I grew up in Jena (Germany), a city of famous poets like Goethe and Schiller as well as influential scientists like Ernst Haeckel, Carl Zeiss, Ernst Abbe or Otto Schott. Here I visited the Carl-Zeiss-Gymnasium, a high school specialized on natural sciences and decided very early that I would like to become a researcher. After an internship at the Max‑Planck‑Institute of Biogeochemistry I moved to Innsbruck (Austria) to study Engineering- , Environmental- & Biotechnology at the Management Center Innsbruck (MCI), with a focus on the utilization of algae for molecular farming. I completed my Bachelor’s degree including an exchange semester at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (IITM, Chennai, India) in 2012 and proceeded at MCI with the Master’s program in biotechnology. Instead of a career plan in pharmaceutical industry, I decided to focus on medical and regenerative research and completed my master’s degree 2014 at the Orthopedic Research and Biotechnology Unit, Children’s Hospital Westmead (Sydney, Australia), specializing in bone regeneration and fracture repair.
I returned to Innsbruck to work for two years as a biomedical scientist in molecular oncology at the Daniel Swarovski Research Laboratory (Department of Visceral-, Transplantation- and Thoracic Surgery), until I had the great opportunity to join the Vascular Surgery Division (Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery) at Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden) and the INTRICARE program in 2017 as an early stage researcher. In my PhD project, I will concentrate on the role of smooth muscle cells in calcification of atherosclerotic plaques, reconnecting to my studies in Sydney in a very interesting way. I am looking forward to great collaborations, discoveries and friendships within this network.
In my free time, I enjoy any kind of outdoor sports (I competed in mountain biking on an international level for 5 years), listening to music (I learned to play the clarinet but have neglected it the past years), drawing, reading and fixing mechanical objects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlRJdEQdbk
