Anna Hess studied Production and Operations Management at the Hector School of Engineering and Management at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Alongside her part-time bachelor's and master's degrees, she worked for several years in a company specialising in sensor technology and industrial automation. In her master's thesis in cooperation with the FZI, she dealt with models for optimising weight and balance planning in air freight.

Since September 2019, she has been working as a research scientist at FZI in the IPE research division, with a focus on logistics and supply chain optimization. Her research interests lie in the planning, analysis, simulation, and optimization of complex systems. In particular, she has experience in the simulation of intralogistics and hospital logistics systems, as well as in the analysis and simulation of concepts for the use of autonomous mobile robots.