Dr. Pamina M. Winkler is a Research Associate in the Biomolecular Nanotechnology and the BioNanoPlasmonics laboratories funded with an Ikerbasque fellowship. Her aim is to develop an independent research line focused on deciphering protein interactions under the influence of small molecules and other biomedicinally relevant factors.

Dr. Winkler obtained her PhD in Photonics from ICFO, Barcelona, in 2020 (cum laude) supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship. During her doctoral research, she pioneered the integration of plasmonic nanoantenna arrays with fluorescence correlation spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy to investigate nanoscale membrane dynamics in living cells. Her work was recognized with the ICFO Thesis Award (2020) and the UPC Special Doctoral Award (2022).

Following her PhD, she joined EPFL, Switzerland, as a postdoctoral researcher, expanding her expertise toward label-free biophysical approaches. Together with her colleagues she showed that proteinogenic amino acids have the capacity to colloidally stabilize weakly interacting nanoscale objects in solution, already at concentrations relevant in the cellular context.

During a short postdoc at the University of Vienna, Austria, she has been applying her biophysical experimental toolkit to probe binding kinetics and aggregation behaviour of proteins linked to neurodegenerative diseases with specific post-translational modifications and in the presence of small molecules.

To date, Dr. Winkler has published >12 peer-reviewed research articles, all in Q1 impact journals, including Nature, ACS Nano, Nano Letters amongst others and two reviews. Her international visibility is demonstrated by the number of citations (780+ citations, h-Index=9), presentations at >20 international conferences and multiple invited talks at renowned research institutes. She has made important contributions across research fields spanning photonics, biophysics, cell biology, biological and physical chemistry.