A/PROF JENNIFER ZENKER

MONASH UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA

A/Prof Jennifer Zenker’s scientific journey started at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), where she obtained her PhD in Neurobiology. Next stop was Australia, starting her PostDoc at EMBL Australia (Monash University), shortly followed by a move to Singapore to IMCB, A*STAR. During her Postdoc, A/Prof Zenker specialised on live imaging of early mouse embryos which led to several seminal discoveries, including first author publications in Science (2017), Cell (2018) and Nature Protocols (2017). She was also awarded three international postdoctoral fellowships, from the prestigious Human Frontier Science Fellowship, German and Swiss National Science Foundation. She then embarked as an independent group leader at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI, Monash). Her research group contributed to the generation of iBlastoids (Nature, 2021) and discovered RNA asymmetries in early mouse embryos (Nature Communications, 2023). In 2019, she was awarded the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Azrieli Scholarship. This was followed by an NHMRC Ideas Grant (2020) and an NHMRC EL2 Investigator Grant (2021). As a real mark of her scientific excellence, A/Prof Zenker received the Sylvia&Charles Viertel Senior Medical Research Fellowship (2023), the Eduard Kellenberger Medal (2023) and the ANZSCDB Emerging Leader Award (2025).