Excited about nucleic acids
I studied biology in Berlin and at Robinson College/Cambridge, and did my Diploma at the Max-Planck for Molecular Genetics where I investigated cycling RNA expressions which control the number of vertebrae in higher animals.
PhD at EMBL
I completed my PhD work at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory/Heidelberg with Anne Ephrussi. We investigated ribonucleic acid motifs important for cellular organisation and body axis formation. I described one element that controls the subcellular localization and works in any RNA and any cell type we tested!
Large data and needing to visualise
With Pavel Tomancak at the Max-Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics I then did a genome-scale investigation of all 14,000 types of RNA a fruit fly can make and showed their changing subcellular localization in development. The data is collected in the Dresden Ovary Table (DOT) and publicly available.
Data vis for life sciences
After completing my time in the laboratory, I was project managing Spim4You, a spin-off idea for imaging software consulting, did a sabbatical as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, and now research how data visualizations can help to communicate biomedical data.