At the cellular level, life depends on structures so small they were once dismissed as simple energy converters — yet when mitochondria fail, the consequences reach across the full spectrum of human illness. Joanna Rorbach, newly appointed professor at Karolinska Institutet, has built her career around understanding precisely how and why that failure occurs, focusing on the protein factories within mitochondria that, when disrupted, give rise to neurodegenerative disease, cancer, and rare inherited conditions. Her work belongs to that quiet but essential tradition of foundational science — the