Living Research By Katrin Althoetmar

The quiet, mid-sized man with the rimless glasses is instantly likeable. It's hard to guess his age but he admits that he is already 43. But what does he mean by "already"? Hong Liu is prone to modesty and looks awkward when a colleague refers to him as "our best". He speaks good German but with a characteristic Asian accent. Having studied mechanics in China, Liu became fascinated by robotics at an early stage in his career. In 1991 he joined the scientific staff at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne where he is currently carrying out research into robotic hands.

Barbara Mayer started out with biology, her weakest subject at school, rather than French and history because of the poor career prospects for teachers. Today she heads up the "Experimental Research - Surgery" department at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich and is the director of SpheroTec GmbH, a promising start-up company carrying out cancer research. When the casually dressed, energetic 46-year old talks about her roles, the enthusiasm for her research is clear.

Foreign scholarships provided a springboard for research

Both Hong Liu and Barbara Mayer carry out research with a clear practical orientation and the results of this research are intended to reach and affect society as a whole. Although applied research has become increasingly popular in recent years, in Germany it is still very much the exception rather than the norm.

So in order to get a more pronounced practical orientation, both researchers opted to go abroad. In 1989 after completing her primary degree in biology, Barbara Mayer took up a postdoctoral position in Toronto thanks to a Canadian scholarship. In her three years there she learned about spheroid technology which uses cultivated cells to produce spherical cell cultures. This is the most important factor in her current activities and is an emerging trend for cancer therapy.

In 1991 Hong Liu was awarded one of the few scholarships offered by the Chinese government to support researchers who wanted to go to Germany. The then 25-year old had just spent seven years at Harbin Institute of Technology in China where he earned a masters degree and had almost finished his PhD. The scholarship allowed him to spend six months at the DLR carrying out research in robotics.

For both researchers, an intercultural dimension continues to play an important role in their work. Barbara Mayer draws on her international contacts to support her research work and acquisitions and Hong Liu plays an important role as linguistic and cultural mediator on Sino-German cooperation projects.