Eriola-Sophia Shanko

Eriola- Sophia was born in Fier, Albania in 1990. At age of 4 she moved to Greece where her ongoing exceptional academic track led to her BSc from the University of Applied Sciences of Piraeus, Greece. Her studies were in the field of Automation and Robotics engineering and her bachelor's thesis described a scalable emergency medical response system that coupled the efficient data collection of a pulse sensor with the flexibility and interoperability of a GSM / GPS service architecture for the early detection of the patient’s emerging heart problems. Her rigorous academic performance attracted an Erasmus Mundus scholarship of a 4% acceptance rate, for the further continuation of her studies. Therefore, she joined a joint International Master on Smart Systems Integration (Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)) at various prestigious universities. The MSc consisted of three reputable universities: Heriot-Watt University HWU (Scotland), Universitetet i Sørøst-Norge USN (Norway) and Budapest University of Technology and Economics BME (Hungary). For her MSc thesis she was offered additional scholarship to conduct research at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich ETHZ (Switzerland), Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering in Basel, Switzerland, with thesis entitled as “Steps towards antibiotic susceptibility testing microfluidic chips” for ASTs-on-chip. The thesis involved the design, microfabrication and characterization of a microfluidic chip for rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing of E. coli.

In the microsystems group Eriola-Sophia is doing research on the optimization of magnetic mixing in capillary-driven microfluidic applications. Magnetic actuation of micro-beads and integrated magnetic micro-actuators enhances low-target-concentration detection via providing a homogeneous platform for high precision handheld diagnostics. She will then introduce the application of microelectromagnets-on-chip for system miniaturization.   

Engineering is the art of directing natural laws for the use and convenience of human kind.