarket or a

sports shop.

But what is maybe less intuitive is that materials are also enabling technologies and what this

means can be seen here.

So without a semiconductor you cannot have a computer chip and without a computer chip

you cannot have a smartphone or the internet or any of our digital societies that we live

on.

Listen to what I'm saying right now.

Without composite materials you cannot build lightweight and without lightweight materials

you cannot build these huge wind turbines that you need to produce renewable energies.

And without biocompatible polymer materials you cannot do 3D printing of these materials

and you cannot implant personalized medical devices or implant materials and therefore

really help people with a personalized approach to medicine.

So these enabling aspects of materials are often in a sense underappreciated.

And now as you've seen materials have been and in my opinion will be at the very basis

of a lot of innovations that are required to solve global challenges that we have faced

and that we are facing in this century.

And maybe to state the obvious but materials do not appear from nowhere.

It requires process technologies and typically if they are complex advanced process technologies

to really make such tailored materials.

So an obvious question is if these things are interconnected why should material science

and engineering and process engineering be taught as separate disciplines?

And fact is that is what we are doing nowadays.

Now this is where MAP comes into play.

MAP is a unique interdisciplinary combination of these two worlds.

So this study program directly connects material science and engineering and chemical and biological

engineering.

And why this is important is that you can then connect a process with a certain structure

that's the typical realm of chemical engineers and the structure with a resulting property

which is the realm of material science and engineering.

And once you have this entire process chain you can really tailor your property of the

material right from the choice of the process.

And this is key to develop advanced and complex materials.

So how does this work?

Here you see the MAP study program and this is composed of a range of different things

here especially these four pillars.

So these four pillars are our focus subjects that are at the heart of the MAP course.

And in order to reach these pillars first you will get fundamental lectures in an individually

tailored curriculum and this curriculum is based on your bachelor's background.

So if you're a material scientist you will learn basics or fundamentals in chemical engineering.