Pittcon Heritage Award

Instrumentation dramatically transformed the power, pace, and impact of scientific research. New questions could be asked and answered. Research that once took years could be done in days. The Pittcon Heritage Award honors those visionaries whose entrepreneurial careers shaped the instrumentation and laboratory supplies community and by doing so have transformed the scientific community at large.

The award has been presented jointly with Pittcon since 2002 and is given out each year at a special ceremony during the Pittcon Conference and Expo. The recipient’s name and achievements are added to the Pittcon Hall of Fame, which conference attendees can visit at the show each year. The 2025 award was presented at the conference held March 1–5 in Boston.

2026 Awardee: Alexandra Knauer

Alexandra Knauer is the CEO and owner of the Berlin-based scientific instruments manufacturer KNAUER Wissenschaftliche Geräte GmbH. She led the transformation of a venerable instrument company into new markets after the end of communism, and has recently overseen the development of novel instruments vital for producing mRNA vaccines. Knauer has been committed to supporting women’s success in typically male professions, eliminating the gender pay gap at her own company while mentoring future leaders. 

Knauer’s parents Herbert and Roswitha Knauer founded the KNAUER scientific instrument company in West Berlin in 1962, building a business that specialized in selling osmometers across the borders between the capitalist and communist worlds. The end of communism left many bills unpaid as Eastern European enterprises struggled to transition to a free market economy. Alexandra Knauer used her education in business administration to reorient the firm. She became general manager of KNAUER in 1995 and took over ownership from her parents in 2000. By 2020, the company had almost doubled in size. 

During the 1990s, KNAUER entered the fields of preparative high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and simulated moving bed chromatography. Knauer oversaw the company’s work in HPLC equipment as an Original Equipment Manufacturer, as well as a firm that could sell complete system solutions for analytical tasks. One of KNAUER’s key recent innovations is impingement jets mixing technology, crucial to COVID vaccine production. During the pandemic, KNAUER helped ramp up production of corona virus vaccines by developing novel production equipment for encapsulating mRNA into lipid nanoparticles. 

Knauer has been recognized as a role model female entrepreneur by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy. She participates in the Berlin entrepreneurship network “Connecting Women” and organizes her company’s annual “Girls Day” to help girls see themselves working in technology companies. In October 2023, Knauer was awarded the Order of Merit by the State of Berlin for her exceptional contributions to the city, recognizing both the success of her company and her work as a socially conscious entrepreneur.

Previous Winners of the Pittcon Heritage Award

Pittcon Hall of Fame Inductees

All winners of the Pittcon Heritage Award are inducted into the Pittcon Hall of Fame. There they join the members of the special introductory class of instrumentation pioneers:

The Science History Institute thanks the American Chemical Society, which granted permission to adapt the biographical information for these web pages, and Declan O’Reilly, former Charles Price Fellow in Polymer Chemistry at the Institute, for his contributions.

The Institute gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation for this undertaking and thanks the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy for giving us the opportunity to be a partner in maintaining the Pittcon Hall of Fame.

About Pittcon

Pittcon is the largest and most inclusive conference and exposition on laboratory science and instrumentation in the world. The annual event brings together more than 30,000 conferees and exhibitors from more than 70 countries.