Science Slam 2019: Susanne Wegmann

Susanne Wegmann, die positiv auf die Rente blickt, weil sie Demenz erforscht, weiß, das Tröpfchen fest werden, wenn sie im Stress sind und die sich daher locker macht.

Susanne first studied biotechnology at the TU Berlin, then did her PhD in biophysics at ETH Zurich, and then went to Boston to study neurobiology in Alzheimer's disease and related diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Now she leads her own research group at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) here in Berlin and is also affiliated to the Charité and ECN member.

In her group, she is working on the identification of neurotoxic mechanisms that play a role in neurodegeneration, with a focus on research into the (mis)functions of tau proteins. Susanne masters the difficult translational leap from the test tube into humans by validating biochemical, biophysical and cell biological results with experiments on postmortem human brain tissue. The projects in Susanne's group deal, for example, with protein phase separation and aggregation, and with cell toxicity in neurodegeneration.