Katja Traven (PhD) is a research assistant at Department of Materials at ZAG with 5 years of experience in inorganic and organic chemistry. For achievements in research within doctoral thesis (on ruthenium coordination compounds with N,N-donor ligands) she was awarded with Krka prize in 2018. Recently, her research work is focused on alkali activated materials – their synthesis as well as mineralogical, microstructural, mechanical and chemical characterization by means of XRF, XRD, SEM, FTIR, BET and MIP analysis. She is involved in ERA-MIN2 project FLOW (http://flow.zag.si/en) and two national ARRS projects (J2-9197 and L7-2629), where the development of alkali activated foams based on different waste materials is investigated. She is a co-author of 8 scientific, one technical paper and of one EP patent application.