Principal Investigator

Banu İyisan has been an associate professor at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (BME), Boğaziçi University since 2025. She previously served as an assistant professor at BME from 2020 to 2025. She is the founder of Biofunctional Nanomaterials Design (BIND) Laboratory and her multidisciplinary research interests include the design, fabrication and characterization of smart nanocarrier systems to overcome challenges in biomedical research and healthcare applications. She was nominated and awarded as the head of a Max Planck Partner Group in 2023, and her group at Boğaziçi University became a partner group of Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. She has received several research grants, including Tübitak 2247D National Outstanding/Early Stage Researchers Program and Tübitak-DAAD Bilateral Cooperation Program. 

She studied Chemical Engineering at Istanbul Technical University (ITU; BSc, 2009 and MSc, 2011) and spent 6 months of her undergraduate study at Technical University of Munich by receiving the EU Erasmus Scholarship. During her MsC studies at ITU, she worked as a research and teaching assistant until she moved to Germany for her PhD study in 2012. To pursue her PhD, Banu started working in the group of Prof. Brigitte Voit at Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research in Dresden, Germany. Her PhD work focused on the development of multifunctional and stimuli-responsive polymersomes (biomimetic vesicles) to use as smart and recognitive nanocontainers for biomedical applications including drug delivery systems, biosensing purposes and synthetic biology. She received her PhD degree in Chemistry from Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden) in 2016. During her PhD studies, Banu was also a member of the interdisciplinary research school from Helmholtz Association (IHRS NANONET, Germany) in the field of nanoelectronics. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Katharina Landfester at Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP) in Mainz, Germany. During her postdoc period (2017-2020), she worked on the development of functional and light responsive nanoparticles / nanocapsules for biosensing and targeted drug delivery applications in the scope of an EU Project that aimed to design a nanophotonic system for breast cancer diagnosis. Since 2021, Banu has also been a visiting senior scientist at MPIP as an adjunct research position for her collaborative studies on different topics of nanomedicine.