Cell scientist to watch – Britta Trappmann

Abstract

ABSTRACT Britta Trappmann studied chemistry at the University of Dortmund, Germany. She then moved to Cambridge, UK, for her PhD (2007–2011) with Wilhelm Huck and Fiona Watt, where she discovered that stem cell fate is regulated by extracellular matrix tethering. For her postdoc, she joined the lab of Christopher Chen in 2012, first at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, and then at Boston University and The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University; there, by developing in vitro models, she investigated how cells sense stiffness and also identified material properties that impact angiogenesis. In 2016, Britta became a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, Münster, Germany, where her group studies how interactions between cells and their surrounding extracellular matrix regulate cell and tissue function.