Newly elected President of the Max Planck Society visits Ploen

Patrick Cramer, newly elected President of the Max Planck Society (MPG), introduced himself to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (MPI) in Ploen.

It is already the 48 institute that Patrick Cramer visited on 14 December 2022 and since his election as the new President of the Max Planck Society. Katja Ketterle, Head of the Department for Institutes at the MPG, was also present. She is largely responsible for bringing the concerns of the individual institutes to the MPG's general administration. It was a sunny winter's day that greeted the MPG representatives on their arrival in Ploen, the home of Germany's northernmost Max Planck Institute and the only one in Schleswig-Holstein.

After a brief welcome by the Managing Director of the MPI for Evolutionary Biology, Paul Rainey, Patrick Cramer and Katja Ketterle took the opportunity to introduce themselves personally to the employees of the MPI in Ploen in a staff meeting. Patrick Cramer gave an outlook on his personal vision of the future of the Max Planck Society. It is a positive outlook, albeit with one or two known stumbling blocks to be cleared out of the way. But his vision is clear: "Our task is to create new knowledge with the help of the best scientists and to be pioneers for the future. All employees of the Max Planck Society contribute their individual part to this, and each and every one of them is important for this," Cramer expressly emphasised. "We wish Patrick Cramer all the best for his work as the new President of the Max Planck Society and look forward to working with him in the future," concluded Paul Rainey.

Afterwards, the representatives took the opportunity to get a personal impression of the work of the Max Planck Institute in Ploen and its employees in individual meetings with representatives of the PhD students and postdocs, with some of the research group leaders, but also with the administrative management and the directors.

"We have been cooperating very successfully with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in numerous research alliances for many years," says Prof. Dr. Simone Fulda, President of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. "I am pleased that we can now structurally strengthen our cooperation even further with the joint appointment as part of the filling of a 4th director's post at MPI Ploen."