On 23 September 2026, we were pleased to welcome Lene Lange for the 37th BioSC Lecture at Forschungszentrum Jülich. She provided an insightful overview of how the resilience of crops and entire agricultural ecosystems can be improved in the face of rapid environmental changes. Her work spanned a wide range of topics, in particular plant breeding, plant protection, soil improvement, and functional analyses of entire microbiomes, such as those found in soil.

North Rhine-Westphalia’s new bioeconomy strategy emphasizes research and development as a source of innovation for a circular and bio-based economy. NRW has huge potential for implementing the bioeconomy. The strategy highlights the opportunities in individual sectors but places particular emphasis on the role of systemic development. Research aimed at establishing the bioeconomy as a system is the founding mission of BioSC and is now finding a lasting echo in the state government’s strategy.

Alexander Dreier, Oscar Pochhammer, and Jan Kietzmann are the winners of this year’s “Meet the Circular Economy” Innovation Challenge. They convinced the jury with a concept for recycling foam mattresses for the company Covestro.

On July 2, speakers from the fields of research and industry gathered to discuss how artificial intelligence, autonomous robotics, and nature-inspired biopesticides are turning sustainable agriculture from a vision of the future into a reality.

A productive and exciting day on recent developments in green chemistry research and application – that was the 11th BioSC Spotlight, which took place as a satellite event to the Fuel and Chemical Science Conference 2026.

For the fifth year in a row, the lecture series “Meet the Circular Economy,” led by Prof. Dr. Sandra Venghaus, takes place at RWTH Aachen University during the 2026 summer semester. At the first session, Dr. Stefanie Eiden of Covestro and Wolfgang Köster of WEPA presented their companies’ concepts for the circular use of polymers respectively paper and pulp fibers.