ASEF mentor 2027. Application for Research Abroad is availabe here.

Mihaela Žigman is Professor of Clinical Infrared Spectroscopy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Physics, and a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich (MPQ).

She is a molecular cell biologist whose work bridges systems-level molecular medicine and analytical profiling to advance our understanding of human physiology in health and disease. She studied at the University of Ljubljana and received her PhD in molecular biology from the University of Vienna. To investigate the role, control and molecular mechanisms of cell division, she performed post-doctoral research at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) in Vienna and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle (FHCRC), and subsequently led a research team at the University of Heidelberg.

Blood contains a very versatile and dynamic mixture of molecules and molecular modifications. Her team combines systems medicine, laser physics, molecular biology, machine learning and clinical research to investigate which biological processes and physiological states shape system-level molecular fingerprints and how they evolve over time.

Current projects explore analytical tools and techniques to investigate general principles underlying physio-logical dynamics and variability, and health-to-disease transitions. They also include method development in vibrational spectroscopy. The aim is to establish where different molecular layers can provide reliable information about human physiology at scale, and where the limits of that information lie.

She welcomes students interested in computational data analytics, systems medicine and molecular profiling
to contribute to these interdisciplinary efforts.