Levkin Research Group of Biofunctional Materials

Many applications reached us in the last few days, much more than our laboratory can host. For this reason, we cannot offer any more internships. However, we are working together with other research groups to enable more laboratory placements at KIT in the near future. Until then, please refrain from sending E-Mails. Many people seemed to confuse our offer. Please note that this is about internships in a chemical or biological laboratory, and NOT enabling you to study your subject at KIT. Please do not just come directly to our laboratory. We are not housing refugees on Campus. Housing is a task of the state (Baden-Württemberg), the federal government (Germany), NGOs, or private helpers.

There is a FAQ from the BAMF:

Link (English)
Link (Ukrainian)

We wish everyone the best in these hard times.

If you are pursuing a degree in chemistry, biology, chemical biology, material science, pharmacy, or a related subject in any Ukrainian university or research institute and you are interested in a laboratory internship at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, please contact me via E-Mail.

After the shocking events of last week, it is important to me to demonstrate that the international scientific community knows no borders and is united against war. Young individuals eager to get a higher education should not be restricted by the aggressive actions of another state. For this reason, I would like to follow the admirable examples of many of my colleagues and offer students in Ukraine a placement in my laboratory at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

My group can offer a warm and international environment, financial support, and many exciting projects in an excellence university.

Sharing is highly appreciated!

Pavel A. Levkin

levkingroup.com

Check out our recent Adv. Mater. paper on mechanically tough, transparent, 3D printable and self-healing polyethylene glycol-gel (PEGgel).

PEG is used as a solvent and not as a covalent crosslinker, leading to these properties.

Congrantulation to Zhenwu and all co-authors!

3D printing offers great flexibility in the creation of precisely engineered objects with highly complex geometries. This is rapidly opening up possibilities in many fields, including aerospace, robotics, construction and medicine.

Read more in the ZEISS News!

Check out our recent Adv. Mater. paper on 3D-printed extremely water-repellent, superhydrophobic, objects with unlimited geometry: superhydrophobic microfluidic channels, oil-absorbing structures and more. 

Congratulation to Zheqin and all co-authors!

The EPICUR PhD Exchange Programme. The 2- to 6-month EPICUR PhD exchange programme will be offered between February and July 2022.

Apply here:
https://register.epicur.auth.gr/assets/courses/catalogue/study-program.html?id=PHDEX

If you are doing PhD in one of these Universities: Adam-Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Poland; University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; University of Freiburg, Germany; University of Haute-Alsace, France; Karlsruher Institute for Technology, Germany; University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria; University of Strasbourg, France.

Here we report a work on "Substrate-Independent and Re-Writable Surface Patterning by Combining Polydopamine Coatings, Silanization, and Thiol-Ene Reaction" in Advanced Functional Materials.
Congratulation to Shuai and all co-authors!

Check out our recent Advanced Functional Materials paper on photodegradable organogels and their use to create organogel patterns and structures, as well as their use as positive photoresists. Collaboration with Patrick Theato.
Congratulation to Johannes Scheiger and all co-authors!

Our new group picture for 2021 is out! 

Joaquín Urrutia, Maximilian Seifermann,  Razan El Khaled El Faraj, Maryam Salarian, Julius Höpfner and Weiyi Liu joined our group as Ph.D. students! Welcome our new group members!

Designing Inherently Photodegradable Cell-Adhesive Hydrogels for 3D Cell Culture.

Check out our recent publication where we combined GelMA with PEG based gels to create photodegradable and biocompatible hydrogels for 3D cell culture.

Great collaboration with Prof. Ute Schepers (KIT). Congratulations to Alisa Rosenfeld and colleagues.

Our project “Liquid Wells as Self-Healing, Functional Analogues to Solid Vessels" has been accepted for publication in Advanced Materials. Congratulations to Johannes and Maria for the great work! This project is a collaboration with the groups of Prof. Hardt (TU Darmstadt) and Prof. Nestler (KIT).

Wenxi's paper "Controlling Geometry and Flow Through Bacterial Bridges on Patterned Lubricant‐Infused Surfaces (pLIS)" has been accepted by Small as selected as BACK COVER.
This work collaborating with Thomas Schwartz demonstrates and explains the formation of bacterial bridge structures—micrometer thin strings formed between clusters of Pseudomonas aeruginosa on patterned lubricant infused surfaces (pLIS) during dewetting. This simple method allows to control the geometry, length and alignment of bacterial bridges by using pre‐designed superhydrophobic‐hydrophilic patterns. The method will be important for understanding biofilm formation, structure and function.
Congratulations to all the authors.

"3D printing of inherently nanoporous structures" check out our latest Nature Comm. paper. Great collaboration with Martin Wegener and Britta Nestler!

Pavel Levkin accepts an invitation to join the editorial advisory board of Advanced Materials Interfaces (Wiley).

Have a look at our newest Advanced Materials paper on "Assembly of Multi‐Spheroid Cellular Architectures by Programmable Droplet Merging". This is a very interesting method to make arrays of complex multi-spheroid architectures (microtissues) by fusing nanoliter droplets containing single spheroids together. Double spheroids or even up to 4 spheroids can be fused together in a controlled way. Different cell types can be combined in such structures (see pictures below).
I believe it will be very useful for tissue engineering applications, studying cell-cell interactions, cell signaling, cell experiments in 3D, etc. Congratulations to Haijun!

Check out our just published Nature Communications paper demonstrating miniaturized chemistry, analysis and biology on-chip using the droplet microarray platform. Great collaboration with Bruker Daltonics on MALDI-MS. We demonstrate attomole detection of molecules, in-situ on-chip reaction monitoring using UV-Vis and IR spectroscopy. The platform is compatible with various cell-biological screenings, which opens new avenues in the fields of high-throughput synthesis and drug discovery. Congratulations to Maximilian Benz for his second Nature Comm. paper.

Proteomics-On-Chip: Combining Droplet Microarrays and Mass Spectrometry for Single-Cell Proteomics!

We are searching for an enthusiastic PhD candidate that holds a major in biology, biochemistry, biotechnology or similar.

Our recent paper in Advanced Biosystems titled “Droplet‐Microarray: Miniaturized Platform for High‐Throughput Screening of Antimicrobial” is online now. Congratulations to Wenxi and the co-authors! Great collaboration with Thomas Schwartz´s group at KIT.
The authors demonstrated the droplet‐microarray (DMA) platform can be used for screening the efficiency of clinically used antibiotics against bacterial pathogens. This platform offers the ability to investigate drug‐resistance of bacteria isolated from patients and the environment with minimal cost and effort.

Our group has now moved to the new building of the Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems - Functional Molecular Systems!