"The programme is financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research [put simply: federal government]. Nationality is irrelevant. The candidate must be established as a researcher in another country and come to Germany [to do research for five years] from that country. About half of the award winners are Germans returning from abroad. German universities [nominate those who will come to their universities.]
"The researchers who are appointed as Alexander von Humboldt Professors receive their awards at a formal, annual ceremony that is held in Berlin in May.
(i) Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (Humboldt Professorship for short; German: Alexander von Humboldt-Professur, Humboldt-Professur for short)
(ii) German-English dictionary:
* Professur (noun feminine; plural: Professuren): "professorship; chair <for the latter: Professur für Geografie Chair of Geography>" http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/dings ... essur&iservice=
* Professor (noun masculine; plural: Professoren, feminine singular: Professorin; Etymology): "professor" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Professor
Recall the first letter of any German noun is capitalized.
(iii) Why is there a hyphen in German between Humboldt and Professur? See Words with a Perspective: German Compound Words. OxfordWords blog, undated http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/12/german-compound-words/
("The Duden ['a dictionary of the German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880'; en.wikipedia.org] hyphenates both words, although omitting the hyphen is also grammatically correct")
(A) The Oxford blog quoted Mark Twain as writing, "Some German words are so long that they have a perspective." The sentence came from Appendix D (titled "The Awful German Language") to the Twain's 1880 book "A Tramp Abroad."
(B) Here is the full text of Appendix D. https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
The tramp refers to Twain himself.
(D) If you read the Wiki page of Mark Twain, you will learn he lived abroad after 1781 for a decade. So how could he publish a travelogue in 1880 (actually two earlier -- because A Tramp Abroad is Twain's third travelogue)?
Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad 1891-1901. In "Scrap Book." PBS, undated www.pbs.org/marktwain/scrapbook/07_tramp_abroad/
("Because of financial problems, Clemens lived in Europe from 1891-1901, but this was neither his first nor last trip abroad. In fact, he was an inveterate traveler. From the age of 17 to the last few weeks of his life” he traveled abroad -- he died of a heart attack in 1910 in Connecticut)
(iv) German name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_name
Quote: "The preposition von ('of') was used to distinguish Nobility; for example, if someone was baron of the village of Veltheim, his family name would be von Veltheim. In modern times, people who were elevated to nobility often had a 'von' added to their name. For example, Johann Wolfgang Goethe had his name changed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This practice ended with the abolition of the monarchy in Germany and Austria in 1919. Sometimes von is also used in geographical names that are not noble, as in von Däniken. 作者: choi 时间: 5-16-2017 12:16
(b) Jijie Chai, Humboldt Professorship. Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, undated www.humboldt-professur.de/en/pre ... ger-2017/chai-jijie
(i) German places the Chinese family name last.
(ii) The field is structure biology and Dr Chai is a structural biologist. Structure biology is always about protein, for DNA invariably has double helix.
(iii)
(A) cryo-electron microscopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryo-electron_microscopy
(it allows the observation of specimens that have not been stained or fixed in any way, showing them in their native environment)
(B) Ewen Callaway, The Revolution Will Not Be Crystallized: a New Method Sweeps Through Structural Biology; Move over X-ray crystallography. Cryo-electron microscopy is kicking up a storm by revealing the hidden machinery of the cell. 525: 172-174 (2015). www.nature.com/news/the-revoluti ... ral-biology-1.18335