Gea originally comes from Eindhoven, in The Netherlands. She received her BSc and MSc in Molecular Life Sciences, a study programme aimed at multidisciplinary research, from Wageningen University. She then continued to do a PhD in the Bio-Inspired Photonics group in Cambridge, under the supervision of Dr. Silvia Vignolini. Currently, she is in the third year of her PhD research, where she is working on photonic structures in living systems. She hereby specialises in the appearance of structural colour in bacteria, with additional work on photonic structures in plants. Furthermore, she works on electron microscope imaging of biological tissue ((cryogenic) SEM, embedding and microtoming for TEM).

Figure 1: On the left is a structurally coloured bacteria colony on the left. The image is taken using dark field light microscopy. On the right is a cryogenic SEM image of the corresponding photonic structure: a hexagonally packed crystal lattice of bacteria.