Dr. Ablasser is Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. She studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and completed her doctorate in 2010. During her training she also spent time in the University of Massachusetts in Worcester, Oxford University and at Harvard Medical School. After her studies she started a research group at the Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Bonn before moving to her current position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. Her work situates around the recognition of viral dsDNA molecules triggering antiviral defenses through the cGAS-STING pathway. In a serendipitous discovery her lab demonstrated that cGAS also recognizes cytosolic chromatin fragments in senescent cells leading to the secretion of SASP factors promoting paracrine senescence. In 2014 Dr. Ablasser was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for Young Researchers and this year she has been awarded the Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators.