Max Planck launches two China centers for climate and biochemistry

The Max Planck Society has inaugurated two new Max Planck Centers in partnership with the Chinese Academy of Sciences on April 13, 2026, establishing research collaborations in Beijing and Shenzhen.

• Main announcement: The two centers are the MAC-Air Center (Max Planck – Asia Center for unraveling the nexus of AIR pollution, extreme weather, and monsoon in a warming climate) in Beijing and the Max Planck Society–Chinese Academy of Sciences Center for Synthetic Biochemistry in Shenzhen; the inauguration date was April 13, 2026, and the collaborations provide access to EarthLab supercomputing infrastructure and the Shenzhen Synthetic Biology Infrastructure.
• Background and details: The MAC-Air Center partners include the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, IIT Madras (IITM), Seoul National University (SNU), Tsinghua University (THU), Nanjing University (NJU), and University of Helsinki (UHEL); the MAC-Air Center will use the 325-meter Tall Tower Observatory, AI-supported meteorological models, and EarthLab simulations. The Synthetic Biochemistry center links the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology with the Institute of Synthetic Biology (CAS) and gives access to automated labs, cultivation, scale-up, real-time metabolic monitoring, and structural analysis within the Shenzhen Synthetic Biology Infrastructure.