Sesilja
Aranko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioproducts and
Biosystems at Aalto University, Finland, where she leads a research group at
the interface of protein engineering and biomaterials. Her group develops
Catcher/Tag protein-ligation pairs and post-translational modification tools
for recombinant production to program the structure and function of proteins
and protein-based materials, with a particular focus on engineered silk and
collagen. Her lab also builds ultra-high-throughput screening platforms based
on bead display and FACS to discover and evolve secreted proteins.
Aranko
earned her PhD in Biosciences from the University of Helsinki in 2014, working
in Dr. Hideo Iwai’s group on protein splicing and inteins. She then continued
as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Markus Linder, studying biomaterials,
including a period at EMBL Hamburg focusing on protein crystallography. She became Assistant Professor at Aalto
University in 2024, where she leads the Cellular Engineering research group.
Aranko has been awarded several major personal research grants, including a
Novo Nordisk Foundation Emerging Investigator grant.