About me
I’m Malene, and I study nanoscience at Aarhus University’s Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO). What I’m doing right now makes more sense once you know why I’m doing it, so I’ll start there.
Most of what I do comes from the same place. I like making things, and I like the part before that even more, where something doesn’t exist yet and I’m working out how it could. That’s true whether I’m painting, writing, coding or in the lab. Once I can see how a thing might work, I start looking for the pieces, and I don’t much care where a piece comes from as long as it holds up when I check it. It also runs in reverse fairly often. I read something because I’m curious, and a while later it has become the next thing I want to build.
I came to nanoscience because I wanted to understand how things work at that scale, and specifically how a material’s components, their arrangement and the conditions around them end up deciding what forms and what it can do. That curiosity is still the main thing, and it comes with wanting to understand it well enough to eventually make something with it. What I find interesting is how many different places the same idea turns up. Metamaterials get their optical or mechanical properties from their pattern. In DNA and RNA nanotechnology a designed sequence folds into a structure that does something. Printed scaffolds guide how cells organise into tissue, and in colloidal systems the particles and their surroundings determine what assembles. I’m drawn to that overlap, which is why my interests span metamaterials, DNA and RNA nanotechnology, tissue engineering, colloidal nanochemistry and tiny robots rather than settling on one of them.
One area I keep coming back to is how materials interact and communicate with living systems, mechanically, chemically and electrically, and the idea that those interactions could be used to make responsive, functional material systems anywhere from the molecular scale up to the tissue scale. It’s something I want to understand much better than I currently do, and something I’d like to build with.
For my bachelor’s project I worked on a bioink for 3D bioprinting nerve-like tissue. It was the first time I had to think about the material’s relationship to the cells, how it would behave in the printer and the structure we were trying to end up with, all at the same time. At the moment I’m helping making and researching chiral metal nanoparticles in a lab at iNANO. There’s a limit to what I can say about the details, but it’s one of these interests I’ve been able to get my hands on in practice rather than just read about.
I’m also part of Aarhus University’s first iGEM team, working on an RNA-based project we’re taking to Paris in November. I’ve been on it since we chose the project in the spring, back when we were still reading around and figuring out what we could realistically do. Since then it has been about turning that into an actual design and trying to get it to work, alongside finding sponsors and meeting other teams from the Nordics and the rest of Europe. I’m building our wiki as well, which is really an exercise in explaining the project clearly enough that someone outside the team could follow it.
I paint, surrealist work, under mlouw.studio. That’s one of the places where the habit of thinking about things that don’t exist yet started, years before I set foot in a lab. I also do science communication for iNANO’s visitor service, and since 2023 I’ve been part of SEMF, the Society for Multidisciplinary and Fundamental Research, which I found through its summer school in Valencia.
I’m taking HTBAA because I want to learn how to build with biomanufacturing as well, and that means understanding it properly first. I want to learn how you get a living system to produce something you’ve designed, and I expect to find out along the way how much of what I think I understand needs reconsidering.