Professor Franka Kalman, PhD profile page

Professor (UAS) Dr. Franka Kalman received her MSc in (bio)chemical engineering from the Technical University Budapest, Hungary, and her PhD in analytical chemistry from the Biotechnikum of the Martin Luther University Halle, Germany.

In the frame of a Humboldt Fellowship, she performed postdoctoral research at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Yale University, USA from 1992 to 1995 under the guidance of Professor Csaba Horvàth, the pioneer of HPLC. Here, she worked in modern separation sciences with a strong focus on capillary electrophoresis. She studied mobility – protein structure relationships, the cis-trans isomerization of proline-containing peptides and developed static capillary coatings.

In 1995, she joined the central analytical department of Ciba Geigy, later Novartis and Solvias in Basel, Switzerland, where she established a modern analytical group (HPLC, CE, AUC, Fl-Spectroscopy, CD, MALDI-TOF-MS, LC-MS etc.), which developed and validated analytical QC test programs for complex (bio)therapeutics such as peptides, proteins, glycoproteins, DNA, carbohydrates etc. In 2008, she moved to Serono (later Merck-Serono), Corsier sur Vevey, Switzerland. Here, she built up a modern analytical trouble-shooting team in the QC department.

Since 2010, she has been a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Valais-Wallis, Sion-Sitten, Institute of Life Sciences, Unit of Analytical Chemistry, where she is performing research including endotoxin purification and analysis, mainly in the frame of EUREKA and Innosuisse projects. She teaches instrumental analytical chemistry, validation, modern separation sciences and pharmaceutical quality management.

She has also been a mentor in the "Fix-the-leaky-pipeline" program, a career-building program for women in science, since 2019.