Martina received her Bachelor degree in Environmental sciences from the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science in september 2012. After her bachelor, she moved to the field of Experimental Biology with a major in Physiology and Immunobiology. During her studies, she did internships in the Institute of Immunology, where she worked on the production of a vaccine for Clostridium tetani and in the University hospital Zagreb in the Tissue Typing center where she learned basic techniques in transplantation immunology.

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In 2014, Martina joined the deMello group as an Erasmus student, where she worked on a microfluidic platform for cell fusion. After completing the Erasmus program she went back to Croatia where she successfully defended her master thesis titled ‘’Antioxidative activity of naringenin in the mouse: applicability in diabetes’’ in December 2014.

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In February 2015, she joined the deMello group as a PhD student working on artificial cells in microfluidic systems. This project is performed in collaboration with Dr. Dora Tang at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany.

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On December 5th 2018 Martina successfully defended her PhD thesis titled ‘’A droplet-based microfluidic platform for the production, analysis and use of designer proteinosomes’’.

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Current research:

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Martina works on functionalization and integration of simple reaction systems mimicking basic biological reactions in proteinosomes, such as creating simple biological networks using programmable DNA and creating complex 3D artificial tissue systems.

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Example work…

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Ugrinic, M.; Zambrano, A.; Berger, S.; Mann, S.; Tang, T.-Y. D.; deMello A. Microfluidic Formation of Proteinosomes. Chemical Communications 2018, 54, 287-290

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Ugrinic, M.; deMello, A.; Tang, T.-Y. D.Microfluidic Tools for Bottom-Up Synthetic Cellularity. Chem 2019, epubs ahead of print