Affiliation: NWO physics institute AMOLF

After studying biochemistry and biophysics at Technische Universität München (DE), Kristina received her PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2015, under the guidance of Sir Prof. David Klenerman. After a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry (Martinsried, GER) with Prof. Petra Schwille, she began her current position as tenure-track group leader at the NWO physics institute AMOLF (Amsterdam, NL) in 2018. Her main aim is to unravel how immune cells communicate with each other, both in natural and immunotherapy contexts: how do immune cells use molecular signaling pathways to transmit, process, and respond to information, both precisely and unambiguously? Her approach is based on microscopy that pushes technical boundaries and on synthetic biology. Combining signaling pathway reconstitution with single-molecule biophysics, her work provides a mechanistic and quantitative perspective on cell signaling. The Ganzinger group’s current research addresses:

• Signaling pathway reconstruction: we use a hybrid in vitro-in vivo approach, interfacing in vitro cell surface models with immune cells.
• Engineering signaling pathways: Her group pushes the application of the same biophysics approach to understand the man-designed signaling networks in immunotherapeutics against cancer.
• Signaling in synthetic cells: Her groups develops methods for the in vitro reconstitution of signaling molecules in lipid vesicles, the groundwork for her goal to develop synthetic cells that communicate with each other and with living cells. 

Her group is passionate about open access science and sharing methods, for example via github (see https://github.com/GanzingerLaband https://ganzingerlab.github.io/K2TIRF/index.html) and detailed method papers.