All the preparations paid off, I have been awarded an ERC starting grant to work on the role of phospho-inositides on neuronal mitochondrial biogenesis! Many thanks to everyone who read my proposal and the many mock interview panels. Exciting times lie ahead! Here is also the link to the press release of the MPI.

The original plan was to go hiking and ride an alpine roller coaster at Blomberg, but the weather decided to be nasty. So instead we went to the “Deutsches Museum“, a wonderful museum on science and engineering. My favorite part was the exhibition on “optics”, where we took the colorful picture, but also the old airplanes were really cool. Or maybe the food in the nearby restaurant “Levinsky” afterward was the best part?

We had the pleasure to demonstrate our technique of seeding dissociated neurons into microfluidic chambers live on camera for a video protocol published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). I look pretty awkward when talking to the camera, but Simone seems to be a natural born actress. I recommend watching, it is very entertaining!

What the hell am I doing here? I am standing on Odeonsplatz in the city center of Munich, holding a gigantic ball of yarn. All thanks to the event “Soapbox Science“, which wants to enhance the visibility of female researchers to the general public. So here I am, talking about our research to passers-by…and many are actually interested! I was overwhelmed by the nice atmosphere on this somewhat rainy July afternoon and was happy to answer many questions on how we can keep our mitochondria happy, even when they have to travel such long distances into our axons (the ball of yarn I used to visualize how long an axon can be). Many thanks also to Hari, Alina and Tabitha for showing their support!

being part of the organizing team was more stressful than I thought, but all the more were we relieved when the SyNergy Summer Fair 2022 was a huge success. It was the 10th anniversary of our excellence cluster, so we went all out and organized an exciting scientific program (thanks to Karen Alim for being our keynote speaker and educating us on intelligence outside the brain). But also the non-scientific entertainment was wonderful, from a bouncy castle for the kids, to a magician for the adults. Special thanks also to Alina and Tabitha who staffed one of the kids entertainment tables and made wonderful things with them out of play dough. If you want more arts and crafts, see here.

So nice to be asked to retell our story in an “Autophagic Punctum” by the Journal Autophagy (see here) and provide a model for how we envision that PINK1 translation is needed to target the Pink1 mRNA to neuronal mitochondria. I made a more elaborate version which I am posting here.

but it is finally here! My Postdoctoral work has been published in Neuron. You can find the article here at Neuron or read the beautiful entry on our institutes web site here. This truly is a labor of love done now on two continents with help from so many talented people. I could not be happier!

Thanks for Hari for organizing a splendid lab outing to the bowling alley. We had a lot of fun and excellent food afterwards (thanks to Jana for the suggestion of the restaurant “Die Küche im Kraftwerk“)

We had a marvelous time at the beautiful Partnachklamm. This is my all-time favorite hike, and I hope my lab now agrees with me!