Physics has been coupled and nanotechnology is spreading its wings to medicine and pharmaceuticals.
Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics for 2006 will be awarded to Dr. Viola Vogel for her creative and pioneering work on bionanotechnology exploring single molecule mechanics and nanomotors for technical applications.
Engineering principles of biological nanosystems for the development of new technologies has been devised and deciphered by Dr. Vogel.
In addition the use of biological motors to build assembly lines for biological and synthetic cargo at the nanoscale level, and exploration of how mechanical forces can switch the functional states of proteins was done by this scientist.
The CV of this great scientist reads as follows: professor in the Department of Materials at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich head of the ETH's Laboratory for Biologically Oriented Materials. After completing her graduate research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, she received her Ph.D. in physics at Frankfurt/Main University, followed by two years as postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. She was a faculty member of the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington and was the founding director of the Seattle Center for Nanotechnology.