Neuroscientist
Susanne first studied biotechnology at the TU Berlin before going on to complete her PhD in biophysics at the ETH Zurich. She then went to Boston to research the neurobiology of Alzheimer’s and related diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She now heads her own research group at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) here in Berlin while also being affiliated with Charité. Her group works to identify the neurotoxic mechanisms that play a role in neurodegeneration, especially in regards to tau proteins and their (mis)functions. Susanne has found a way to master the difficult translational leap from test tube to human by validating biochemical, biophysical and cytological results from experiments on postmortem human brain tissue. Projects within Susanne’s research group are thus concerned with protein phase separation and aggregation, and with cytotoxicity in neurodegeneration.