Pandemics and Alertness member WG3 (Complementary and enabling techniques), LINXS Fellow

Head of Scientific Support, European Spallation Source ERIC, and adjunct Associate Professor, Division of Physical Chemistry, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Hanna Wacklin-Knecht trained as chemist at Imperial College (UK) and received a DPhil in 2004 in Physical Chemistry from Oxford University, on the development of neutron reflectometry to study enzyme mechanism at membrane interfaces. Her research centers around elucidating cell membrane structure and function by using neutron scattering and deuteration, ranging from development of advanced biomimetics for human cell membranes to the in-situ study of membrane-protein and lipid function related to health and disease. After carrying out postdoctoral research at Oxford, the Toshiba R&D Centre (Japan) and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), she joined the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble (France) as an instrument scientist in 2009 and joined ESS in 2011. She has worked at ESS in a number of different roles on instrument and facility design, first as an instrument scientist for neutron reflectometry, and later as scientist for Life science within the DEMAX deuteration platform, and founder of the international deuteration network DeuNET. She was appointed in 2024 as the Head of the ESS Scientific Support Division comprising support laboratories and sample environments.