3M-NANO Prize for IMT PhD student Ebrahim TaiediNejad

Around 300 papers and presentations were assessed by the expert jury, and the paper by Ebrahim TaiediNejad, Zongliang Ying, Peer Erfle and Andreas Dietzel on ‘Scalable Production of Monodisperse Lipid Nanoparticles via a Multi-Nozzle LARLM Platform’ was awarded second place in the Graduate Awards in Applied Nanoengineering. The 3M-NANO Conference, which is dedicated to interdisciplinary research topics in nanoscience and engineering, took place this year in Suzhou, PR China.

Ebrahim TaiediNejad and his co-winner received the award for their work from Andre Geim, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, at the prestigious 3M-NANO Conference, which is dedicated to interdisciplinary research topics in nanoscience and engineering. Photo credits: 3M-NANO 2026 Secretariat/IEEE

In their paper, Ebrahim TaiediNejad and his colleagues present their research findings—developed at the Institute of Microtechnology (IMT) and the Centre for Pharmaceutical Process Engineering (PVZ)—on the optimised clinical use of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). LNPs are a fundamental delivery technology for mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics; however, producing them with the size homogeneity required for clinical use – whilst scaling up to industrially relevant quantities – remains a major technical challenge. Whilst conventional microfluidic mixing devices with a single nozzle produce highly uniform particles, their throughput rates are too low for large-scale production. The team’s multi-nozzle LARLM platform solves this problem by evenly distributing the aqueous phase across an array of nozzles for the organic phase, allowing multiple mixing channels to operate in parallel without compromising particle uniformity.

Ebrahim TaiediNejad has been working at the IMT since 2020, where he is pursuing his PhD on the topic of ‘DLS feedback-regulated continuous nanoparticle production’. In 2025, he received the VDE/VDI GMM Prize for a paper published in Scientific Reports. In it, he presents a novel 3D microfluidic system that enables the continuous and highly efficient production of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) with controlled particle size and low polydispersity. With this prize, which comes with a cash award of 2,500 euros, the VDE/VDI Technical Society for Microelectronics, Microsystems and Precision Engineering honours the best scientific paper in this discipline (see the report as a PDF).