Bio:
Dr. Zenker leads her own research group at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI, Monash University, Australia) exploring the subcellular real-time architecture of pluripotent cells in the living preimplantation mouse embryo and hiPSCs by applying cutting-edge quantitative imaging approaches.

Her scientific journey started at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), where she obtained her PhD in Neurobiology, identifying novel cellular mechanisms underlying diabetic peripheral neuropathy. Next stop was Australia, starting her PostDoc at EMBL Australia at Monash University, shortly followed by a move to Singapore due to the relocalisation of the lab to IMCB, A*STAR (Singapore). During her postdoctoral studies, Jennifer 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). She was also 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 an 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 and the Eduard Kellenberger Medal, both in 2023.