WISE fellow Kristina Ganzinger starts new research group at AMOLF

On September 1st, Kristina Ganzinger will start as tenure track group leader. Ganzinger comes to AMOLF with a WISE fellowship, which is part of an NWO program for excellent female researchers. With her research group Physics of Cellular Interactions, she reinforces the Living Matter department headed by Gijsje Koenderink.

At AMOLF, Ganzinger will use biophysical and systems biology techniques to study the physical principles of complex information transfer and processing in the immune system. By combining synthetic biology tools with advanced single molecule microscopy, she will pioneer a unique ‘synthetic immunology’ approach that promises to have an enormous impact by providing quantitative insights in the biophysics of cell-cell communication and predictive models to aid diagnosis and therapy of immune disease.

During her PhD studies at the University of Cambridge under the direction of David Klenerman, Ganzinger studied receptor-ligand interactions, in particular T cell activation. As a postdoctoral researcher with Petra Schwille at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry, Ganzinger moved into the field of bottom-up synthetic biology, devising microfluidic tools to study biomimetic processes in model membrane systems. Ganzinger received a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship of the European Commission.

About the NWO WISE program
NWO has several dedicated programs for talented researchers. To improve the gender balance among its research staff, NWO decided in 2015 to establish a tenure-track program for female researchers at NWO institutes, Women In Science Excel (WISE). This program offers excellent female researchers the possibility to develop their own research group at one of the NWO institutes.

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