Dr. Kathrin Brenker studied Molecular Medicine at the Georg August University in Göttingen. During her PhD at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg, Kathrin worked at the interface between immunology and optogenetics. The lack of efficient analysis tools for optogenetic research, forced her (like many others) to solder her own illumination devices to perform experiments. As most people in the field struggle with the same challenge, she decided to start to commercialize the prototypes from her PhD and start a company: opto biolabs GmbH. The team has won numerous prices in the past years including a podium during the SPIE Startup Challenge 2019 in San Francisco and the German Innovation Award Gold in 2023. Today, opto biolabs has 4 Products on the market, sell to North America, Europe and Asia and is the first company to establish global standards in the field of optogenetics.