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Covestro CTO Klaus Schäfer is new chairman of DECHEMA

Dr. Klaus Schäfer, Chief Technology Officer of Covestro, takes over the chair of DECHEMA from 1 January 2019. At the board meeting on 30 November 2018, he was elected unequivocally into office. Schäfer (on the left) follows Prof. Dr. Rainer Diercks who held the position since 2013.

Dr. Klaus Schäfer has been a Member of the Board of Covestro since 2015 and the company's labor director since 2017. He is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Covestro, responsible for production and technology and all chemical production sites.

"DECHEMA has to offer discussion platforms for the exchange between industry and science, users and technology suppliers, oriented on societal needs", Schäfer said after his election. "The topical portfolio of DECHEMA currently is ideally aligend to this." Schäfer said that sustainability was the most relevant future topic, affecting many other topics such as bioeconomy, energy and raw materials.

At the general meeting, the DECHEMA members elected three new members to the DECHEMA board

• Dipl.-Ing. Steffen Bersch, Member of the Board of GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft, supports the group "Apparatus and Plant Engineering
• Dr. Michael Grund, Head of Business Transformation  at Merck KGaA, represents the group "Chemical Industry/ Biotechnology"
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Marquardt, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Forschungszentrums Jülich and Vice President of the Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft, was elected as representative of the "Science" group

Prof. Dr. Ferdi Schüth, Director at Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim and Vice President of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Dr. Christian Bruch, Member of the Board of Linde AG, and Dr. Jürgen Stebani, CEO of polyMaterials AG, have been re-elected. The members of the board of DECHEMA are elected for three years and represent the groups "Science", "Apparatus and Plant Engineering" and "Chemical Industry/Biotechnology", the most relevant fields of DECHEMA's activities.

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