Prof. Dr Alex J. Plajer, Junior Professor of Macromolecular Chemistry at the University of Bayreuth, has been honoured with the prestigious Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the DFG. The award comes with prize money of €200,000. A total of 156 nominations were submitted to the DFG this year. Ten award recipients were announced yesterday and will be honoured in Berlin on 11 June 2026.
Bavaria’s Minister of Science, Markus Blume, said: “My heartfelt congratulations to Junior Professor Dr. Alex Plajer – and heartfelt congratulations to the University of Bayreuth: it has an outstanding young researcher in its ranks. With his innovative research on sustainable and more recyclable plastics, Alex Plajer is opening up entirely new perspectives for polymer research. Through a clear research profile and innovative questions, he is already shaping his discipline today – and will continue to do so for a long time to come. The Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize is an outstanding personal achievement, a fantastic success for the University of Bayreuth and also a major success for Bavaria as a centre of science. In total, four of the renowned Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prizes will go to the Free State in 2026. This makes it impressively clear: Bavaria is home to talent.”
“Receiving the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize is not only a personal recognition of my research in sustainable polymer chemistry, but also of the exceptional work of my entire team at the University of Bayreuth. Without the team’s dedicated research spirit and the ideal research environment in Bayreuth, our progress in functional materials and inorganic polymer synthesis would not have been possible,” says Plajer.
Plajer joined the University of Bayreuth in 2023 as Junior Professor of Macromolecular Chemistry after his academic career took him through Heidelberg, Cambridge, Oxford and Berlin. He works on sustainable structural polymers and new functional polymer materials whose inorganic components can be more easily removed and ideally also recycled. Plajer and his team have already succeeded in synthesising a novel group of fluorinated polyesters that degrade more quickly than conventional polyesters. In addition, Plajer has developed a blueprint for sustainable plastics with so-called dynamic disulphide bridges, which can open and close under pressure and heat, making the material easier to recycle. Furthermore, Plajer and his team have developed a new class of materials in which water is not – as is usual in chemistry – regarded as a disruptive factor that weakens bonds between molecules, but is instead used as a deliberate chemical design element.
Plajer has already been recognised for his innovative research with various prestigious awards, including the ADUC Prize of the German Chemical Society (GDCh). In March, he was also appointed to the Junge Kolleg of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW), where early-career researchers work on forward-looking questions and benefit from the interdisciplinary and intergenerational exchange within the Academy’s scholarly community. In his research project funded by the Junge Kolleg, Plajer is developing new polymers containing specifically cleavable bonds to produce materials that can be repaired, deliberately broken down, or recycled. Membership of the Junge Kolleg comes with an annual stipend of €12,000.
These recent achievements highlight the strong momentum of Plajer’s research and his role as a driving force in sustainable materials science. The awards emphasise the strength of the University of Bayreuth’s polymer science focus and the excellent conditions it provides for early-career researchers.
