Biography

Serena obtained her single cycle master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology at the University of Siena (Italy) in 2018. In 2017 she joined Wilson’s group as an exchange student for doing an internship during which she studied the influence of the shape and the control over the movement of catalase-based micromotors. Afterwards, she did and internship at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Utrecht University working on nanoporous liquid crystalline nanoparticles for drug delivery. In 2019 she started her PhD focussing on developing stimuli-responsive micromotors and investigating how the self-propelling behaviour is affected in response to a stimulus.

Projects for students

Wilson’s group designed a new type of self-propelled micromotor made from soft, biocompatible materials. Although the fabrication technique has already been devised and the factors that must be considered in the design of motors including shape, composition, and distribution of catalyst have been investigated, still further studies are required to expand the scope of potential applications. We aim to develop stimuli-responsive micromotors by adopting different materials which allow us to keep the control of their propulsive behavior.

Publications

1. Shauni Keller, Serena P. Teora, Guo Xun Hu, Marlies Nijemeisland, and Daniela A. Wilson; High-Throughput Design of Biocompatible Enzyme-Based Hydrogel Microparticles with Autonomous Movement;  Chem. Int. Ed. 2018, 130; DOI: 10.1002/anie.201805661.
2. Shauni Keller, Guo Xun Hu, Maria I. Gherghina-Tudor, Serena P. Teora, and Daniela A. Wilson; A Microfluidic Tool for Fine-Tuning Motion of Soft Micromotors; Funct Mater. 2019, 1904889; DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201904889