Silvana Konermann

Early life and education Silvana Maria Konermann was born in 1988 in Baden, Switzerland near Zürich. She attended Sächsisches Landesgymnasium Sankt Afra zu Meißen in Saxony, Germany. She received her Bachelor's degree in neurobiology from ETH Zurich in 2009.

In 2010, Konermann entered the Brain and Cognitive Sciences PhD program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined Feng Zhang's lab at the Broad Institute and McGovern Institute for Brain Research as one of Zhang's first graduate students. During her PhD, Konermann contributed to the development of pioneering genetic perturbation technologies, including one of the first systems for genome-scale CRISPR activation. She completed her PhD in neuroscience in 2016, receiving the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award for "outstanding achievement during graduate studies in the biological sciences." Career As a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, Konermann was part of the team that discovered Cas13d, a new subclass of compact RNA-targeting CRISPR effectors. She was named an HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellow in 2017 and a CZ Biohub investigator in 2019. In October 2019, Konermann joined Stanford as an assistant professor of biochemistry. Legacy The minor planet 21546 Konermann was named in honor of her 2006 second-place finish at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

Personal life In June 2022, Konermann married Irish tech billionaire Patrick Collison, the co-founder and CEO of Stripe. Konermann met Collison at the 2005 European Union Contest for Young Scientists.