Susanne Mertens is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics and head of the astroparticle physics department. She is working in the field of experimental astroparticle physics and deals with some of the most fundamental questions in physics, such as the mass and properties of neutrinos, the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe and the nature of dark matter. Her research focuses on both data analysis and the development of new detector technologies for large-scale research projects to detect these fundamental building blocks of our universe. Prof. Mertens is involved in many of the world's leading research collaborations, often in leading positions as well, for example as co-spokesperson of the world-leading experiment KATRIN for measuring the neutrino mass, as PI of the TRISTAN project, a planned extension of KATRIN aimed at the detection of sterile neutrino detection or as PI of the ComPol project, a satellite mission to measure the X-ray polarization of the X-ray binary star system Cygnus X-1.