Sabine Schmidt (Germany)
| Hallo! My name is Sabine and I work at EMBL. |  |
When I was at school, my favourite subject always was biology, maybe because I love animals and my sisters and me always had several different types of pets. I like dogs, cats, guinea pigs and hamsters. We had a huge garden where we spent most of our time. But later I was also interested in all the other fields of biology. I didn't like math, physics or chemistry as much as biology, but still much more than most of the other subjects. For me these logic subjects were so easy, once you understand it, you don't have to be afraid of any exam any more.
In Germany in the last two years of school, you have to choose two subjects in a higher level, so I chose Biology and English because I knew thatif I wanted to go into biological sciences, I would need to speak English, and it was a very good decision.
After finishing school, I still could not decide whether I wanted to study biology, molecular biology, environmental biology or veterinary medicine. So first I went to a technician school to learn to be a technician for biology, to have more time to decide and have a deeper insight in the life in a lab. This school was big fun, I loved the work in the lab and nearly every subject had something to do with the different fields of biology, and of course math, physics and chemistry, which was not a problem at all.
After finishing the technician school I studied biotechnology. So I finished my degree as an engineer of biotechnologies.
At EMBL I work in the Genomics Core Facility, we do service for EMBL groups and groups all over the world in different fields of genomic research. I mostly work with systems to search for the different expression of genes in different diseases like cancer. I don't have my own research projects, but I have many different projects from different groups all over the world, which makes it very interesting, and I get to know a lot of people from everywhere. And we speak English all the time, otherwise there would be too many different languages.
I my free time I still have my pets, now it is a dog and a horse, I do dressage riding and I like to dance, everything from classical ballet up to salsa, I play piano and of course I like to go out with friends.