Profile

I am two things, a scientist and a mother.

I’ve always dreamt about being a scientist but not the other one. However now, they are both a very significant part of who I am. Becoming a mother is one of the main things that started my passion to communicate science. I developed that sense of responsibility towards my children and all others around me. One day I ended up explaining a figure(a normal cell vs a cancer cell) in one of the review articles to my five year old daughter and she was fascinated by it. Then it suddenly clicked, we can give much more to people around us, especially children, than we imagine.

At work, I do research and I try to publish my results in scientific journals. We work in a lab with colleagues so there is constant communication among us about science, results, frustrations, life, coffee/tea, politics anything you can think of really. 🙂

I spent five years doing a PhD(USA) and five years doing a postdoc(UK). They were both a lot of fun! Now, the next step is to set up my own lab and lead my own group of students and postdocs to do research on my favourite topic, STEM cells in the brain.

wish me luck! 🙂

I come to the lab in the morning and the first thing, I would check on my ~500 tubes of fruit fly stocks with different genotypes. I’d dissect fruit fly larvae to analyse their brains and look for many different molecules in the brain stem cells. I also work with human cells and I use them to test for similarities between fruit flies and humans. I construct fluorescently tagged molecules and visualise them in fruit fly and human cells. Most of the time, we discover great similarities which improves our understanding of humans by studying simple fruit flies.