Daniela Kraft

Professor Experimental physics

Name: Prof.dr. D.J. Kraft
Telephone: +31 71 527 1873
E-mail: kraft@physics.leidenuniv.nl
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2221-6473

Daniela Kraft is full professor of soft and biological matter at the Huygens-Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She obtained her Ph.D. cum laude from the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, under supervision of Willem Kegel. Supported by a Rubicon grant, she then joined the Center for Soft Matter Research at New York University, USA, as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2013, she moved to Leiden, where she established her own group. Her research focuses on self-assembly in biological and soft matter systems, ranging from anisotropic colloidal particles to lipid membranes, emulsions, and viruses. Dr. Kraft has been awarded a VENI and VIDI fellowship from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, an ERC starting grant, the paper of the year award 2017 from Biophysical Journal and the 2021 Emerging Leader Award of Journal of Physics: Materials.

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Daniela Kraft wins 2019 Athena Prize

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Current Research Projects

High Tech Smart Materials
	Anisotropic Colloids The synthesis of novel types of colloidal particles with anisotropic shapes and interactions plays a central role in our research. We continuously develop new approaches and modifications to be able to answer fundamental physics questions.
	Self-assembly of Colloidal Particles We aim at guiding and understanding the self-assembly of complex colloidal particles into designer structures and employ them for creating functional materials. We use state-of-the art confocal microscopy methods to image the kinetic assembly pathways and resulting structures in situ.
	Quantitative particle tracking We study the thermally induced random motion of colloidal particles with various anisotropic shapes by confocal microscopy. Particle tracking routines allow us to obtain full information about the position and orientation of the particles and extract quantitative information about the full diffusion coefficient matrix.
Biological Model Systems
	Membrane-mediated interactions Lipid membranes compartmentalize cells and obtain functionality by attached and inserted proteins. We use a colloidal model system to quantitatively study the interaction between objects that deform lipid membranes to unravel the forces behind protein organizations in cells.

Past Research Projects

Virus Assembly

Natural viruses spontaneously assemble from coat proteins and their genome. We aim at identifying the crucial features for the assembly of viruses by developing theoretical models and synthetic proteins in collaboration with Paul van der Schoot (TU Eindhoven) and Renko de Vries and Joris Sprakel (Wageningen University).

Spontaneously assembling Pickering Emulsions

We studied the conditions for the spontaneous emulsification of mixtures of colloids in water and particular oils into particle stabilized ("Pickering") droplets.