Sylvia Badurek (Austria)
| Hi! My name is Sylvia. I am 27 years old, originally from Austria, and currently in the final year of my PhD studies in molecular biology at the Mouse Biology Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Monterotondo, Italy. |  |
Actually, at age of ten, I wanted to become a novelist, but this early passion for the fine arts was soon superseded by my interest in nature and science. I used to dry and collect plant leaves, could spend hours watching ant colonies and was reading my older brother's biology textbooks just for fun. Ok, I confess this sounds a little bit odd, but these were the beginnings, and when we first learned about molecular biology in high school, I realised that what I really wanted to do was to find out how life works on a molecular level and decided to become a scientist.
In reality it was not such a straightforward way to get to that decision, because I knew from my father (who is a physicist) that the life of a scientist is not always easy, but my parents encouraged me to follow my interests and passions. So I studied biology at the University of Vienna with specialisation in genetics. I spent my third year as an exchange student in Scotland at the University of Glasgow, which was a wonderful experience and prompted me to go abroad again for my PhD studies.
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Sylvia Badurek |
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So I have been working in a European research institute in a little town close to Rome for more than three years by now. We are organised in research groups of about 10 people per group. Each group works on a specific subject and consists of PhD students and postdocs (young researchers who have finished their PhD, but do not have their own groups yet), who all have their own projects within a certain field of study, but who also collaborate with each other and people from other groups, and even other research institutes and universities. Each group also has a technician who helps the PhD students and postdocs with some routine work and of course a group leader as boss, who is an experienced scientist who does mainly theoretical and administrative work, planning the projects, giving advice to the students and postdocs on the experiments and organising the budget.
As we all come from different countries the main language spoken in the lab is English. The main interest of our lab lies in studying the function of a receptor protein in the plasma membrane of neurons, which is important in controlling the development and survival of neurons as well as the establishment and maintenance of specific connections between neurons, which is important for learning and memory processes. We hope that the results of our basic research will contribute to a deeper understanding of the molecular processes underlying learning and memory and, ultimately help to find a cure for neurological diseases such as Alzheimers and schizophrenia.
When I am not in the lab I love going to the cinema, meeting friends, reading books, playing basketball and travelling.
Schools:
Ostarrichigymnasium BG/BRG Amstetten
Bernoulligymnasium BG/BRG Wien 22