Silvana Konermann

Silvana Konermann is a Swiss-American bioengineer and neuroscientist whose research focuses on CRISPR, genome engineering, transcription and epigenetics, and Alzheimer's disease. She is an assistant professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, as well as co-founder and executive director of the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California.

Biography
Konermann attended Sächsisches Landesgymnasium Sankt Afra zu Meißen in Saxony, Germany, before matriculating in 2006 at ETH Zurich, where she completed her bachelor of science degree in neurobiology in three years.

She then moved to the United States and worked in the lab of Carlos Lois before entering the doctoral program in neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving her Ph.D. in 2016 working in Feng Zhang's group. Since 2017, she has been an HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) Hanna H. Gray Fellow. She has also been a CZ Biohub Investigator and a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, Berkeley working with Patrick Hsu. In 2019, she joined Stanford as an assistant professor.

Konermann's research uses genome engineering technologies to investigate the genetic and molecular drivers of Alzheimer’s disease risk.

21546 Konermann, a minor planet, was named after her, in honor of her 2006 second-place finish in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. At that time she was a senior at Sankt Afra in Meissen, Germany.

In June 2022, Konermann married Irish-American tech billionaire Patrick Collison, the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, with whom she co-founded Fast Grants and later the Arc Institute. Konermann met Collison during the 2004 EU Young Scientist competition.