Surface Design – Applications in Bioscience and Nanotechnology

Renate Forch studied Chemistry at the University of London, King's College and Queen Mary. After finishing her Ph.D. she went to the University of Western Ontario, Canada, where she built up a research group focussing on plasma surface modification of polymer films. Since February 1996 she has been holding a post at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research working on pulsed plasma polymerisation of thin organic films with the aim to develop functional coatings to improve surface properties of materials such as biocompatibility and tribological properties. Holger Schonherr studied chemistry and polymer chemistry and physics in Mainz, Germany, and Toronto, Canada. After a post-doctoral position at Stanford, he became professor at the University of Twente, Netherlands. In 2008, he accepted a post as a full professor for Physical Chemistry at the University of Siegen, Germany. Professor Schonherr's major research interests are the chemistry and physics of surfaces and interfaces, functional platforms for biointerfacing, self-organized and macromolecular systems in confinement as well as scanning force microscopy. He is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed papers. A. Toby A. Jenkins received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Great Britain. After a post-doc position at the University of Leeds, he was awarded an Alexander-von-Humboldt fellowship in 1999, allowing him to work at the Max-Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, where he studied the interaction of lipid vesicles with micropatterned surfaces and polymer supports. In September 2000 he became a lecturer in the department of Chemistry at the University of Bath, Great Britain.