As our annual Christmas outing we went to play curling at Waldheim Biergarten. Not as easy as it looks, but we quickly got better at it…in the end the decision was really close!

After our paper in nature Metabolism was published, I was asked to write a little piece on my experience setting up a lab in the Nature metabolism Career Pathways series. You can find it here

Publishing, Pain and Perseverance

Another great abbey this year, at the PhD and PostDoc organized retreat of our Excellence cluster SyNergy. What an event to speak in such a beautiful location! Thanks for selecting me as a speaker!

It’s risky to plan a hike on October 30th, but luckily the weather was not too cold…although we still had some light drizzle and not the bright sunshine that we had all the rest of that week. So unfortunately the planned alpine roller coaster trip down from the Schliersbergalm was cancelled as the brakes don’t work on wet tracks. But at least we still could use the trampoline and enjoy the amazing views!

My lab set up a stand and organized tours for the general public for the Open Day of the Max Planck Institutes for Biological Intelligence and Biochemistry, explaining our work by using wooden train tracks as axons and the trains as our mitochondria. They were either transporting little Lego figurines, or the instructions on how to built them locally. A great metaphor and we could even simulate train wrecks to show what happens in disease! Very fun and rewarding!

So proud of Alina winning the Poster prize at the EMBO Meeting on membrane contact sites. Well deserved! I wish I could have been there!

It took two years of planning and then our dream became finally true! With my friend and colleagues, Tatjana Kleele, Julien Courchet and Elisa Motori, I organized and EMBO meeting on “Mitochondria in the nervous system”. Thanks to Tatjana, we held the meeting in Switzerland, in the beautiful town of Engelberg, surrounded by impressive mountains, an old abbey and amazing cheese. Together with the amazing science this was my favorite conference ever. To many happy returns!

For her excellent thesis and impactful work, Tabitha was awarded the Otto-Hahn Medal of the Max-Planck Society, together with five other awardees in the biomedical section. I could not be more proud of her!

So proud of Simone for successfully defending her PhD! Thank you for all the hard work in the past years and for hanging in there despite all the picots your project took! Well deserved mag(m)a cum laude!

So much fun to host the Kleele lab at our beautiful Seewiesen Campus, for fun and science! In you we have found our kindred spirits that share our love for neuronal mitochondria…and were wolf games 🙂