When I was a child, someone offered me a chemistry set, with a few vials and plastic pipettes, as well as a little microscope and slides. It’s strange really, because no one in my family works in science. I remember taking a a journal and writing down all my experiments, with dates, “protocols” and results.  I suppose this should have been a dead giveaway of what I wanted to become one day, but no, I wanted to be an Egyptologist back then. Anyway, let’s just say that for my studies, I took the scenic road!

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First stop : a boarding school in Orléans, where I obtained my high school diploma in laboratory techniques and biology, meant to form future technicians. After a first internship in a research lab, I figured I wanted to conduct my own research one day, hence I needed a higher degree than planned. After high school, I entered a preparatory class for the entrance exams of engineering schools in France. Although I passed the concours, I took the crazy decision to withdraw in order to go to the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland. There, I lost the battle against mathematics and couldn’t complete the bachelor. But the war was not over, I went back to Strasbourg and completed the third year of Bachelor in Life Sciences, followed by my Master degree in Developmental biology and Stem cells. Now in Munich, I finally made it to the PhD! Regarding my experience, it took me several trials to figure out in which field I wanted to work. I tried oncology, then immunology in Drosophila, followed by mouse stem cell biology at my current lab, and I completed my master’s thesis working at Bill Keyes’ lab on cellular senescence. Finally, I went back to the Torres-Padilla lab for my PhD, because my greatest interest lies in understanding the regulation of totipotency, using the in vitro system of mouse embryonic stem cells. Since my project involves epigenetics and reprogramming in stem cells, joining the Episystem network is a great opportunity, as the workshops and conferences provided by the network will be very helpful.