Katharina first joined the Spence group for a summer project in 2021 during her Biomedical Sciences undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, when she became fascinated by the complexity of the adaptive immune response toward malaria. Her project focused on developing an assay for activating T cells in vitro.
Eager to help expanding the repertoire of techniques by which malaria and other infectious diseases could be studied using human tissue in the lab, she undertook her BSc honours project with Phil Spence and Wiebke Nahrendorf.
After completing her MSc by Research degree at Edinburgh, Katharina returned to the Spence lab as a Research Assistant to work on the BIO-004 clinical trial. She is excited to get sucked into the ins and outs of running the trial and even more so to have her research questions answered by the data.
When she’s not in the lab, Katharina can be found exploring Edinburgh by foot, sampling its many restaurants, playing music, or visiting the local library for her next reading fix.