new project leader at the ZML

Dr. Anastassiya Schramm is a chemist and synthetic biology researcher from Kazakhstan working at the interface of functional materials and biointerfaces, with a focus on stimuli-responsive vesicle systems. She studied chemistry at New York University Abu Dhabi and gained additional research experience in New York. She was admitted to the Max Planck School “Matter to Life” and completed both her Master’s thesis and PhD research in the area of synthetic biology with Prof. Joachim Spatz at the MPI for Medical Research in Heidelberg. Her doctoral work focused on trigger-responsive vesicle systems, investigating NIR light–activated cargo release from gold nanorod–decorated giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) as a route toward spatially controlled release in biomimetic compartments.

At ZML, Anastassiya contributes to the Aster Bioelectronics initiative, which emerged from the Matter to Life ecosystem and is currently being developed as a translational venture. The team was awarded a GO-Bio grant (approx. €1.0 million) to develop a wireless, wearable platform for continuous biomarker monitoring. The consortium brings together partners at TU Dresden and the Technical University of Munich and is led on the TUM side by Jan Jedryszek. The research goal is to combine synthetic bio-interfaces with miniaturized electronics to enable robust, user-friendly biomarker tracking for future biomedical applications.