Author Biography

Regina Luttge was born and grew up in Germany, where she was awarded a BEng by the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in 1993. She received an Erasmus award and spent half a year at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, where she was introduced to research studying liquid crystals. From 1994 to 1999 she had been working in Research & Development at the Institut für Mikrotechnik Mainz, Germany, first as a process engineer facilitating a variety of LIGA projects utilizing x-ray lithography and subsequently as a researcher on the application of electron-beam lithography for x-ray masks. She then undertook research in the field of microsystems technology at the University of London, Imperial College, UK, under the supervision of A.S. Holmes and was awarded a PhD in 2003 for her thesis ‘Fabrication technologies for optical scanners based on micromachined cantilevers’. Since 2001 she has been a research member at MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Twente, the Netherlands, where she conducted her postdoctoral research on Lab-on-a-Chip applications and nanolithography from 2003 to 2007. During her postdoctoral research she supported technology transfer and actively motivated the industrial utilization of research results. The latter led to her involvement in high-tech entrepreneurship and the initiation of her first own spin-off company MyLife Technologies in 2008, which is incubated by the business development program at University of Twente and the Valorization program of the Technology Foundation STW, applied science division of The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the technology program of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. MyLife Technologies received recently a first-phase Life Sciences Pre-Seed Grant by The Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw). With respect to her academic career, Regina Luttge received a VENI award by NWO in 2007 and was appointed by University of Twente as assistant professor at the Faculty of Science and Technology. She currently holds a tenure-track position affiliated with the research chair Mesoscale Chemical Systems at MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology. Her scientific research focuses on nanofabrication technology and the engineering of microsystems for applications in (bio)medical technology, with a specific interest in neuroscience. In her new research project she will combine nanotechnology and neuroscience for which she was awarded the ERC starting grant in 2011.