Clear-cut ideas

Tanja Zimmermann joined Empa's Board of Directors in September. She runs the new Functional Materials department - another step up in a successful career that began in Empa's Wood lab. Thanks to her inquisitiveness, creativity and an eye for the impossible, Zimmermann helped lift a previously little-known research field onto the international stage - "Creativity is a basic requirement in research." Tanja Zimmermann is speaking from experience. Born in Hamburg, she used creative ideas to rehabilitate a research field at Empa. Until only a few years ago, wood was not exactly a fashionable research field - and not just at Empa, either. According to Zimmermann, the general consensus was that everything that you would possibly want to know about wood had already been investigated. As a newly appointed head of the corresponding research lab in 2011, one of her first tasks was thus to convince Empa's Board of Directors of the contrary - and she succeeded compellingly, as a glance at her team's publication list reveals.