Clinical Translation→

Jessica has spent more time in clinical settings than a laboratory CV usually shows. Between October 2023 and April 2025 she worked full-time as a Pflegehelferin, first at Alpenland Homecare and Nursing at Deutenberg and then at Seniorenzentrum MENetatis in Villingen-Schwenningen, financing her master's degree while studying for it. The work was patient care, support with activities of daily living, infection control and collaboration across a healthcare team. It was not research. It did put her in front of the people whose joints eventually fail, which is a different preparation from reading about them. Her research now sits inside a hospital rather than beside one, since G.E.R.N. belongs to the Department of Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery at the University Medical Center Freiburg and her biostatistics post is at the same institution. Translation, in her case, means the distance between a stained chondrocyte and a patient is short and she has stood at both ends of it. Why that distance still matters clinically is set out on the science page behind this heading.