Janneke Schwaner

Janneke is an independent research group leader of the ‘Neuromechanics of Movement’ group at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Stuttgart in Germany and a senior researcher at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, while awarded a Dutch Research Council (NWO) VENI talent scheme grant. Generally speaking, in her research Janneke combines unique experimental data, physical modeling, and novel modeling approaches to better understand underlying mechanisms to agile locomotion. Earlier, Janneke was a Marie Sklodowska Curie postdoctoral scholar at KU Leuven, working with Prof Friedl de Groote. Before coming back to Europe, Janneke was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Irvine, working with Prof Monica Daley. During her post-doc years, Janneke focused on how the neuromusculoskeletal system enables navigating complex terrain and it is impacted by nerve injuries (i.e., impacting neural feedback loops), using guinea fowl as a model species. In 2020 Janneke completed her Ph.D. from the University of Idaho in Moscow (USA) working with Dr. Craig McGowan. Her Ph.D. projects included studying the jumping and tail-assisted aerial reorientation abilities of desert kangaroo rats to elucidate the biomechanics and control of extreme organismal behaviors. Janneke is a divisional assistant editor of Integrative and Comparative Biology (the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology journal), an Outside JEB (Journal of Experimental Biology) SciComm author, and first-author on a paper on how professional societies can be more welcoming to parent members. Recently she published a paper on strategies how junior and senior professionals in our societies can become better allies.