Karl Normak

Résumé

Karl Normak was born in 1995 in Tartu, Estonia. He returned to his birth city in 2014 to begin his bachelor’s studies at the University of Tartu. During his bachelor’s he was on exchange at the University of Helsinki, where he studied small molecule GDNF mimetics under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Mart Saarma. He also worked part-time during his bachelor studies, developing monoclonal antibodies and researching potential HPV anti-virals at Icosagen AS and Icosagen Cell Factory OÜ. In 2017 he graduated with a B.Sc. degree in Chemistry from the University of Tartu with full honours.

After a year as a conscript, Karl came to Switzerland to continue his education at ETHZ. During his Masters studies Karl helped founding a student organisation focused on expanding the life-span of our clothes and an early stage start-up creating a portable sensor to measure microbial health in soil. For his Master’s thesis, Karl investigated how enzymatic reactions are affected by phase separation in biomolecular condensates in Prof. Dr. Arosio’s group. After finishing his Master’s, Karl joined Prof. Dr. Arosio’s group as a PhD student to study the encapsulation of various payloads into extracellular vesicles as an innovative way of camouflaging the payloads from the immune system and providing targeting capabilities.