Dresden International Graduate School for Biomedicine and Bioengineering

Knut Drescher received his undergraduate education in physics at the University of Oxford, before pursuing a PhD in biophysics at the University of Cambridge. He became interested in molecular biology and bacterial biofilms during his postdoctoral training at Princeton University, in the Department of Molecular Biology from 2011–2014. In 2015, Knut moved to Marburg in Germany, where he led a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, and where he was a professor of biophysics at the Philipps University of Marburg. In 2021, he relocated his lab to the Biozentrum at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Knut’s research combines methods from physics and molecular biology to understand bacterial collective behaviors, with a focus on biofilms and swarming behaviors.

Dr. Franziska Jehle is currently a Research Group Leader in the Biomaterials Department at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam. Her group is interested in the various mucus-based materials that snails secrete for several – and even partially contrary – functions: lubrication, adhesion, defense and protection. The main research objective is the elucidation of key building blocks and mechanisms underlying the multiple functions of snail mucus.

Franziska Jehle received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 2019 for her work focusing on the self-assembly of a hierarchically-structured protein-based biological material, the mussel byssus. This was followed by a Postdoc in the group of Prof. Matthew Harrington at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where she investigated the smectic liquid crystal forming collagenous protein precursors for byssus fabrication.

Mathias’ research focuses on the translation of unique biological light manipulation concepts into bio-inspired, adaptive, and actively tunable micro-optical devices. Through experimentation and optical modeling, and by employing a diversity of manufacturing principles including self-assembly and unconventional thin film processing techniques, his group is developing novel optical technologies. He joined the faculty of MIT in November 2013. Prior to that, Mathias held a Feodor Lynen research fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for postdoctoral studies at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences of Harvard University, where his research was focused on bio-inspired photonics, bio-imaging and optical spectroscopy. He earned his degree in physics from the Saarland University in Germany and the University of Lorraine (formerly Henri Poincaré University) in France in 2006. Mathias then continued his graduate studies at the University of Cambridge in the UK at the Cavendish Laboratories, receiving his Ph.D. in 2010.

Boaz Pokroy is currently a full Prof. in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Technion Haifa Israel where he also gained all his academic degrees. Prior to that he was a post doctoral fellow and a Fulbright scholar at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Harvard University, Cambridge MA USA and Bell Labs, Murray Hill NJ.

The research of Pokroy focuses on biomineralization and bio-inspired materials. He studies the structure of bio-minerals on the atomic, nano and meso-scales using state of the art high-resolution characterization techniques such as high-resolution synchrotron diffraction and aberration corrected TEM. Based on the strategies that organisms use to produce natural materials, his lab also develops novel bio-inspired materials, such as semiconductors whose band gap can be tuned by the incorporation of intracrystalline biological molecules, controlling the short range order of nano-amorphous materials and fabrication of superhydrophobic/superoleophobic surfaces for various applications.

Anna Rising is professor in veterinary medical biochemistry at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Group Leader at Karolinska Institutet. Dr Rising has pioneered the field of artificial spider silk spinning and is Principle Investigator on an ongoing ERC consolidator grant. She is the inventor of 13 patent families and is co-founder of a biotech start-up company.

Cecilia Roque is an Associate Professor with Habilitation in Bioengineering at the Chemistry Department, School of Science & Technology at NOVA University (Lisbon, Portugal). Cecilia is UCIBIO Director, and also leads the Biomolecular Engineering Lab at UCIBIO-NOVA. She holds a degree in Chemical Engineering (Major in Biotechnology) and a PhD in Biotechnology from Instituto Superior Técnico, and has an Habilitation in Bioengineering from NOVA University of Lisbon.

Cecilia has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge and at the Catholic University of America, a Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK) and at INESC-MN (PT), and a visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge (2006, 2011), University of São Paulo (2015–2018), University of Nantes (2011), City University of New York (2018) and KTH (2022). Her research focus on biomimetics merging chemistry, biotechnology and engineering, and her work has been merited with several national and international distinctions. She has been awarded Starting and Proof-of-concept grants from the European Research Council (2014, 2022), and is currently leading a FET-OPEN project.

Dr. James C. Weaver runs the Wide-Field Electron Optics Laboratory and leads the Biologically Inspired Materials and Design Group. Working at the interface between zoology, materials science, biomedical engineering, and multi-material 3D printing, his main research interests focus on investigating structure – function relationships in hierarchically ordered biological composites and the advanced fabrication of their synthetic analogues. He has played critical roles in the development of new model systems for the study of a wide range of biomineralization processes and is an internationally recognized and award-winning scanning electron microscopist.

With a strong history of national and international academic and industrial collaborations, he has coauthored more than 150 journal articles in the biological, physical, and geological sciences. His work has been featured on the covers of more than 40 scientific journals and he has contributed to numerous collaborative art installations, which have been exhibited in Berlin, Boston, Frankfurt, London, New York, Paris, and San Francisco.