We would like to wish a warm welcome to a new colleague: Since October 2020, the research group around Dr. Mihaela Žigman has been supported by Viola Zóka, who is our new medical laboratory assistant!
The young Hungarian fellow is a proud alumnus of the University of Pécs, where she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry. She had developed a strong passion for chemistry early on which was even more intensified while she was acquiring professional experiences at a company laboratory in Nagykanizsa (Hidrofilt Ltd. Hungary). She was performing qualitative and quantitative analysis of water samples using various analytical chemistry methods.
Shortly after Viola has heard about the newly emerging infrared molecular fingerprinting technique, which by far allows for more sophisticated analysis of human blood samples than other methods she was familiar with, she applied for a job at the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting (CMF) in Budapest. CMF has a very close collaboration with the Laser Physics Department of the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich, blood samples collected for clinical studies of CMF will therefore be analyzed at the LMU.
Since it is still a couple of years ahead until CMF is establishing its own analytical laser laboratories, Viola has changed her residency from Hungary to Germany to pursue a new professional career at the Garching Research Center and directly fuel the CMF research goals from there. Together with laser scientist and molecular biologists, Viola will analyze blood samples for their molecular composition using infrared spectroscopy - something that everyone is very much excited about!