Petra S. Dittrich is Professor for Bioanalytics at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich. She develops microfluidic devices for bioanalytical and diagnostic applications. Her research interests focus currently on single cell analysis, lipid membrane studies and engineering of minimal cells. She studied Chemistry at Bielefeld University (Germany) and Universidad de Salamanca (Spain). She earned her PhD degree at the Max Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (MPI Göttingen, Germany) in 2003. After a year as postdoctoral fellow at the MPI Göttingen, she was postdoc at the Institute for Analytical Sciences (ISAS Dortmund, Germany). From 2008, she was Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences (ETH Zurich). For research stays, she visited the Cornell University (Ithaca, USA, in 2002) and the University of Tokyo (Japan, in 2005). She received among others awards the prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC, from 2008-2014) as well as the ERC Consolidator Grant (2016-2021).