Award Winner

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 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.

Her parents, Herbert and Roswitha Knauer, founded the KNAUER scientific instrument company in West Berlin in 1962. The company initially specialized in selling osmometers to customers in the Federal Republic of Germany and to western original equipment manufacturers. Diligent sales activities also helped the company build a market for its instruments behind the Iron Curtain, an unusual market for western instrument makers. The company expanded into building modular high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) systems in the 1970s after Herbert Knauer noticed how many people visited the Waters Company booth at Pittcon. By the 1980s, the company’s HPLC business outperformed the osmometers.

In 1989, Germany was happily reunited, but this era also meant the reorganization of the East European economies. Many companies, labs, and institutes closed, leading to big losses for KNAUER. The newly graduated business economist entered the company to help her parents save their life’s work.

Knauer made a series of hard choices, including closing a new venture in HPLC columns and outsourcing some departments in order to focus on R&D, sales, and service. By 1996, these choices had showed success. HPLC sales increased with the development of the PC-controllable and extremely compact WellChrom line of HPLC instruments together with the EuroChrom control software. She became managing director and owner of the company in 2000. During the 2000s, UHPLC systems and simulated moving bed chromatography broadened the portfolio, enabling KNAUER to sell more devices to OEM customers. By 2020, the company had almost doubled in size.

One of KNAUER’s key recent innovations is lipid nanoparticle encapsulation equipment, which enabled mass production of the mRNA vaccine for COVID-19. As the pandemic developed, Knauer and her team threw themselves into the challenge of developing custom solutions that enabled pharma companies like BioNTech and Pfizer to scale up vaccine production. Today KNAUER’s impingement jets mixing technology means that if a process works on a small research scale in the laboratory, it is highly likely that it can also be implemented on a large production scale.

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. Sustainability as defined in the UN global compact is a matter close to her heart and to the hearts of her company’s management team. 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.