Four RWTH Researchers Among the Most Widely Cited Scholars Worldwide

Four RWTH Aachen professors have been added to the list of Highly Cited Researchers 2017.

 

The list documents which scholars are most often cited in their disciplines. Citations serve as an idicator of the importance of a publication and the quality of the work. RWTH professors Joos van Dongen, Magnus Rueping, Karl Zilles and Björn Usadel have made it into the ranking. Rueping, Zilles and Usadel have already been included in the list of the most influential researchers in the past; this is the first time for biologist von Dongen. A total of 3,400 researchers in 21 scientific disciplines are ranked.

Joost van Dongen supervises the research group Molecular Ecology of the Rhizosphere. He researches how plants perceive their environment and how they implement this information in biochemical and physiological answers. Van Dongen, born in 1973, studied biology at the Universities of Utrecht and Wageningen. Before accepting the appointment at RWTH in May 2013, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam. "Being incuded in the ranking is a recognition of our work. It confirms the international interest in our research at RWTH," says van Dongen.

Magnus Rueping became Chair of Organic Chemistry III in 2009. He studied at TU Berlin and completed his doctorate at ETH Zürich in 2002. Afterwards he was a researcher at Harvard University until 2004, when he was appointed professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main – without a Habilitation. The 44-year-old has already received numerous awards, including two from the European Research Council: first the ERC Starting Grant and later the ERS Consolidator Grand. The European Union provided Rueping with almost three million euros for his research.

Björn Usadel is Chair of Botany. The 42-year-old researches the construction of plant cell walls as a renewable resource and the development and application of bioinformatic methods in plant research. Usadel studied biochemistry at the Free University of Berlin and earned his doctorate at the University of Potsdam. After working in various positions at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam he took up the RWTH chair in September 2011.

Since 2012, Karl Zilles has been JARA-BRAIN Senior Professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at RWTH Aachen University Hospital. His research activities at RWTH Aachen and Forschungszentrum Jülich are centered on the structural, molecular, and functional organization of the mouse, rat, non-human primate and human cerebral cortex. Zilles studied at the University of Tübingen and at Goethe University Frankfurt, and he obtained his post-doctoral lecturing qualification from Hannover Medical School. Before becoming director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at Forschungszentrum Jülich in 1998, he has held leading positions at the universities of Kiel, Cologne, and Düsseldorf.

Source: Press and Communications