Lena Pantelić is a research assistant in the Group for Eco-biotechnology and Drug Development at the IMGGE. Lena earned her Bachelor's (2021) and Master's (2022) degrees in Biochemistry from the Faculty of Chemistry. After volunteering in the laboratory, she began her PhD in Biotechnology and began her work at IMGGE in 2022.

Her research focuses on upcycling food waste for the production of valuable bacterial biopigments, such as pyocyanin and undecylprodigiosin, and investigating their biocatalytic transformation to enhance their biological activity. Her doctoral research aims to optimize the production and enzymatic derivatization of these bacterial pigments to create novel compounds with improved therapeutic potential. Her work involves a range of methodologies, including bacterial cultivation in bioreactors, purification of secondary metabolites, enzymatic biocatalysis, and various chromatographic and molecular biology techniques. The initial results from her PhD have been published in Enzyme and Microbial Technology, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology and Journal of Molecular Liquids.