The statutes of GEFTA allow the attribution of an Honorary membership for outstanding merits in the realisation of the aims of our association. During the last decade, three personalities, being well-known to the thermoanalytical community, received this honour - Professor Hans-Jürgen Seifert from Kassel 9 years ago, Professor Heiko Cammenga from Braunschweig in 2004, and two years ago Professor Volker Krämer from Freiburg.

This year, the GEFTA board decided to appreciate the work of Dr. Wolf-Dieter Emmerich by awarding him the Honorary membership of GEFTA.

As certainly you all know, Dr. Emmerich was the managing director of Netzsch Gerätebau for more than three decades. He is one of the foundators of GEFTA in 1974 and, to some extent, his spiritus rector not only at the early beginning of GEFTA's activities, but over practically all the time of his professional career. He inspired life and engagement of our national scientific association by the quality of his judgement, by the visions he followed, and by his scientific work.

As managing director of a company manufacturing scientific instrumentation he was convinced that a maximum of chances and of influence on the market can be reached by closely relating the design and the development of novel instrumentation concepts with first row researchers from scientific institutes and universities. And he followed this goal since the beginning of his professional life in 1974.

It was always fascinating to see how Dr. Emmerich was able to join a hard business including ups and downs with a permanent publishing activity in reputed scientific journals. This is one of the keys to understand the commercial success of Netzsch Gerätebau, and it illustrates the inspiring input he gave to the scientific life of GEFTA.

For these reasons we acknowledge today the work of Dr. Emmerich by attributing him the Honorary membership of GEFTA. Please, accept my best wishes and congratulations on this occasion.

Mulhouse (France), 19. Juni 2008


On behalf of the GEFTA Board
Michael Feist
GEFTA chairman





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