Prof. Dr. Petra Dittrich

Prof. Petra S. Dittrich is Associate Professor for Bioanalytics at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich. She develops microfluidic devices for the life sciences, particular for bioanalytical and diagnostic applications. The interdisciplinary approach combines chemical, physical, biological and engineering aspects of microfluidic-based technology. Her research interests focus currently on single cell analysis, lipid membrane studies and engineering of minimal cells. She studied chemistry at Bielefeld University (Germany) and Universidad de Salamanca (Spain) from 1993 to 1999. She earned her PhD degree at the Max Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (MPI Göttingen, Germany) in 2003. After another year as postdoctoral fellow at the MPI Göttingen, she had a postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Analytical Sciences (ISAS Dortmund, Germany) (2004-2008). From 2008-2014, she was Assistant Professor at the Organic Chemistry Laboratories of the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences (ETH Zurich). For research stays, she visited the Cornell University (Ithaca, USA, in 2002) and the University of Tokyo (Japan, in 2005). Petra Dittrich received the Starting Grant from the European Research Commission (ERC, 2008-2013), and the ERC Consolidator Grant (2016-2021). She was awarded the Analytica Forschungspreis of the German Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM), donated by Roche Diagnostics GmbH in 2010 and the Heinrich Emmanuel Merck award, donated by Merck KGaA, in 2015.