Janna Nawroth is a Principal Investigator at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus in Munich, Germany.
She received her PhD in Biology at the California Institute of Technology, where she studied the structure-function relationships of jellyfish propulsion and used these insights to engineer muscle powered pumps for biomedical research. For her postdoctoral training, she was awarded the Technology Development Fellowship at the Harvard University Wyss Institute. She developed Organ-Chips and advanced imaging technologies with Don Ingber and Kit Parker to study the mechanics of human heart, lung and liver tissues, before continuing this work at the Organ-Chip company Emulate and later at the University of Southern California. In 2020, Dr. Nawroth received an ERC Starting Grant for studying the role of mechanical forces and defective mucociliary clearance in chronic airway disease.
Her group’s primary research interest is to understand the mechanobiology of the airway epithelium. She proposes that chronic airway diseases, such asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), are exacerbated and perpetuated by a change in the mechanical environment of the airways that promotes disease progression and lowers defenses to irritants and pathogens. To investigate this hypothesis, her group studies how normal and abnormal mechanical forces shape epithelial differentiation and remodeling on genetic and functional levels, and how the resulting properties of extracellular matrix, tissue architecture, and mucus affect mucociliary clearance, the primary mechanical defense of the airways. Dr. Nawroth combines three different approaches to study these mechanisms at different spatial scales: Airway-on-a-Chip models, advanced imaging and analysis tools, and physics-based in silico models.
