In Berlin she completed her doctoral studies at FU Berlin on the biochemical characterization of molecular chaperones in 2007. From 2008 to 2013, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Northwestern University in Chicago (USA), prior to establishing her own working group at the Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology in Berlin. There, she was a project leader in the NeuroCure excellence cluster. Janine Kirstein carries out research into the molecular mechanisms of protein folding. She is also interested in how mistakes in protein quality control can lead to neurodegenerative diseases