| Andrea Hupfeld (née Kneuttinger) is a research group leader in Biochemistry at the University of Regensburg. Her group focuses on the engineering of photocontrol in enzymes by using a combined organic chemistry, chemical biology, enzymology, and protein engineering approach. Already in high school Andrea became fascinated by molecular mechanisms and therefore studied Biochemistry at the Technical University of Munich. In 2010, she obtained her Master degree with high distinction and was awarded with the Jürgen-Manchot prize for characterizing a DNA repair enzyme. Motivated by this interdisciplinary work at the interface of organic chemistry and enzymology, she continued the project in her doctorate with Thomas Carell at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich until 2014. Driven by the desire to acquire additional professional expertise and life experience outside research, she honed her teaching skills both as a Science teacher in Southampton (England) and a lecturer on Scientific English in Regensburg (Germany), as well as her leadership skills by qualifying as project management specialist. In 2016 Andrea resumed her career in research as a PostDoc with Reinhard Sterner at the University of Regensburg, where she achieved to photocontrol enzyme activity and allostery reversibly and with high light-regulation factors by the incorporation of photo-responsive unnatural amino acids. In 2020 she started her habilitation as well as founded her own research group in which she resumes her work on the light-regulation of proteins, in particular enzymes, using unnatural amino acids - a field, which she dubbed "photoxenoprotein engineering" in 2022. | 
