Invited speakers

Andreas Barth

Andreas Barth is Professor in Experimental Molecular Biophysics at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics of Stockholm University (Sweden). He is a trained physicist with a Diploma degree from the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany). Courses and research practice given by Hans-Joachim Galla made him switch to biophysics for his PhD, which he obtained at University of Freiburg (Germany) with Werner Mäntele in 1992. He became then Wellcome fellow at the National Institute for Medical Research in London (UK) with Peter Bayley and moved via Erlangen to Frankfurt am Main (Germany) where he became Assistant Professor at Goethe University. Since 2002 he holds a position at Stockholm University.

The common theme in his research has been the application of spectroscopic techniques to the study of proteins, with a particular focus on infrared spectroscopy where he uses advanced approaches like isotope-edition and nanoscale spectroscopy. Current research topics are:

(i) the aggregation of the amyloid-β peptide, which is tightly linked to Alzheimer's disease;

(ii) the calculation of the infrared spectrum of proteins (amide I band), which will improve the structural relevance of protein infrared spectroscopy; and

(iii) the interaction of microplastics with microorganisms, which is important to characterize better because it determines the fate of microplastics in the oceans.