Diana Zakharchuk

Personal Introduction

Diana is originally from Ukraine and earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biomolecular Engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. Her academic focus was on protein and peptide synthesis as well as their characterization. During her master’s studies, she spent a semester at the Computational Omics Lab (CoLAB) at Busan National University in South Korea, where she developed a GAN-based neural network for analysis of microscopy images. Her master’s thesis centered on the design and evaluation of multispecific antibodies targeting three key receptors involved in cancer cell survival and proliferation.

Diana is currently pursuing her PhD at the CAMDgraz Laboratory at the Medical University of Graz. Her research focuses on developing controllable degradation and lifecycle management strategies for micro- and nanorobotic materials by integrating biocatalytic systems with material design to enable sustainable disassembly and recycling after use.

Outside the laboratory, Diana enjoys working out, traveling, and playing tennis.

Project Introduction

The main goal of this PhD project is the the search, design and delivery of degradative enzymes for the recycling of nano/microbots. To accomplish it, it will be considered the study of different enzyme candidates that may have degradative activity towards the selected polymers, as well as establishing enzymatic assays for selected polymers and clone, express and assay the different enzyme derivatives. Finally, the (re)design of novel enzyme variants will be achieved by using computer-aided protocols and machine learning, obtaining a clear design, expression, and characterization of biocatalysts for the degradation of materials used for nano/microrobots.