Janna C. Nawroth, Ph.D. is Principal Investigator at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus (Helmholtz Munich) and Technical University Munich (TUM) in Germany.  She leads the Mechanobiology Lab, which combines high-speed imaging, human tissue engineering, and physics-based modeling to reveal how ciliated tissues drive fluid transport and protect organs. Her group maps airway defense and brain ventricular flows and derives cross-species design rules for ciliary pumps. An ERC Starting Grant (2020) and Proof-of-Concept Grant (2025) launched a program on tissue mechanics and defective mucociliary clearance in chronic airway disease, yielding recent work on structure–function principles of airway clearance (Nat Commun, 2025) and universal flow rules for ciliated organs (Nat Phys, 2024).

Previously, Dr. Nawroth was a Senior Research Associate at the University of Southern California (2019–2021), where she advanced human-relevant lung models for biophysical studies and catalyzed a multi-center “Breathing-on-Chip” study. In industry, she served as Principal Investigator/Associate Director of R&D at Emulate, Inc. (2016–2019), leading Organ-on-Chip programs across airway and liver, including a human Liver-Chip that recapitulates alcohol-associated disease phenotypes and an Airway-Chip that mimics asthma exacerbations. Earlier, as a Technology Development Fellow and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Wyss Institute (2014–2016), she developed assay for studying cilia damage due to cigarette-smoking in a Lung-Chip model, and invented new micropatterning methods for hydrogels. She trained in biofluid mechanics during a postdoc at Caltech’s Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (2013) and earned her Ph.D. in Biology at Caltech (2013), where her work on bioinspired, muscle-powered pumps culminated in a Nature Biotechnology cover article.