Franziska Lissel is currently a TU Dresden Young Investigator, Liebig Fellow of the Association of the Chemical Industry (VCI), and an Independent Research Group Leader heading the Functional Electronic Materials Group (FEM) within the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research (IPF).

From 2020 to 2021, she was appointed as Acting Professor at the Department of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry at the University of Jena. Her research focus is the exploration of electronically active organic and polymeric materials with a secondary functionality: (1) the covalent introduction of redox-active metal centers into conjugated polymer backbones to enable switchable conductance and memory elements; (2) new design concepts for intrinsically stretchable and recyclable semiconducting polymers, which possess a mechanical softness matching human skin; (3) conjugated polymers as a new class of matrices for MALDI MS and MS Imaging to enable the visualization of low molecular weight metabolites; and (4) in the area of interfaces on modulating the interface of coinage metals and conjugated organic molecules and conjugated polymers.

Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar in chemical engineering at Stanford University where she was associated with the Bao Research Group and at KAUST where she worked in the Computational Sciences Group. She was graduated with a Ph.D. in the natural sciences (Dr. sc. nat.) on probing electronic properties through the specific design of organometallic molecules from University of Zurich in 2014 under the supervision of Heinz Berke and was affiliated with the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at ETH Zurich. Prior to this, she studied biology and chemistry at the University of Bremen from where she earned a M.Sc. in chemistry (Dipl.-Chem.) in 2009.

Dr. Lissel's studies and research were awarded with several fellowships and research grants, for example by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences (SCNAT). Next to her academic research, she is actively performing technology transfer in collaboration with multiple industrial partners like IBM Research, Procter & Gamble, and Samsung.