Heike studied Biology at Heidelberg University before joining the Grossniklaus lab (University of Zurich) as a PhD student, where she discovered novel players during pollen tube reception in Arabidopsis. She then moved to Stanford (California, USA) to the group of Prof. José Dinneny (Carnegie Institution) as a postdoc funded by the German Research Foundation. Heike and her team developed a large-scale phenotyping robot (GLO-Bot) to study natural variation of root system architecture in Arabidopsis. Heike then moved back to Heidelberg, where she worked as a lab manager in Michael Raissig’s lab to help establish the lab and build the Brachypodium transformation pipeline. At the same time, they established the leaf succulent Kalanchoë laxiflora as an experimental model system to study different aspects of leaf development. Since May 2026, Heike is leading the research group “Functional Anatomy of Succulents” as an SNSF Starting Grant Assistant Professor.
