IL-1β Signalling→

Jessica's master's thesis carries IL-1β in its title. Having joined G.E.R.N. in January 2025 as a scientific research intern and moved into the thesis phase that August, she began the thesis itself, IL-1β-Mediated Cytoskeletal Remodelling and Transcriptional Reprogramming in Chondrocytes, in March 2026, at the Department of Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery, University Medical Center Freiburg. Her work with this cytokine is practical rather than theoretical. She cultures primary chondrocytes, stimulates them under inflammatory conditions, stains them by immunofluorescence, and reads the outcome out cell by cell through high-content single-cell image analysis. Analysis runs in Excel, VBA, R and SigmaPlot, wherein per-cell measurements become numbers comparable across conditions. She contributed to the assay development and protocol design behind those experiments rather than only running them, and she has trained and supervised the laboratory interns who arrived after her. In December 2025 she presented the work in progress orally at the Sino-German Symposium held with Nanjing Medical University in Freiburg, and took part in the formal roundtable discussion. The pathway set out on the science page is, for her, a bench question she returns to most working days.