Prof. Blettner majored in statistics/economics/social sciences at the Universitiy of Dortmund, Germany. After completion of her diploma in Statistics in 1978, she was a research and teaching assistant at the Department of Statistics at the University of Dortmund. After working as statistician/programmer in Essen and the Word Health Organisation (Lyon, France), she moved to the Radiation Epidemiology Branch, Program of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, National Cancer Institute (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA), where she completed her Ph.D. thesis in 1987. After being a lecturer in medical statistics at the University of Liverpool, Prof. Blettner joined the Division of Epidemiology of the Germany Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ) in Heidelberg as Assistant Professor. From 1999 until 2001 she was full Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Medical Statistics and Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Bielefeld. In 2003 Prof. Blettner joined the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz and became Director of the Institute of Medical Biometry, Epidemiology and Informatics.