Foteini Christodoulou (Greece)
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| Hello!
My name is Fay. I graduated from the University of Sussex, UK, with a degree in Molecular Genetics in Biotechnology. I am currently doing my doctorate at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. |
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Just as someone who is obsessed with fashion would love to work for Vogue magazine, I feel lucky to work at EMBL. My passion is science, and EMBL is an institute where one gets bombarded with the latest trends and news in science, just as for the fashion world in Vogue. Both the EMBL and Vogue are run by young and dynamic people who want to be pioneers in their fields, and this is exactly the environment I like.
My interest in science started because of the great biology teacher I had at high school. It was the chapter on molecular biology that really impressed me back at school and made me decide to become a scientist. Later at university, I was introduced to the fascinating theories of evolution and with time I learned that some of these theories could be tested using molecular biology as a tool! Before I realized, I ended up doing my PhD in this exact field.
I like to think of my research project as a romantic one: we are trying to understand how the brain evolved. The human brain is very complex with many subunits, but it started off as a simple organ and gradually evolved into something more complex. The last ancestor of humans (and many other species) that had this simplistic brain is what interests me, because I would like to know how it all began.
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Sea worm (Platynereis dumerilii) |
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This is why I am working on a sea worm, which we think is quite similar to this last ancestor. In particular, I am looking at a part of the brain that is very ancient in terms of the functions that it controls: thirst, hunger, sex drive, reproduction, aggression and other basic functions. I want to find out how a chemical pathway that is crucial for the development of the brain works in this worm. We can then compare it with the pathway in other organisms to see what has changed during evolution.
To keep up with the fast pace of cutting-edge science, I dedicate a lot of my time in the lab to reading, in parallel with doing experiments. But I still have time for my hobbies. I do all kinds of indoor court sports and my favourite one is volleyball! When the weather is good I play tennis, and in the winter I try to ski every weekend! Other than sports, I spend a lot of my time searching for cool music and mixing it using my DJ decks.