Introduction to the project

Post by Malvika Sharan, 2019-07-17

Meet Maria-Theresa!

Maria-Teresa is a 16 years old school goer, who spends her free time learning how to code, playing sports and taking piano lessons. She got introduced to programming a few years ago through the MINT master (detail), a program for high school students to study Mathematics, Informatics, the Natural Sciences and Technology. I had a chance to spend a few days this summer with her when ‘Friends of EMBL’ paired us up as mentor and mentee as a part of a project called ‘Women in Science: Courage to Succeed’.

We both were interested in this project when Barbara Solich, the program officer invited us to be a part of it; me as a researcher with an unconventional computational career at EMBL, and Maria-Theresa for her curiosity in computational biology. I don’t think either of us really understood the meaning of ‘Courage to Succeed’ in this context, but it didn’t matter as long as there was ‘Science’ involved.

The EMBL Teens reporters, Maria-Theresa (right), European Researchers’ Night 2018, IMAGE: Patrick Müller / EMBL

In our first meeting in July, I was already quite impressed to learn how interested she is to understand the scope of informatics in the biomedical field. It didn’t take me long to see that she is not our typical nerd. As much as she likes working on computers, she loves spending time in nature and plays outdoor sports, such as tennis and golf - at a competitive level. As if that was not enough for me to question my own productivity during my teenage years, she shyly shared with me that she has also been playing piano since she was 7, though humbly she denies knowing anything too well and categorizes her experience as ‘only a little’.

We met at EMBL to chat over lunch which lasted for 2 hours. In this conversation I tried to share as much as I could about my background, my origin story, my experience with programming, my job, my parents, life in India, and the current support system for women in academia in general. I wasn’t sure how I could make her time in this project useful, so I went on responding to the questions that she had prepared for me, while she took a few notes. It was quite obvious that we both come from very different experiences and so far we had found only computational biology as an interest that we both shared.

While we walked around at EMBL, I pointed towards a poster that I had put up that morning about the Heidelberg Unseminar in Bioinformatics event on ‘making friends with failure’ that I was co-organising. This led to us talking about how everyone experiences failure, and how little we talk about it. She excitedly added how she steps back when something fails, and learn from them before trying again. Boom! We found another connection and so it was time for ice cream before Maria-Theresa could go back to enjoying her summer holidays.

Maria-Theresa told me about her 2018 expedition to the Silicon Valley hosted by her master MINT program. As someone interested in learning more about artificial intelligence and machine learning, this trip was a dream come true for her. Some highlights from her trip included her visits to big tech companies like SAP, intel, apple, and eBay, and the university campuses of Stanford and Berkeley. Her favorite part was the opportunity to interview several engineers, developers, founders of start-up companies and university students. She shared that it was great to know that ‘failure’ is seen as a usual thing in Silicon Valley. In her interviews, several people told her that it is assumed that 90% of the start-up companies will fail no matter how innovative the idea is. Therefore, people commend risk-taking over the fear of failures.

While Maria-Theresa was getting ready to leave for her bus, Wolfgang Huber, a senior scientist at EMBL, came over to say hello, who I introduced to Maria-Theresa as one of the pioneers in computational biology, who had quit Silicon Valley for the love of research.

I shared with her the aspects EMBL that makes it a vibrant workplace. There are low barriers for collaborating with immensely successful and curious scientists here. One can reach out to others for a chat, and get help in their work relatively easier than other places. In fact, this exact aspect of EMBL makes it a unique place to be working in. On this note, I invited her to spend a few days with me at EMBL, while we could work together on the project ‘Women in Science: Courage to Succeed’. She not only accepted the invitation but added that this could never have happened had she taken a project in wet-lab biology where teenagers need special permission to enter the lab. So, Maria-Theresa will be back next week, and we will learn GitHub, set up a homepage for her and maybe even understand how we can find ‘Courage to Succeed’ in our project.

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