Christa Dern graduated from the University of the Saarland, Germany, with a PhD in Linguistics after completing research in the area of cognitive semantics. She joined the Forensic Science Institute of the German Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) in 1998 and specialized in the area of Forensic Authorship Analysis. She has in-depth experience in handling cases of questioned authorship (authorship attribution, author profiling) and has been active in reporting, research, publication, and university teaching.

In 2016 she became head of the management support unit of the Technical Operational Service in the sub-division Operational and Investigative Support of the BKA. During this time she was responsible for the National AI Coordination Unit, the National Clearing Board Tools and Methods, inaugural chair of the European Clearing Board Tools, Methods, and Innovation (EuCB) and member of the Steering Group of the EU Innovation Hub.

Since 2022 she is director of the sub-division Biometrics at the Forensic Science Institute of the BKA, which comprises the Analysis of Human DNA, Latent Fingerprint Analysis and Face Comparison, Handwriting, Text, Audio, and Speech.
Since March 2024 Christa is chair of the ENFSI Research & Development Standing Committee (RDSC).