Melanie Hannebelle
Assistant Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology · SciLifeLab Fellow

Melanie leads the Hannebelle Lab in the Biophysics division of the Department of Applied Physics at KTH, and is a SciLifeLab fellow.

She is a bioengineer and biophysicist working at the interface of physics, microbiology, and global health. Her research uses microscopy, microfluidics, and quantitative modeling to study how pathogens move, adhere, and organize, with a particular focus on schistosomiasis and tuberculosis, two diseases of major global health burden.

Melanie trained in applied physics and bioengineering at ENS Paris-Saclay and EPFL, where she completed her PhD on the biophysics of mycobacterial growth and division using time-lapse atomic force microscopy. She then joined the Prakash Lab at Stanford (USA) and SwissTPH (Switzerland) as a postdoctoral fellow, where she developed open-source microscopy tools and uncovered how schistosome larvae exploit the air-water interface to find their hosts. Her work has been recognized by the Swiss TB Award (2024), the Stanford JEDI Award (2023), and fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Beyond the lab, Melanie is committed to making science a more open and equitable endeavor, through open-source instrumentation, field microscopy training in Senegal, Brazil, and the United States, and community work supporting children's literacy.