Venera Weinhardt
Venera Weinhardt was a project leader at the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS) from 2020-2025, establishing her group during the pandemic. Her group develops X-ray–based imaging techniques for biomedical applications and their research bridges physics, engineering, computer science, and structural biology, with a focus on understanding structural changes in development, viral infections, and immune cell activation. This is achieved through a combination of innovative sample preparation, soft X-ray microscopy, and AI-driven segmentation methods.
Venera studied physics at Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia before completing her doctorate at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). She was a visiting fellow at the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she optimized soft X-ray tomography for high-resolution 3D imaging of intact cells. Since 2020, she has been leading her independent projects in Heidelberg.
Her research has been recognized with prestigious funding from the European Research Council, including a Synergy Grant to develop soft X-ray microscopy for investigating hepatitis E virus infections. In collaboration with teams in Dublin and Warwick, her group is using microbiopsy tools for targeted tissue sampling, nanometer-scale 3D imaging, and AI-based analyses to uncover cellular alterations caused by viral pathogens. This level of detail and complexity will provide novel insights into the pathogenesis of the hepatitis E virus.
Recent work from her group introduced a scalable “biofilm-in-capillary” system compatible with full-rotation soft X-ray tomography. Applying this to a genetic knockout in Bacillus subtilis helped characterize the structure and function of biofilms at high resolution.
