Marlene Rau (Germany)
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| Hello!
My name is Marlene. I'm a 29-year-old biologist from Marburg, Germany, working as a postdoc in a lab at the EMBL Heidelberg. This means I got a PhD degree a year and a half ago and I am now continuing to work on projects in a laboratory. |
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I originally started studying biology because I was fascinated by the amazing and neat way a lot of things are organised in nature, and I wanted to understand them better to appreciate them more. Nowadays, I work on eye development. I look at zebrafish eyes, which are very similar to ours, and try to understand some more about how this complicated and important organ form, and also what goes wrong in genetically inherited diseases. There are a lot of people born blind or with defective vision. One of my aims is to understand this better so that eventually in the future cures may be found.
But it's not all work and no fun! We have a number of sports and fun clubs at the institute, including climbing, diving, waterskiing and a music club. That is where I spend some of my spare time, but of course also going out with friends, having parties. And I sing in a band and dance Argentine tango and salsa. We also go skiing together in winter.
Marlene Rau |
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Another great thing about my institute is that it is at an international institute, so you get to know people from all over the world and make friends. For example, I had the chance to visit colleagues from Taiwan at home – a place I would probably never have gone otherwise. I like travelling a lot, and in science it's part of what you should do anyway – to meet other people at conferences or collaborate with other scientists or simply moving abroad for some stage of your career. I've lived in Australia for a while during my studies, for example.
Besides, I also work as a freelance science journalist because I like to share my enthusiasm for some of nature's intricacies. And I think it's important to let people know what it is scientists do, and why, and what is important about it. Especially since the idea many people have of science is not quite like the real everyday thing.
Being a scientist is a job for curious people, I believe - and it comes with quite a lot of freedom that you don't find in many other jobs. And even if you have to have a lot of patience sometimes until you get a good result out of your experiments – in the end it's rewarding to have gained some more knowledge on how things work, so I enjoy it!