Doctoral thesis success: Emine Karakaya

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Congratulations to Emine Karakaya on successfully defending her doctoral thesis titled “Development of Alginate-Based Bioinks Exhibiting Promising Cell-Material Interactions for 3DBiofabrication Approaches” on 20th October 2025. Emine carried out her doctoral project at our Institute under the supervision of Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini, within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center TRR 225 (LINK: https://trr225biofab.de), specifically in Project B06, led by Dr. Rainer Detsch. The defense took place in person in Erlangen. The members of the doctoral defense committee were: Prof. Sahar Salehi Müller (University of Hohenheim), Prof. Silvia Budday (Department of Mechanical Engineering, FAU), Prof. Peter Felfer (Department of Materials Science and Engineering, FAU) (Chair) and Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini. Prof. Boccaccini highlighted the innovative results achieved by Emine during her doctoral research. She developed and characterized a wide range of alginate-based hydrogels with added functionalities, optimized for applications in biofabrication, specifically for drop-on-demand approaches. Several papers have been published based on Emine’s thesis (e.g., references [1–2]). Many congratulations once again to Emine on the successful defense of her doctoral thesis. We wish her all the best in her future career!

[1] E. Karakaya, et al., How to Determine a Suitable Alginate for Biofabrication Approaches using an Extensive Alginate Library?, Biomacromolecules 24 (2023) 2982-2997. doi: 10.1021/acs.biomac.2c01282

[2] E. Karakaya, et al., Engineering peptide-modified alginate-based bioinks with cell-adhesive properties for biofabrication, RSC Adv. 14 (2024) 13769. DOI: 10.1039/d3ra08394b