Ghanaian scientist based in Germany, Dr Henry Reynolds Nana Benyin Enninful, has won the prestigious Walter Benjamin Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

Initiated in July 2019, the Walter Benjamin Programme enables early career researchers with outstanding qualifications to pursue their own research project at a German research institution of their choice – and also researchers integrated into the German research system the opportunity to go abroad with the host institutions providing support for the project.

The programme’s objective is to provide the path towards an increasingly independent research career and autonomy for qualified postdoctoral researchers. Consequently, it aims at fostering the mobility and thematic development of the fellows, which are crucial in this career phase.

The program funds direct project costs for up to two years and, where applicable, additional publication costs in book format.

For the next two years, Dr Enninful will combine different experimental techniques to investigate fundamental insights into ion dynamics in supercapacitors to provide a basis for tailored supercapacitor material synthesis and development for combined high power and energy densities.

Supercapacitors are energy storage devices with a capacitance value much higher than other capacitors but with lower voltage limits.

They are used in applications that require many rapid charge/discharge cycles, rather than long-term compact energy storage — in automobiles, buses, trains, cranes and elevators.

This promising and innovative work will be carried out at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Universität Leipzig and Cambridge University.

Dr Enninful obtained a PhD from the Faculty of Physics and Earth Sciences, Universität Leipzig, Germany in October 2022.

For his dissertation on “Advanced Kernel-Based NMR Cryoporometry Characterization of Mesoporous Solids”, he developed a new approach to the NMR Cryoporometry technique for characterizing mesoporous materials which resulted in five first-author papers and one under preparation.

Nana Benyin has also obtained an MSc. Petroleum Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy and a BSc in Aerospace Engineering from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana.

He is an old student of the Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School, Legon. 

Dr Enninful has published in many high-quality journals and presented his work at many international conferences.

His work has been recognised with many prizes and awards including the Heraeus-Stiftung Fellowship, Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting Participation and the Eni Project Scholarship, among others.