Jenny Wagner

Jenny Wagner's CV resembles cosmic structure growth: during her undergraduate studies of physics, mathematics, and computer science, she worked as an intern in a quantum optics lab. Then, she completed her diploma with a thesis in particle physics at CERN before she scaled up to apply machine learning and pattern recognition in biophysics. After obtaining her PhD from Heidelberg University in 2011 and a short postdoc time between biophysics, chemistry, and medical applications, she finally turned to the largest scales in the cosmos, when she received her first grant from the German Research Foundation to pursue her own research in astrophysics in 2014.

Since then, her work has dealt with the influence of models on the interpretation of cosmic observables. Among other things, she shows that the existence and distribution of so-called dark matter is strongly model-driven. Her results on the influence of models in strong gravitational lensing were honoured with the "Prize for Courageous Science" from the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of the state of Baden-Württemberg in 2020.

Jenny Wagner is currently a visiting scientist at the Helsinki Institute of Physics at the University of Helsinki and at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taipei. From 2012 to 2024, she was (co-)editor of the textbook "Physics for Scientists and Engineers" by P. Tipler and G. Mosca at Springer-Spektrum Verlag.

She is also active in science communication via YouTube and through public lectures on topics in astrophysics and cosmology all around the world. In 2025, she accepted the invitation to join the scientific advisory board of Germany's humanist society, the Giordano Bruno Foundation, to further disseminate fact-based reasoning.