Heidi Dvinge (Denmark)
| Hi, my name is Heidi. I am doing my PhD at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the UK. |
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Some kids dream about becoming a fireman when they grow up. Or maybe a princess in puff sleeves and a diamond tiara. Well, I have to admit that as a kid I actually never dreamed about standing in a white lab coat all day, or spending hours at a time at my computer analysing data. Nevertheless, that's where I ended. And what's more - I love it!!
Getting there was a bit of a winding road though. As a little girl I played with My Little Pony and not Chemistry Kits for Kids, and I was never digging around the garden looking for earthworms that I could dissect (much to my mother's relief). But I was always interested in how things worked. Especially living things. Why did the leaves turns yellow and red during the autumn? What was inside me and how did it work? And how did life start and turned into the world I could see around me?
During high school I slowly realised that these were questions that I really wanted to know the answer to. So I started studying biochemical engineering, where I learned a lot about chemistry and biology. But since it was a technical degree I also had to study other things such as statistics and programming, and I discovered - much to my surprise! - that I actually really liked that. So I ended up in bioinformatics, which is basically a mix of biology and computer science. We're examining biological data, but because the amount of information is increasing amazingly these years, we have to develop and use computer tools to analyse it. This means that we're a mix of people with very different backgrounds, which I find very inspiring. Working in science also means that I get to work with people from all over the world. I wouldn't like to work in a rigid 9 to 5 job with someone else telling me what to do all the time. Instead I have a lot of freedom, and we always have to be creative and come up with new solutions to tackle the challenges we meet.
In my group we analyse stem cells. Ultimately, we'd like to know what makes a stem cell change into other types of cells, and how these change occurs. Pretty neat in my view. And it's something where I can see how it relates to myself and other humans, and how it may be useful to others one day. I'm working at the single cell level, where I'm trying to analyse how all the components within a cell fit together, and how cells signal both between and within them selves, to trigger the mechanisms that change them from one type into another. So basically, how can human beings develop from just a single cell? Well, I don't know yet, but I'm sure I will in three years time when I finish my PhD!