Nanoscience Center Awards Prizes to Student Researchers

Three Ph.D. students and one master’s student from Würzburg and Munich have won prizes for their innovative work in application-oriented nanoscience at the Nano Innovation Awards at the Center for NanoScience.

Florian Schüder at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich received a €3,000 ($3,500) award in the Master's Thesis category. In his research, Schüder implemented the recently developed DNA-PAINT superresolution technique using a minimally modified spinning-disk confocal microscope to extend imaging to whole cells and potentially tissues. Due to the wide availability of spinning-disk microscopes in standard biology labs and imaging facilities, researchers can now answer questions with super-resolution in whole cells and beyond.

The Ph.D. Thesis category’s €6,000 ($7,000) award was split among three awardees. In the thesis work of Patrick Vogel at the Julius-Maximilians University in Würzburg, a novel scanner concept — the traveling wave magnetic particle inspection (TWMPI) system — was developed and built, which allows the rapid and highly sensitive visualization of SPIONs. TWMPI is a promising noninvasive imaging modality that could already prove its high potential for medicine, biology and geology in preliminary experiments.

The thesis of chemist Stefan Datz at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich focused on the synthesis and modification of nanomaterials for drug delivery applications to specifically target cancerous tissue without harming healthy tissue. The requirements for efficient stimuli-responsive and thus controllable release of cargo molecules into cancer cells and the design principles for smart and autonomous nanocarriers are discussed.

Under the banner "One patient, one tumor profile, one personalized treatment", a novel micropatterning technique was developed in the scope of Peter Röttgermann’s Ph.D. thesis at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. These micropatterns allow the screening of thousands of single cells in parallel for different cell death markers in a time-resolved way. The analysis of these heterogeneous multi-color signals allows for the identification of the right compound of drugs for a successful, personalized tumor treatment.

The Center for NanoScience aims to stimulate and coordinate research in nanoscience in the Munich area. Since its foundation in 1998 at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, the center has developed into a broad network of researchers from the faculties of physics, chemistry, pharmacy, biology and medicine.