Celina Vila-Sanjurjo successfully defended her PhD thesis

Today, Celina Vila-Sanjurjo successfully defended her doctoral thesis, at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Celina had come to Münster with her supervisor, Prof. Francisco Goycoolea, and performed large parts of her doctoral project here, partly in collaboration with our group. She married, stayed in Germany, had (has!) a daughter, founded her family here – and kept working on her project which includes an impressive theoretical and in silico modeling part. She developed the hypothesis that bacterial quorum sensing can be explained as a percolation process, in which connectivity is more important than sheer density in a bacterial population. It is a challenging concept – and thus difficult to publish – but she explained and defended it very well during her disputation. And she was also successful in the lab, developing different protocols to stabilize chitosan-based nanoparticles for drug delivery, not least for anti-quorum sensing drugs which are a promising and important complementation to current antibiotics now that these are increasingly ineffective due to the development of antibiotics resistance in pathogenic bacteria. For one such natural quorum quenching compound, cinnamaldehyde, she even suggested and provided experimental evidence for a new mode of action based on a comparison of bioinformatic in silico predictions and biochemical in vitro data. Her (unfortunately virtual) defense in which Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher participated as “vocal”, i.e. as one of the opponents, was an excellent starting point for a comeback to research after the period of family leave. We can be sure to hear more from her in future!