Katja Schenke-Layland is the Professor of Medical Technologies and Regenerative Medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University Tübingen (MFT). She is the Director of the NMI Natural and Medical Sciences Institute in Reutlingen, the CEO of the NMI-TT GmbH, Study Dean of Medical Technologies at the University of Tübingen, and Project Scientist at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Dept. of Medicine/ Cardiology, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Katja is currently the Co-Editor-In-Chief of Tissue Engineering Part B (Mary Ann Liebert) and Executive Editor of Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews (Elsevier), as well as on several editorial boards such as Matrix Biology (Elsevier), Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering (Elsevier), and Journal of 3D Printing in Medicine (Future Medicine). Katja is a fellow/ board member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), German Central Ethics Committee for Stem Cell Research (ZES), International and German Societies of Matrix Biology, and the European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering and Science (EAMBES). She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, has an h-index of 45 Scopus and has been granted 4 patents.
Katja graduated in 2004 in the area of heart valve tissue engineering and non-invasive imaging under the supervision of Dr. Ulrich A. Stock at the University of Jena, Germany. Another field of interest was how tissue processing (e.g. cryopreservation) impacts extracellular matrix (ECM) structures and cells. She helped pioneer the use of multiphoton laser-based confocal microscopy and second harmonic generation as non-invasive tissue imaging tools. For her post-doctoral work, she joined 2005 the Dr. Robb MacLellan lab at UCLA with a focused on cardiac stem cell biology. Here, her seminal work was to be the first scientist to demonstrate that induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) differentiate towards the cardiovascular and hematopoietic lineages, showing that beating cardiomyocytes could be derived from iPSCs. She then returned 2010 to Germany to join the Fraunhofer IGB in Stuttgart, Germany as a group leader, which was then followed by her appointment as Professor at the MFT and promotion to Department Head and later Director of the Fraunhofer IGB. She remained focused on cardiovascular tissue engineering and move into the areas of in vitro test systems and Raman microspectroscopy, with a focus on ECM proteins. Currently, her research lab at the MFT focuses on the translation of human development into clinically relevant biomaterials and regenerative therapies, and the development of diagnostic tools to assess (stem) cell states and fates, discover therapeutic candidates and diagnose diseases. She leverages her appointments to bridge the gaps between science and industry to drive viable health care solutions, particularly at the NMI, where they focus on supporting local Star-Ups and SMEs.