Dr. Zenker is the head of the Zenker lab at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI, Monash University, Australia) and an emerging leader in the field of cellular architecture of pluripotent cells in vivo and in vitro who is applying cutting-edge quantitative imaging approaches. She obtained her PhD (2012) in Neurobiology at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), identifying novel cellular mechanisms underlying diabetic peripheral neuropathy. During her Postdoctoral studies at IMCB, A*STAR (Singapore) she specialised on live imaging of the early mouse embryo which led to a number of seminal discoveries, including 3 first author papers in Science (2017), Cell (2018) and Nature Protocols (2017) plus 2 reviews in Dev. Cell (2018) and Curr. Opin. in Cell Biol (2017). She was awarded three international postdoctoral fellowships, from the prestigious Human Frontier Science Fellowship (HFSP), the German and Swiss National Science Foundation (DFG and SNF). In November 2018 she embarked on a career as an independent group leader at ARMI. In 2019, she was awarded the highly competitive Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Azrieli Scholarship. This was followed by an NHMRC Ideas Grant in 2020 and a NHMRC EL2 Investigator Grant in 2021. As a real mark of her distinction and scientific excellence, Dr. Zenker received the Sylvia and Charles Viertel Senior Medical Research Fellowship 2022. Since its establishment, the Zenker Lab has published in top journals, including Nature (2021) describing the discovery of iBlastoids, Nature Communications (2023), Trends in Cell Biology (2021) and Development (2021).
Scientific field: Developmental biology, Cell biology
Microscopy background: Image Analysis
Posted by Jennifer Zenker, on 4 September 2023
