Group Members

Ms. Kimberly Garcia

Kimberly hails from the city of Baguio in the Philippines. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry (cum laude) from the Institute of Chemistry, University of the Philippines-Diliman. After which, she worked as a university research assistant in the mass spectrometry facility embedded in the same institute. During this time, she worked in the service facility while also working on mass spectrometry-based metabolomics projects as applied to natural products discovery. She did her Master of Science in Kyoto University under the Monbukagakusho (MEXT) scholarship awarded by the Japanese government. There, she studied evolutionary biology of marine giant viruses in the Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research.  After which, she worked as a chemistry specialist for chemical journals and patents database excerption before coming to Maastricht University to start her PhD.

Ms. Mariia Sobko

Mariia is a Maastricht Science Programme bachelor’s student at Maastricht University, focusing on bioinformatics.

Her interests lie at the intersection of computer science and biology. Her research experience spans wet-lab research, computational structural biology, gene expression analysis, and machine learning.

During her internship in Dr. Sebastiaan Van Nuffel’s group, she explores machine learning approaches for the analysis and classification of ToF-SIMS data.

Ms. Zoja Malova

Zoja is a Maastricht Science Programme bachelor's student at Maastricht University. In 2026, she began her research project as part of the Honours Research Programme.

In her undergraduate studies, she focuses on chemistry and materials science. Her main interest lies in nanoengineering, particularly functional nanomaterials with engineered properties.

Her current project focuses on the surface characterization of gold-core mesoporous silica-coated nanoparticles using Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS). Through this work, she aims to analyze the chemical composition of the nanoparticle surface, which is critical for optimizing their performance in targeted biomedical and technological applications.