Petra studied Medicine at the University of Tübingen, followed by post-doctoral trainings at McMaster University and University of Toronto in Canada. She completed her residency at the University Women’s Hospital in Würzburg and then became a senior researcher at the Charité, University Medicine Berlin, followed by a faculty position in Psycho-Neuro-Immunology. She was awarded with a Canada Research Chair in 2006 and accepted a position as Full Professor of Neuroimmunology at the Department of Medicine, Brain Body Institute, McMaster University in Canada. She returned to Germany in 2010 to accept a position as a Professor for Feto-Maternal Medicine at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. Her main research interest over the last 2 decades addressed how the maternal immune adaptation during pregnancy is operational and vulnerable to challenges. She here aims to understand how health and disease in children are programmed during pregnancy. Petra supervised numerous emerging medical and basic science researcher, many of which continue to work in academia. To date, four of her former trainees have become faculty members as various universities. She also serves as Dean of Research of the Medical Faculty since 2018 and is a member on various executive and advisory boards of scientific societies, scientific journals, funding agencies and institutions.