Student Speakers - 2025
Aleksandra Dudzik
School of Medicine
UCD
Aleksandra is third year Ph.D student investigating the impact of acute and chronic inflammation on the proteomic composition of High-Density Lipoprotein (HDL) particles with a view to gaining a better understanding of the cardioprotective properties of HDL and for risk stratification of cardiometabolic complications in obesity. Her project is supervised by Dr Fiona McGillicuddy and Prof Stephen Pennington. Aleksandra’s work is supporting the development of MetHealth, NovaUCD’s start-up company of the year 2022. MetHealth is developing a risk stratification platform using targeted proteomics for metabolic health in obesity.
Maikel Gaitkoski
NIBRT
Dublin
Maikel holds a master’s degree in Bioscience & Biotechnology from the Carlos Chagas Institute, FIOCRUZ, Brazil. He joined the Characterisation and Comparability Lab at NIBRT in June 2022 as a Research Associate and is a PhD candidate on Bioprocess Engineering by UCD. In his current project, funded by Science Foundation Ireland in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and the University of Liverpool, Maikel focuses on the development of a fully automated analytical platform for the real-time monitoring of bioreactors during the batch and fed-batch production of biopharmaceutical molecules by eukaryotic cells, integrating several analytical approaches.
Anna Mulligan
NIBRT
Dublin
Anna is a PhD student in the NIBRT Characterisation and Comparability Laboratory (CCL) led by Dr Jonathan Bones. Since joining the CCL group as a Research Associate in 2022, her work has focused on the analysis of small molecule impurities and their clearance during downstream bioprocessing operations using LC-MS. In 2023, Anna began her PhD studies with the UCD School of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering working on the application of Microdroplet Chemistry for the characterisation of therapeutic proteins by Mass Spectrometry.