Lisa Mailänder earned her bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in chemistry from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Germany. She started at Goodyear Dunlop as a staff engineer working on tire compound development.
"I thought it was very interesting to be part of the development of a product which everyone of us uses almost every day," she said. "On the surface, a tire is a round and black thing, but on the inside, it is a high-tech product with many layers and responsible for the safety of people as it is the only contact point of a car to the road. I enjoyed [being] part of cross-functional teams which made the tire development possible."
Mailänder is now the product development manager for engineering thermoplastics at Teknor Apex in Germany. Her team develops and optimizes new products in the field of ETP, hard-soft combinations and new technologies.
"We use mostly polyamide as base resin but [are] enlarging our portfolio also to others such as PBT [polybutylene terephthalate], PP and blends," she said. "We develop these materials on lab scale and then transfer these products to production scale in cooperation with our production team."
She also evaluates new raw materials and optimizes compound properties and processing.
"To investigate the properties of the compounds, I analyze test results from physical and chemical test methods," she said. "While my direct colleagues are currently working more on projects for customers, I am mainly working on more fundamental projects that should lead to completely new, innovative products and with which we want to open up new markets."
Mailänder said she enjoys her job in research and development: "It brings new technical challenges every day, which we try to solve. It never gets boring and keeps the mind fresh."
Mailänder holds several patents and has 10 published articles in academic papers. She was named the chemistry faculty award winner for best Ph.D. thesis in 2016.
When she was a member of a research training group during her doctorate, one of the supervising professors gave Mailänder's team this advice: "Ask questions. In my opinion, it is important to learn to ask the right questions in a technical environment."
Mailänder said she agrees with that advice.
"It takes practice and effort to do this. But since then, I always make up my mind to ask if something is unclear to me or if I want to know more about something," she said. "It helps me to deepen my understanding and often helps others who may not dare to ask the same question at that moment."