Ph.D student
Joined the Hollfelder group: 01 October 2020
Background and Current Projects: After graduating from high school in Austria, I studied biochemistry (B.Sc. and M.Sc.) at TU Munich. For my bachelor’s thesis I did research in Prof. Aymelt Itzen’s lab on posttranslational modifications of small GTPases. In my master’s studies I specialized on bioorganic chemistry and joined the lab of Prof. Kathrin Lang to work on synthetic ubiquitination methodologies using genetic code expansion. Moreover, I focused on neurobiology and worked in Dr Irina Dudanova’s lab at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried to study a protein correlated with Huntington’s disease pathogenesis. For my master’s thesis I again joined Kathrin Lang’s lab to perform directed evolution with the transpeptidase sortase A and to work on alternative enzymatic protein labeling techniques. During that time, I had the opportunity to work on a project involving the engineering of NRPS modules using yeast surface display in Prof. Donald Hilvert’s lab at ETH Zürich. These two placements deepened my interest in the directed evolution of enzymes. In 2020 I joined Prof. Florian Hollfelder’s lab for my PhD funded by a Trinity College/Benn W Levy Studentship. In my PhD I will use droplet microfluidics in combination with high-throughput sequencing to create maps of evolutionary trajectories in sequence space.
