Katharina Braeutigam

Prof. Katharina Braeutigam moved to Canada shortly after completing her PhD at the Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, Germany, leaving behind a different continent, country and academic system, in short, a different life. She was looking for a new perspective, another scientific landscape and found it in Canada. Two years ago, Prof. Braeutigam joined a faculty of Biology at University of Toronto Mississauga as Assistant Professor.

Prof. Braeutigam discovered that she wants to study plants in her undergrad studies, when she was amazed by “how the most fascinating organisms on Earth shape our ecosystems”. She comes originally from a strong photosynthesis, plant stress biology and plant reproductive background, from working with the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana as well as forest trees. For this, she won national and international awards, and her work has attracted attention in the scientific community and the press.

As a master student, she witnessed and was actively engaged in the incipient stages of bioinformatics starting out with microarray analysis. Since then, the fascination for big data sets and sheer endless possibilities to ask new questions and to extract answers never ceased to amaze her. Now, next generation sequencing and data analysis form a central part of her work and her new lab.

Media availability: Radio, Print/Online