Spokespeople

holds a PhD in biology and completed her doctorate at the Justus Liebig University Giessen and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg in the field of molecular embryonic development in 2002. Working in the research department of an in vitro fertilisation clinic in Sydney, Australia, Dr Schaft initially worked on the differentiation of human embryonic stem cells, but then moved into increasingly responsible management positions, both leading scientific projects and working in the area of legislative and ethical research regulation. In 2016, Dr Schaft started as a project manager at BioRN, independently leading BMBF-funded internationalisation projects and playing a key role in the strategic realignment of the BioRN cluster.

Dr Schaft has been BioRN's managing director since October 2018.

is Managing Director of the InfectoGnostics Research Campus Jena, the Thuringian innovation cluster for diagnostics and biotechnology. The public-private partnership develops market-ready solutions for the on-site analysis of infections with more than 30 partners from science, medicine and industry.

After studying biology in Hamburg, Jens Hellwage completed his doctorate in 1998 at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine on the topic of immune regulators of the innate immune response, worked as a post-doc at the Haartman Institute of the University of Helsinki (Finland) and from 2005-2012 he headed the junior research group Molecular Immunobiology at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology in Jena. Jens Hellwage is author or co-author of more than 40 scientific publications. From 2005-2012, he worked for the start-up company 4-Antibody AG (now: Agenus) as a unit manager for assay development and as a project manager across sites in Jena and Basel. Since 2013, he has been working in the InfectoGnostics research campus at the interface between academic research and the realisation of diagnostic products.