Biological and Soft Materials

Hi!

My name is Lotta and I am a biophysicist interested in biomechanics, self-assembly, dynamics, geometry, ... basically everything that can described with Physics and that is squishy and/or biological! I've been working a lot with biopolymers and now transitioned to droplets made of phase-separating proteins, see my Research page.

About my bio (CV here): I've recently started as an independent group leader at the Leibniz Institue for Interactive Materials  (DWI Aachen) and have a teaching assignment at RWTH Aachen, all about soft and biological materials. If you're interested in what we will be doing in detail, let me know and we can have a chat.

Previously, I was a PostDoc at University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Cornell University, USA. I pursued my undergraduate studies at University of Göttingen and spent a year of my Master's degree at University of California, Santa Barbara (it is a very beautiful place). I finished my PhD with Sarah Köster at University of Göttingen, Germany, in 2021 where we investigated interactions within and between cytoskeletal biopolymers. During my PostDoc, I've been working with and Eric Dufresne (Cornell) and Ben Schuler (UZH). Together, we investigate the molecular and supramolecular structures of phase-separating proteins and other materials.

Job openings

We are currently looking for two PhD students who are excited to work on soft and biological materials! We are searching for enthusiastic individuals from diverse backgrounds.

One job posting can be found here and another one here.  The first one is about the structural properties of phase-separating liquids measured with SAXS. The other one is part of the Polymer Mechanochemistry CRC 1769, where we will study the properties of microgels with optical tweezers.

We'll also be looking for Bachelor's and Master's students, exchange students and PostDocs with their own funding. Contact me in case you're interested.

Contact:

E-Mail: lorenz@dwi.rwth-aachen.de

Lorenz lab institute website: https://www.dwi.rwth-aachen.de/en/working-group/rg-lorenz

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/charlotta-lorenz-b3b4a180

 OrcID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9822-9384

GoogleScholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Xl1KmiwAAAAJ&hl=en