Krista defends her PhD

Krista defends her PhD

19 Jun 2023

Immensely proud of Krista for defending her PhD with flying colors - big congrats Dr. Gert for a brilliant PhD defense on Bouncer’s role in determining compatibility between sperm and egg in fish!

During her PhD, Krista discovered Bouncer’s species-specificity between zebrafish and medaka gametes, and established medaka as a new model organism in the lab. Moreover, Krista single-handedly established a zebrafish-medaka reverse hybrid system as a powerful tool to study parental contributions during embryogenesis. Krista stood out for her full dedication to her research, which culminated in a total of 8 (!!) manuscripts - a heroic body of work with key findings addressing the mechanism of fertilization and zygotic genome activation. Thank you for all your contributions in and outside of the lab! We wish you all the best for your future postdoc, whereever it will take you!

A huge thank you also to Krista’s examiners Carmen Williams (NIH, USA), Manfred Schartl (University of Wuerzburg, Germany) and Uli Technau (UBB, University of Vienna, Austria) for their insightful questions and discussion.