Biography:

Katrin studied Physics at the Universities of Würzburg, Germany, and New Mexico, U.S.A., before joining Stefan W. Hell’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen in 2002, where she pioneered the application of STED microscopy in biology and the use of fluorescent proteins for live-cell super-resolution imaging. During her postdoc in the same group, she extended STED microscopy for imaging living tissue and contributed to the first in vivo imaging of dendritic spines in the living mouse brain with nanoscale resolution. In 2014, she established her own junior research group at the CNMPB in Göttingen and was awarded the Lennart Nilsson Award in 2015. Since 2024, she holds a professorship in Cellular and Molecular Imaging in Anatomy at the University of Augsburg. Her research focuses on advancing in vivo STED microscopy to study synaptic nanoorganization, plasticity, and their role underlying learning and memory.