Elena Naumovska

Elena Naumovska is a Post-doc in the Islet Research lab.

In in 2010 , she earned her BSc Molecular biology at Sofia University ‘St.Kliment Ohridski’, Bulgaria. There she became interested in nanotechnology which led to a one year position as an undergraduate research assistant, at the lab of Dr.Iliana Ivanova, Department of General and Industrial Microbiology. After her bachelor studies she moved to Sweden where she started her Master studies in Cellular and Molecular biology at Uppsala University. Her research thesis focused on developing fusogenic liposomes for the modification of the cell plasma membrane and it was done in Prof.Rudolf Merkel laboratory, under the supervision Dr.Agnes Csiszar at the Research center Juelich (Forschungszentrum Julich) in Germany. However, her interest in stem cells and tissue engineering led her further to Stem Cell Center in the University of Oslo. There in the group of Dr.Gareth Sullivan, she focused in the development of 3D organotypic models of the liver and in the directed differentiation of induced pluripotent stem cells towards hepatocyte like cells. Subsequently, she moved to the Arctic circle in Norway at the University of Tromso where she was involved in the investigation of extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their role in the development of Venous Thrombosis (VTE). In 2016, she started as an early stage researcher (ESR) in the ITN-MIMIC, a Marie Curie funded industrial doctorate, which focused on mimicking organs-on-chips for high-throughput drug screening and basic research. Her work was mainly performed in MIMETAS the organ on a chip company under the supervision of Dr.Dorota Kurek, where she also worked as a R&D Scientist. In 2020 she finished her PhD in connection to the university of Sheffield, the United Kingdom titled “Development of a Gut-on-a-Chip models in a 3D microfluidic platform (OrganoPlate®)” with Dr.Kai Erdmann as an academic supervisor.

Most recently, in June 2020 she joined the group of Prof.Eelco de Koning as a postdoc, where her focus will be on beta-cell replacement therapies, mainly developing and optimizing strategies for directed differentiation of pluripotent stem cells.