Jana Lasser was a postdoctoral researcher in the Section for Science of Complex Systems at Medical University of Vienna and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna from January 2020 to March 2021. In April 2021 she changed to Graz University of Technology. She is also Professor for Computational Social Sciences and Humanities at RWTH Aachen (interim, W3) and Associate Faculty at CSH.

Jana studied physics at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen and graduated with an analysis and modeling of transport networks in nature. In her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Jana combined numerical simulations, experiments and field research to uncover the driving mechanism of hexagonal crust patterns in salt deserts. During her PhD, Jana also spearheaded the effort to develop and implement the Data Literacy teaching curriculum at her university.

Her current research activity is focused on the analysis of disease risk and emotion dynamics from several big longitudinal data sets. Besides her research work, Jana is an active proponent of open science practices and an open knowledge fellow of the Wikimedia foundation.