1 February - 29 February 2016

My stay at the Nottingham Trent university in the  group of Professor Perry was very rewarding. The Biomolecular Materials Interface Research Group provided an excellent infrastructure to support my PhD studies and the group members were very obliging. The opportunity to benefit from their long time experience and expertise in the research field of biomolecule and materials interaction has open new insights and advance our research. Additionally the warm welcome of the group members and my landlady made my stays more than enjoyable.

Within Prof. Perry’s working group not only the essential methods for synthesis and characterization of nanoparticles and sensors as well as single crystals were easily accessible, but also the group members were very supportive and gave me the opportunity to familiarize myself with a variety of further methods. My research stay was very productive, even though we were not able to carry out the planned experiments, due to a broken devices for the planned Isothermal Titration Calorimetry (ITC) experiments, and I benefit from their long time experience and expertise in the research field of biomolecule and materials interaction.

Based on this fruitful cooperation and since the planned ITC experiments need to be carried out at a later point, we agreed to prepare and have already submitted a DAAD proposal for a research stay of one year to strengthen the scientific cooperation and to provide further access to ITC and other experimental methods including multi parametric surface plasmon resonance (MP- SPR) and quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) to characterize the binding affinities of zinc oxide binding peptides. Due to the synergetic effects and the complementary methods in the HMI working group, we already started to prepare a common manuscript.