Prof. Alke Petri-Fink received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Ulm, Germany, in 1999. After a post-doctoral stay at the University of Gainesville, Florida, she joined the Institute of Materials Science at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), first as a post-doctoral researcher, then as a senior scientist. She became an Associate Swiss National Science Foundation Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Fribourg in 2009, and a Full Professor in 2011 at the Adolphe Merkle Institute, Switzerland. Her research focuses on inorganic nanoparticles and their synthesis, surfaces, and interactions with biological cells.