Our Team.

Joana Martins is an Assistant Professor in the Blue Biotechnology and Engineered Living Materials field at TU Delft, The Netherlands. Before joining TU Delft, in January 2022, she was an Assistant Researcher at CIIMAR, University of Porto (UP), Portugal, where she was developing her research in the Marine Biotechnology field. She is a Microbiologist with a PhD in Biology from the Faculty of Sciences of University of Porto, Portugal.    

Elvin Karana is Professor of Materials Innovation and Design at TU Delft, The Netherlands, where she founded and directs the Materials Experience Lab. Giving emphasis to materials’ role in design as experiential and yet deeply rooted in their inherent properties, Elvin explores and navigates the productive shifts between materials science and design for materials and product development in synergy. In 2019, she founded the creative biodesign research lab Material Incubator, that aims at designing materials that incorporate living organisms and exploring their potential in fostering an alternative notion of the everyday. 

Marie-Eve Aubin-Tam is leading a research group in the Bionanoscience department at TU Delft (Netherlands) since 2012. She obtained her Ph.D. in biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2008, and then followed by a Postdoc in single-molecule biophysics also at MIT. Her expertise lies at the interface of biophysics and material science. She seeks to understand the physics and biology of living matter, and then use this knowledge to develop material with superior performance, as well as new production methods that are more sustainable. Together with her team, she pioneered the use of bacterial manufacturing of biomimetic nacre-like CaCO3 layered high-performance materials.

Tobias van Grinsven is a master graduate from the University of Amsterdam with a background in biotechnology and genetic modification. He has extensive experience with cultivating and monitoring cyanobacteria and is conducting the experiment for the CyanoNexus project.