Olivia Merkel has been a Professor of Drug Delivery at LMU Munich since 2015, Chair since 2022, and Co-Director of the Department of Pharmacy since 2024. She is a Registered Pharmacist, received a MS (2006) and a PhD (2009) in Pharmaceutical Technology as well as numerous awards, including an ERC Starting Grant, ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant and ERC Consolidator Grant, the APV Research Award and the Carl-Wilhelm-Scheele-Award. Merkel is the co-spokesperson for the BMBF Future Cluster CNAT-M and an author of over 120 articles and book chapters. She served as NIH reviewer from 2014-2015, SNSF reviewer from 2018-2022, is an Editorial Board member for JCR, EJPB, Molecular Pharmaceutics and other journals, Associate Editor for DDTR and WIREs Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology, was the President of the German Controlled Release Society in 2020 and the Chair of the CRS Focus Group on Transdermal and Mucosal Delivery from 2020-2022, and currently is a scientific advisory board member of Coriolis Pharma, AMW, and Corden Pharma as well as a co-founder of RNhale. Her research focuses mainly on RNA formulation and pulmonary delivery for the treatment of a variety of lung diseases.