Franziska Koller, Ph.D., is responsibleand for content at the Project Genetic Engineering and the Environment (Fachstelle Gentechnik und Umwelt, FGU).
She obtained her Master’s degree in biology with special focus on molecular biology. Franziska completed her Ph.D. at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in the field of microbiology. Her academic studies and Ph.D. included working with various modern molecular biological techniques in the fields of basic and clinical research.
From 2021 until 2025, Dr. Michael Cieslak shared the tasks with Franziska Koller. He worked at the Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and received his doctorate in 2012 in the field of evolutionary genetics and breeding biology at the Freie Universität Berlin. He then did research at the Institute for Infectious Medicine of the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health. The main topics here were evolutionary phylogenetics and population dynamics in order to reconstruct transmission chains of viral infectious diseases. In addition, he works intensively on population phylogeny, evolutionary concepts and their dependence on the genome size of a species.
From 2017 until 2021, Katharina Kawall, Ph.D., had overall responsibility for the FGU. Her academic studies included completing a dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology (MPIIB) in Berlin and at the Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin). Katharina obtained her Ph.D. with special focus on various molecular biological methods/techniques/processes and also gained personal experience with applications of CRISPR/Cas9.