During my PhD I joined the doctoral representatives of DINI within Helmholtz Munich. This news-post details my responsibilities and accomplishments within DINI.

Second, I joined a group of waterscouts in the Netherlands called Chauken. I help organize events and became secretary of the Foundation for Conservation of the Jacoba II: the Chauken 40-meter ship clubhouse.

Lastly, I organise the bookclub of the IMPRS-LS graduate school that is associated with Max- Planck. This monthly bookclub gathers in a restaurant to discuss books of a monthly theme..

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My Track (Major) called ‘Genes to Organisms’ within this study allowed me to explore both laboratory and computational approaches to research. This was best represented in my 9 month research project:

under supervision of Dr. Giannis Stringlis and Dr. Ronnie de Jonge at the Plant-Microbe Interactions group headed by Prof. Dr. Corné Pieterse.

Following my passions with computational work, I followed a 6 month profile (Minor) of ‘Applied Data Science’ which introduced me to various Data Science related subjects such as cloud computing, data visualization and advanced coding practices in R.

I concluded my Masters by means of my Writing Assignment. Here, students were asked to write a short literature review in the span of three weeks:

For this process, I was supervised by Dr. Patrick Deelen from the University Medical Center Groningen department of Genetics, Franke Lab, in Groningen and Dr. Jeroen de Ridder at the Utrecht Medical Center. In this text, I reviewed the various interpretations of the omnigenic model within human genetics. The subject truly fascinated me and inspired me to look for PhD positions within human genetics.

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During my masters I was an active member of the Kunstorkest – Baroque Student Orchestra (2nd violin). I was their secretary and chair for a semester. Additionally, I was in charge of External Communications within the umbrella organisation KOSMU. Here, I designed a new logo, redesigned the website and created a variety of content on the blog, facebook and instagram pages of both the Kunstorkest and KOSMU.

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I majored in Molecular Life Sciences and followed a minor in Behavioral Neuroscience. One course on compatuational genetics was an internship supervised by Dr. Harm-Jan Westra within the Franke Lab me and a peer student looked into the predictive power of methylation-Quantitative-Trait-Loci to predict gene expression applied in Python.

My thesis ‘The molecular mechanism of surfactin immunity in B. subtilis‘ was done under supervision of Prof. Dr. Dirk-Jan Scheffers

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During my bachelor I was part of the editorial committee of the student associaltion magazine Lifeline, of the GLV Idun student association. I ran a short column called ‘Jolien has seen something small’ ( which rhymes in Dutch), where I would shortly comment on things inspired by my major. Additionally, I would design the layout of a few pages every edition. Since back then the magazine was only in print there is no record of these texts, but please find their current website.
I was the secretary of this committee for a year.

Secondly, I was a member of the sporting student association of Surface, where I learned the basics of windsurfing. Additionally, this is where I joined the Web-Cie (website-committee) and helped create content and build the Surface website.

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The second half of which I followed the tracks of both Nature & Health, and Nature & Technics. For my final profile report I conducted a survey under students and interviewed staff to judge how well the school was suited to cope with a government-required change that would increase the placement of specific children with special needs into the regular classrooms. It was titled ‘is the NCLF Autism Spectrum -Proof?’.

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