I was not sure what profession I wanted to pursuit after finishing my Abitur (German high school exam). To get a little time to rethink this problem and to enlarge my horizon I decided to live half a year abroad in Australia. I returned with the decision to study medicine, because of different reasons. The huge variety of fields was a big point, starting from surgery to internal medicine over radiology and human genetics to medical life science. Also the thought to do something meaningful and to have the possibility to work partly in science played an important role.

During my medical studies I decided to work as medical doctoral researcher, because I realized that I wanted to get the knowledge to do basic research, before starting as a physician and having no opportunity to learn the methods of molecular biology and the scientific process during the first stressful years.