Profile

I live in a tiny apartment by myself. My boyfriend is South African and currently does a PhD in Switzerland.. as such we spend a lot of our free time and money on visiting each other. I have always been really interested in viruses and wanted to become a researcher who helps finding cures and vaccines for infectious diseases.
My favourite TV show was Game of Thrones before it was ruined by the terrible last two seasons but I also really liked Big Bang Theory and Breaking Bad. In my free time I like to meet friends, drawing landscapes and travel a lot.. but since travel has been restricted for a while now I am mainly at home reading books and watching YouTube.

I am also a writer for an online science magazine and involved in initiatives that attempt to reduce plastic waste in science.

The virus I worked on in my PhD ‘Vaccinia Virus’ is actually the first virus that was ever used as a ‘vaccine’.. that is also were the name comes from. As such it was used to completely eliminate Smallpox from the planet. Before we got rid of it the virus might have killed up to 500 million people… even pharaohs of ancient Egypt have been found to have had the virus (you can find some pox scars on mummies).

There are still a few other pox viruses in the world and some are dangerous to humans. So its important to better understand them. I studied how Vaccinia circumvents the immune system, in particular one aspect that is called ‘autophagy’. In autophagy cells essentially eat pathogens within them up to make them no longer dangerous. It a very exciting part of the immune defence and very effective. But many viruses have found ways to ‘trick’ autophagy and still infect the cell… including vaccinia. I worked on finding out how vaccinia does it so we can better understand what viruses do to cells and maybe what we can do to prevent that.

Now I have moved to a different lab where I don’t work with one specific virus anymore but I am building tools to understand infection better.

Its difficult to say what I do in a typical day because the great thing about science is its always different: On Friday I make a plan about what I want to get done in the next week. You need to be very organised as a scientist!
I then group the tasks into blocks that I can get done each day. One experiment usually takes 3-5 days to complete. So depending on what is happening that day I am seeding cells, clone new DNA plasmids, extract DNA from bacteria, infect cells with viruses or look at cells under the microscope.
When there is some free time where I don’t need to do lab work, I analyse data or I read new research from other people so I can learn new things other people in my field have found out. That way I might get new ideas for my own project… or I have a coffee break with my friends 🙂