Biography
Jennifer is a microbiologist specialising in radiation biology. She received her BSc in Molecular & Organismic Biology from the University of Basel. She then went on to pursue a PhD in Physics at the University of Edinburgh's UK Centre for Astrobiology with her research focusing on microbes under extreme radiation conditions, which included experiments flown on board the International Space Station. After completing her degree she was awarded a NASA Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and continued her research at the NASA Ames Research Center, California, where she worked on developing new clean room sterilisation techniques to support planetary protection efforts. She also supported further experiments that were flown to the International Space Station, designed to investigate bacterial evolution and mutation rates. She is currently working as a research associate in the HSLU Medical Engineering Department's Space Biology group and is contributing to a number of projects including the optimisation of random positioning machine algorithms to simulate zero-gravity, as well as establishing new microbiological analysis facilities.
