By Ate Jaarsma
I’m Ate, one of the newer additions of the Deep Purple team. Since I started recently, I thought I would introduce myself a bit. In the beginning of this year I graduated from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, where I got my background in molecular biology. During my master I have mostly been busy with microbiology, in particular competition between bacteria. In my research projects I worked with engineering of antimicrobial peptides, and Contact-Dependent Inhibition (during a stay at Uppsala University). I’m happy to continue this line of work now at Aarhus University as part of the Deep Purple project. In a nutshell, I am looking into the chemical warfare that takes place between microbes living on the Greenland Ice Sheet in their fight for food and space.
Still, the Deep Purple project is very inter-disciplinary and because of that, the field was a bit new to me. The last three months I have been reading a lot, and I found out how much I didn´t know… But a plan for me to work on the coming years is now in place! This has all been made possible in part by incredibly helpful colleagues and Danes in general, who made the move to Denmark really easy. The transition to a new country has been smooth so I felt settled quickly, allowing me to focus on the science. Most of all, it’s wonderful to be back at work. This summer, my productivity was a bit limited to growing vegetables, building an insect hotel, painting (not in the art-sense), and drawing (in the art-sense). So it is amazing to also do science again, most importantly in a real lab with real colleagues around. Something I certainly missed during the past lock-down. Starting a PhD is a dream come true, which still feels unreal now and then when I’m biking along the beautiful Roskilde Fjord to work in the morning… I´m excited for what is to come!
