Dr Natalya Schmerl holds the position of Technical Team Leader: Commercial Testing within STEM. She is a materials scientist by education and received her PhD in surface and interfacial analysis in 2018, specialising in electron and ion scattering spectroscopies.
Natalya joined UniSA in 2018 working as a Senior Technical Officer and then transitioned into a Research Associate/ Senior Research Engineer position for 3 years. In this time she worked on both industry and academic projects in a range of discipline areas such as metallurgy, thin film coating, electrically conductive polymers and 3D printing of polymers.
In 2020 the University created a mask testing and synthetic blood facility as part of South Australia’s COVID-19 response, and Natalya worked with this facility from its formation, becoming facility manager and was the facility leader through the NATA certification process. In 2022 Natalya became part of the Microscopy Australia team and worked with the X-Ray diffractometers at Mawson Lakes, running samples and performing instrument maintenance.
In 2023 she transitioned her NATA skill set over to STEM Commercial Testing with the Australian Flow Management Group (AFMG) and the Structural Material Assemblies Group (SMAG).