Dr. Gail Anne Vinnacombe-Willson, a postdoctoral researcher at the BioNanoPlasmonics Laboratory, has been appointed Research Associate after being awarded a Postdoctoral Junior Leader fellowship from the “la Caixa” Foundation for her project, “In situ wet-chemical nanosynthesis for influencing and interrogating stem cells on chip”, and obtaining an Ikerbasque Research Fellow position.
Dr. Vinnacombe-Willson obtained her PhD in Materials Chemistry in 2022 from the University of California, Los Angeles, in the United States. There, she developed unconventional bottom-up syntheses and scalable nanopatterning methods for plasmonic metal nanostructures. She combined these techniques with microfluidics to create platforms for cell capture and release, resulting in a US patent.
She was awarded a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship in 2019, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2022, the same year that she joined the BioNanoPlasmonics group as a postdoctoral researcher.
Her independent research combines nanoplasmonics, bottom-up synthesis, and microfluidic in vitro models. 
Funding: 
InNaNeuro - Application No. 161993 - (La Caixa Foundation)
NanoMatMod – (Ikerbasque)