Jana Wittmann

PhD student

Jana Wittmann

Office Y55-K-88

Tel +41 44 635 31 81

Jana was born in Karlsruhe, Germany where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in physics with extended mathematics and a minor in computer sciences from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). During her studies at KIT, she took the opportunity to do an Erasmus term at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in Ireland.
As her interest in life sciences grew, she completed her studies with Master of Science specializing in biophysics at Heidelberg University, Germany. She took part in the DESY (German electron synchrotron) summer student program, where she worked on a project on optimized sample delivery for X-ray serial crystallography experiments under the supervision of Dr. Dominik Oberthür in the Chapman group at the Centre for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL).

Jana carried out her Master thesis, where she developed an automated 4D particle tracking pipeline for kinetochores, at European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg with the Ellenberg group under the supervision of Dr. Julius Hossain.

She joined the Gilmour lab in November 2021 as a PhD student examining fibroblast development, function and interaction in vivo. To achieve this, Jana will study fibroblast networks in zebra fish embryos using optogenetic tools for manipulating these and image and data analysis methods for quantification and interpretation of the results.

When she is not in the lab, Jana enjoys outdoor activities, including running and skiing, knits and sews some of her own clothes or studies foreign languages, currently Japanese.