The Bode EPR lab

Prof Bela E Bode

Professor - PI

Bela is originally from Frankfurt am Main (Germany) where he studied chemistry as an undergraduate. For his postgraduate studies in Frankfurt he investigated quantitative aspects of pulsed dipolar EPR spectroscopy under the joint supervision of Olav Schiemann and Thomas Prisner. After a short postdoctoral stay with Thomas Prisner he moved to the Matysik group in Leiden (The Netherlands) to study optical methods in solid-state NMR spectroscopy before moving to his current position in St Andrews.

Google Scholar; Orcid; ResearcherID;

Dr Katrin Ackermann

Senior Research Fellow

Katrin studied biochemistry at the University of Bayreuth and at the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany), where she prepared her thesis on liquid-state protein NMR. For her postgraduate studies she worked on diurnal rhythms in human post-mortem tissues at the Anatomy in Frankfurt. She continued to work in the field of human chronobiology during two postdoctoral stays at the University of Surrey (UK) and at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam (NL), before joining the University of St Andrews in 2012 and starting to work with EPR. Her projects in the Bode group are centred on EPR applications for structural biology.

ResearchGate; Google Scholar; Orcid

Yannik Limbach

Fourth year PhD student

I am a joint PhD student between the laboratories of Bela Bode at the University of St Andrews and Olav Schiemann at the University of Bonn. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Bonn in 2020, I continued my studies in Bonn which were completed in 2022 graduating with a Master of Science in Chemistry, with a focus on Biochemistry. After that I started my PhD studies in Bonn and moved to St Andrews for the second half of my PhD in 2024. My PhD aims to develop EPR spectroscopy into a technique capable of providing structural insights into biological systems in their native environment, e.g. in cells and at low concentrations. When I am not in the lab or in front of the spectrometer, I enjoy cooking and spending time outdoors (assuming the Scottish weather permits it).

Eleonora Tardo

Third year PhD student

Aisika Chakraborty

Third year PhD student

Yichen Wei

Second year PhD student

Rajni Bala

First year PhD student

Omila Perera

First year PhD student

Erika Mitchell

Project student 2025-2026