David Niedbalka

David Niedbalka received his BSc in Bioengineering and MSc in Biochemical and Chemical Engineering from the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. After an Erasmus exchange year during his Bachelor's at the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain, David worked on the embedding of nanoparticles with active pharmaceutical ingredients into different excipients to enhance their drug release profile; this work was performed at his home university. During his Master's, David synthesized CdSe quantum dots and characterized them by small-angle X-ray scattering, which was followed by a Master thesis project on near-infrared fluorescent nanoparticles for potential in vivo applications, performed at the Particle Technology Laboratory of ETH Zurich led by Prof. Sotiris E. Pratsinis. In addition, David has gained professional experience in the Swiss pharmaceutical sector, which encompassed two internships and one permanent position in Basel: at Novartis and F. Hoffmann-La Roche he worked in the area of crystallization and fluid bed granulation modeling; at Pharmaplan AG he was employed as a Bioprocess Engineer. Since February 2021, he has been enrolled as a PhD student at the Laboratory for Energy Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich, wherein David’s focus is the development of bimetallic catalysts for the dry reforming of methane and their characterization by in situ/operando X-ray techniques.