We congratulate Dr. Jana Kalvelage on being awarded this year's Faculty V - Mathematics and Natural Sciences doctoral prize for her dissertation. The faculty held a ceremony to celebrate the graduation of around 590 graduates. In her doctoral thesis, which was awarded the highest grade of summa cum laude, Kalvelage investigated the unusual cell biology of a particular marine algae. “Dr. Jana Kalvelage has done impressive pioneering methodological work here in several respects, achieved fundamentally new scientific findings and implemented this in the context of a number of fruitful collaborations,” says Prof. Dr. Ralf Rabus, head of the ‘General and Molecular Microbiology’ working group in which Kalvelage completed her doctorate. 

“I love working in the lab and the best thing was when something finally worked after a long period of trial and error,” says Kalvelage. “My best experience was my first successful preparation of a cell nucleus. I had treated the DNA in the nuclei with a blue stain and after countless failed attempts, I was once again sitting at the microscope and everything glowed blue - it was amazing.”

This passion has enabled Kalvelage to overcome all the challenges associated with working on this special microalgae. The unicellular algae of the species Prorocentrum cordatum belongs to the group of dinoflagellates. It is distributed worldwide and can multiply rapidly in warm, nutrient-rich waters and form harmful algal blooms. However, its cell biology and metabolic processes are still largely unknown at the molecular level. Kalvelage's research is contributing to a better understanding of how this organism carries out photosynthesis, how the structures of its organelles are organized and how it reacts to heat stress.

Kalvelage is now preparing an application for research funding together with colleagues from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She wants to investigate the molecular processes during photosynthesis in more detail.