bio
Franziska is currently a PhD candidate in the laboratories of Dr. William Shih and Dr. Don Ingber at Harvard University. She works at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where she uses DNA origami structures to build new materials for tissue engineering and to develop methods for drug delivery. She is expected to graduate with a Ph.D. in June 2012.
In college, Franziska has participated in a variety of different research projects. For her senior thesis, she worked in the laboratory of Dr. Sebastian Springer at Jacobs University Bremen to optimize the expression of tapasin, a protein involved in MHC class I function, as well as the laboratory of Dr. Antje Boetius at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology to identify bacterial communities in intertidal zone and deep sea sediments. After her junior year, she spent a summer at UC Berkeley/CHORI with Dr. Mark Shigenaga studying the GI tract inflammatory response of mice in response to high fat diets. During her junior and senior year, she was a teaching assistant for introductory lab courses in biochemical engineering and advanced lab courses in biochemistry.
Franziska was sponsored by the National German Academic Foundation throughout her undergraduate career. Only 0.25% of all students at German universities are sponsored by this award.