Sanna Sillankorva joined INL in 2019 and is currently a Staff Researcher and recipient of Principal Investigator through the Scientific Employment Stimulus program (2020.03171.CEECIND). Her research is focused on the use of bacteriophages and lysins against antibiotic-resistant pathogens, focusing on biofilm populations, the development of novel topical bacteriophage delivery systems and packaging, and transdermal and transtympanic permeation approaches, in vitro and ex vivo biofilm models.

She holds a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering in 2009 from the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal. Her doctoral research was conducted jointly at the Bioprocess Engineering Department at the University of Oulu, Finland, and at the DNA Sequencing and Genomics laboratory at the University of Helsinki, Finland. he was a postdoctoral researcher (2009-2013) at the Centre of Biological Engineering of the University of Minho. As a postdoctoral researcher, she visited Timothy K. Lu's lab in the Synthetic Biology group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA. After, Sanna held an FCT Investigator position from 2013 to 2018 that focused on preventing and controlling food and clinically relevant pathogens. She joined INL in 2019 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow [Marie Skłodowska-Curie Co-funding of regional, national, and international programmes (COFUND-FP)] to develop a new topical delivery system to deliver bacteriophages to chronic wounds. She has authored over 75 research articles in this domain, several book chapters and edited two Phage Therapy books (ISBN: 978-1-0716-3522-3, ISBN: 978-2-88945-789-2).