Team

Sam Wilken — Principal Investigator

Junior Research Group Leader, Carl-Zeiss-Foundation Center for Synthetic Genomics, Department of Chemistry, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Sam is an experimental physicist interested in the far-from-equilibrium organizational mechanisms underlying biology's disordered, multi-component materials and in using programmable biomolecular systems to reproduce and extend them synthetically. 

Full CV Google Scholar Email: swilken @ uni-mainz.de

Abhishek Ghadai — Postdoctoral Researcher

I am fascinated by how simple interactions between microscopic building blocks give rise to emergent behavior and complexity. My research explores the physical principles underlying self-organization, phase transitions, and collective dynamics in soft matter, using programmable DNA materials as a versatile platform to understand and engineer complex materials.

Email: aghadai @ uni-mainz.de

Oliver Kraft — PhD Student

With a background in biology, my research interests have evolved from studying the fundamental principles of biological organization to the engineering of programmable, bioinspired soft materials. By coupling transcription to phase-separated DNA-liquids, I investigate how biochemical reaction networks can be applied to engineer dynamic and self-organizing nonequilibrium systems.

Email: okraft @ uni-mainz.de