Jola was born and raised in a small town in Northern Germany. Passionate about organic chemistry from an early age, she began studying chemistry at Georg August University of Göttingen, where she learnt to cleave C-H bonds under the supervision of Professor Lutz Ackermann. Jola was actually the group's first Bachelor's and Master's student (due to the change from the diploma system to the BSc/MSc system in the mid 2000s). During her studies, she spent a semester at the Stockholm University in Sweden as an Erasmus student in Professor Kalman Szabo's group. In 2011, Jola joined Professor Erick Carreira's lab at ETH Zurich because she was fascinated by oxetanes. From 2012 to 2015, she completed her PhD at the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis (LIKAT) in Rostock, Germany, under the supervision of Professor Matthias Beller, and became familiar with high-pressure and carbonylation facilities - and went off to some more bond cleaving. Another first followed when she joined the lab of Prof. David Sarlah at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US as a postdoc from 2015 to 2016, helping to launch the lab’s MTAD campaign. In November 2016, she returned to LIKAT to begin her independent career as an independent young investigator, and was promoted to Associate Research Group leader in 2022.

Jola's scientific interests lie at the intersection of catalytic functionalisation, method development, and physical organic chemistry. Her research aims to understand and control reactivity at a fundamental level, translating insights into robust synthetic strategies for synthesising complex molecules. She is deeply committed to fostering interdisciplinary research environments.

In her free time, Jola enjoys spending time with her children and in her garden. She loves ridiculously large things (like the universe) and ridiculously small things (like photons and electrons).