Romana Schirhagl is Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at QT Sense, a quantum sensing technology company developing biomedical diagnostic tools using nanodiamond sensors. She is also a Professor at the University Medical Center Groningen.

Romana earned her PhD in Chemistry and Biology from Universitat Wien and completed postdoctoral research at Stanford University and ETH Zurich before starting her research group at UMCG in 2014.

Romana has secured over 12 million EUR in research funding including prestigious VIDI and ASPASIA grants and has published extensively in journals like ACS Nano, Carbon, and PNAS. Her research has been validated in over 50 peer-reviewed studies.

QT Sense raised 6 million EUR in February 2025 from QDNL Participations and angel investors, followed by 4 million EUR in February 2026 led by Cottonwood Technology Fund, with additional grants from ONCO-Q and Quantum Forward Challenge.

QT Sense's Quantum Nuova platform enables real-time cellular stress detection at single-cell resolution, with applications in sepsis diagnostics that can detect the condition within seconds and personalized cancer treatment for millions of patients by 2030.