Chemical scientist Emad Flear Aziz Bekhit is convinced: " I would not have been able to make a career in Germany without the DAAD." Born in Cairo in 1978, the Egyptian had originally given no thought at all to studying in Germany, but would rather have gone to the United States. A DAAD scholarship led to his change of mind. While studying in his Bachelor's programme at the University of Cairo, he came to Berlin twice in 1999 for research stays of several months at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing. Just as for all scholarship holders, the DAAD invited him to regular meetings. "The internationality and openness of these meetings really left a deep impression on me," says Emad Aziz.

He liked it so much in Germany that he decided in 2001 to do his Master's degree at the FU Berlin. He subsequently did the research for his doctorate at BESSY – the Berlin Electron Storage Ring Society for Synchrotron Radiation in Adlershof, today the Helmholtz-Centre Berlin for Materials and Energy (HZB). Emad Aziz received two awards for the doctoral dissertation that he completed in 2008, namely the Dissertationspreis Adlershof and the Ernst-Eckard-Koch-Prize. In the course of his work, he developed an experimental chamber, the so-called "Liquidrome". This made it possible for the very first time to do spectroscopic examinations of materials in an aqueous solution. His work included a study into the oxygen uptake in haemoglobin, the substance that makes blood red. His results could be of significance to drug addiction therapy, but also for completely different subjects, such as solar cell research. The new opportunities provided by spectroscopy, however, also served to attract some international researchers to the HZB. Furthermore, Emad Aziz was invited to the University of Berkeley, California, to establish his technique there.

In the mean time, the chemical scientist is in charge of his own research group at the HZB and occasionally also works at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. "However, Berlin has become my real home," says Emad Aziz, who has meanwhile even applied for German citizenship.