Karen Stetter
This exciting speaker shows that not all PhDs need to stay in academia. After getting her MSc at TU München, Karen Stetter switched to TU Dresden for her PhD. There, she focussed on strain engineering of undomesticated Bacillus species and tool development. For her postdoc, she worked with various organisms, e.g., developing a process for efficient silver nanoparticle formation using Aspergillus spp. and genetic pathway design in E. coli and Pseudomonas. After her postdoc, she spent time as a research scientist at a small start up called FGen in Basel, Switzerland, where she already managed multiple research projects designing, executing, and analyzing experiments for a wide range of customers. When FGen was acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks, she switched teams internally to become a data manager for the Genetic Parts Curation team until finally moving to Boston, Massachusetts, and becoming a Senior Program Leader overseeing multi-million US$ projects on protein engineering, assay development, biosensor development and more.
Working as a Program Leader, she is working on shaping the world of tomorrow from a more practical perspective than most researchers do, while keeping a mentoring position for upcoming scientists.
