What is the topic of your PhD project and what does your work look like in practice?
Before I started, my laboratory performed a forward-genetic screening in Drosophila melanogaster, and they identified certain genes with potential roles in neurodegeneration. During my PhD, I will mainly work with some of these genes, corroborating their implication in neurodegeneration and understanding the molecular mechanisms behind them related to axonal degeneration.
In practice, I am now mostly behind the computer getting to know the topic and reading literature to set up my first experiments. However, this will change soon, and I will spend more and more time in the lab with the flies.
What has your career path been so far and how did you come to your current position?
After graduating from Biotechnology at the University of Valencia (Spain), and my unforgettable Erasmus in Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy), I knew I wanted to continue discovering the field of biomedicine while exploring the world. That is why I came to Nijmegen, to do my MSc Biomedical Sciences at Radboud UMC. I spent two amazing years in the Netherlands, and because I didn’t want to leave, I started looking for PhD jobs in this country. It was difficult for me to find a topic that matched my interests. However, with my current position, it was love at first sight.
What does your perfect weekend look like?
On the weekends, I like to discover new places. I usually take the train or my bike to visit different cities or explore nature. Something I really like about the Netherlands is that it is so small, and it has a lot of nature while also having a lot of cities. This gives me a lot of options and makes it very easy to do these things.
What is an important life lesson you have learned in the past?
As a perfectionist, I compromise my work-life balance quite easily. But luckily during my master's, I learned how unhealthy and sometimes inefficient that is. For this reason, now I try to have a balance between work and social activities.