2026 Archimedes Science Award goes to hydrogen pioneer Prof. Peter Wasserscheid

Prof. Peter Wasserscheid is this year’s winner of the Archimedes Science Award presented by the Free State of Saxony and DRESDEN-concept e.V. (DDc). Prof. Wasserscheid is Professor of Chemical Reaction Engineering at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) and Director of the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nuremberg for Renewable Energy (IET-2) and the Institute for a Sustainable Hydrogen Economy (IHE-3), both of which are part of Forschungszentrum Jülich. The award ceremony will take place on September 9, 2026, in Dresden as part of this year’s “Building Bridges” conference.

The decision in favor of Prof. Wasserscheid was made by an exceptionally high-caliber jury comprising the heads of the four major German non-university research organizations (Helmholtz Association, Max Planck Society, Fraunhofer Society, and Leibniz Association), the president of the German Rectors’ Conference, and, representing the DDc Executive Board, Prof. Ursula M. Staudinger, rector of TUD, and Prof. Sebastian M. Schmidt, scientific director of the Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR).