- sponsored by the Walter Kölle Foundation -

The Wasserchemische Gesellschaft of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) has awarded the Water Chemistry PhD Prize once a year since 1992. The prize recognises outstanding dissertations that have made important contributions to the further development of a water chemistry topic and have been awarded an overall grade of very good or better. The award comes with an award certificate and prize money of 1500 euros from the Walter-Kölle-Stiftung. The award ceremony traditionally takes place during the annual conference WASSER of the Water Chemistry Society. A prize committee appointed by the division's executive committee decides on the awarding of the prize.

The prize has not yet been announced.

Submission deadline: 31 October 2025

Objective
The Water Chemistry Division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) awards the Water Chemistry Doctoral Prize - sponsored by the Walter Kölle Foundation once a year in recognition of an outstanding dissertation that makes an important contribution to the further development of a water chemistry topic.

The prize
The award comes with a certificate and prize money of 1500 euros from the Walter-Kölle-Stiftung. The prize will be awarded on the occasion of the annual conference WATER 2026, which will take place in Kiel from 11-13 May 2026. The award winner will be invited to present the prize-winning work in a scientific lecture at the conference. The costs of attending the conference will be borne by the specialist group. The awarding of the prize is decided on by a prize committee appointed by the departmental committee.

Nomination
Nominations are usually made by the academic supervisor; self-nominations are expressly excluded. The doctorate was completed after 1 November 2023 and before 31 October 2025 (examination date). The dissertation was awarded an overall grade of very good or better All nominations include the following documents:

• Nomination letter from the academic supervisor
• At least one additional reference (preferably doctoral reports and grades of the reviews)
• Summary of the dissertation (max. 3 pages)
• PhD certificate
• Complete dissertation
• Publications relevant to the dissertation
• Short CV in table form including contact details (email address) and list of publications, patents and conference papers

Submission
Please send your proposal by e-mail and summarised in a PDF file to the GDCh office for the attention of Maike Fries.

The Water Chemistry PhD Prize was awarded on 26 May 2025 on the occasion of WASSER 2025 in Münster to Dr Jonathan Zweigle

"[...] in recognition of his outstanding dissertation, written in the working group of Prof. Dr. Christian Zwiener at the University of Tübingen with the title "Characterisation and Identification of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in the Environment and Consumer Products via High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry and Oxidative Conversion". As part of his dissertation, Dr Zweigle made significant progress in the development of analytical screening methods using high-resolution mass spectrometry and the identification of PFAS in products and environmental samples. The approaches developed by Dr Zweigle were implemented in the open-source tool "PF∆Screen", which offers the scientific community a PFAS-optimised workflow for data evaluation of HRMS data. In addition, Dr. Zweigle successfully further developed the PFAS sum parameter TOP assay in PhotoTOP, which not only circumvented problems of the TOP assay, but also characterised fluorinated side chain polymers in solid samples."