Biography
- Sylvia Ganda received her B.E. (Hons.) in Chemical Engineering in 2015 from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. Her undergraduate thesis piqued her interests in the use of chemistry and material science to address critical health-related issues. This led to Sylvia spending 2 years as a research assistant at UNSW Sydney where she was fortunate to do an exchange to the University of Bayreuth, Germany. During this time, she focused on the fundamental aspects of nanoparticle fabrication for drug delivery using bottom-up self-assembly techniques. In 2017, she was awarded the Australian Government RTP Scholarship to pursue a PhD in Chemistry. In her PhD, she addressed some of the most critical aspects in drug delivery research by developing entirely biodegradable polymeric nanoparticles for immunotherapy and understanding how they travel through cells (microscopy) and flow alongside blood (microfluidics).
From this experience, Sylvia becomes fascinated by nature’s design principles and biological phenomena. She aspires to leverage the interactions between chemistry, materials and biology to elucidate the fundamentals of disease occurrence and progression and develop better treatment. In March 2021, she joined the Kilian Lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow, focusing on developing bio-inspired extracellular matrices and hydrogels to help understand melanoma progression and metastasis (NCI, NIH). Sylvia is passionate about improving biomedical technologies with the hope to develop low-cost targeted and effective personalized medicine. In her free time, she enjoys reading, hiking, cooking and dining.
- contact: s.ganda@unsw.edu.au
Projects
- - Bio-inspired hydrogels for melanoma migration and metastasis
- - Cancer cell plasticity
