Dr Felicia Schlotthauer

Dr Felicia Schlotthauer is a molecular biologist with a background in virology and immunology research. Felicia moved to Melbourne to pursue a PhD in the Viral Entry and Vaccines Group at Burnet Institute under Professor Heidi Drummer.

After successful completion of her PhD in 2022, Felicia gained experience in quality management while working as a Quality Assurance Officer for the Burnet Diagnostic Initiative (BDI).

Following her excursion into the world of quality management, Felicia took on a role as Research Officer in the BDI, with the main focus of identification and feasibility studies of new diagnostics to feed the development pipeline. In the last four months of the role, she was the inaugural acting team leader of the scientific team.

As the Project Manager in the BDI, her responsibilities include managing all product development projects to assist the impact of the BDI, through the commercialisation of intellectual property and research outcomes. This includes identifying research to be licensed, providing expert advice on commercialisation, building networks to identify opportunities for research commercialisation, and managing stakeholders. 

More recently, Felicia has been appointed the Commercial Project Manager for the Office for Research Translation (ORT). The ORT brings together research translation initiatives including Burnext, the Burnet Diagnostics Initiative (BDI) and the Burnet Vaccine Initiative (BVI).

Prior to moving to Melbourne and joining Burnet, Felicia completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Luebeck in Germany. During this time, she also gained industry experience during an internship at the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim.

• 2022: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
• 2017: Master of Science (MSc), Infection Biology, University of Luebeck, Germany
• 2014: Bachelor of Science (BSc), Molecular Life Science, University of Luebeck, Germany

• Adjunct Research Fellow, Monash University, Melbourne

• Mar 2023–present: Project Manager, Burnet Institute
• Nov 2022–Mar 2023: Research Officer, Burnet Institute
• Jan 2022–Nov 2022: Technical Writer and Quality Assurance Officer, Burnet Institute

• 2022: Young Investigator Award, The 27th International Symposium on Hepatitis C and Related Viruses
• 2020: Ideas Jam seed funding (project team grant)
• 2019: International Travel Award, Australian Centre for Hepatitis Virology