Kerstin started working at the Sanger Institute in 2000 after gaining a PhD in genetics from Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany. After 2 years working on the reference annotation for the human and C. elegans genomes, she formed her own team to analyse and improve genome assemblies. Her team initially focused on the zebrafish genome assembly, and subsequently expanded in scope to the human, mouse and chicken reference assemblies as a founding member of the Genome Reference Consortium in 2008. Kerstin and her team lead the validation of the assemblies produced by the Vertebrate Genome Sequencing Project and the Darwin Tree of Life Project.