Marlies Oomen never imagined that her seven months internship at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts would turn into a six-year PhD programme: “I had planned to come back to the Netherlands to complete a PhD,” she explains. “I ended up staying in the United States. This was my first international experience. I worked with people coming from different countries and different scientific cultures. There was no turning back.”
“In fact,” Oomen continues, “I was already surrounded by members of the EMBO communities even though I was not a fellow yet. A junior researcher in the lab had applied to the EMBO Fellowship Programme, and my supervisor was Job Dekker, an EMBO Associate Member and native Dutch like me.”
Now an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow at Helmholtz Munich, Oomen investigates transposable elements, remnants of ancient viral DNA found activated after fertilization across numerous lifeforms. Identifying specific elements provides her with the opportunity to understand the regulatory principles in early mammalian embryonic development, when rapid changes occur in transcriptional programme and epigenetic bookmarking.
Oomen describes the process of applying for a fellowship as smooth. “I wanted to experience working in Europe after the United States,” she continues. “My application to the EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship came at the right time for me, as I had already chosen to work with EMBO Member Maria Elena Torres-Padilla. The winter deadline fit my moving needs perfectly. I was very happy when the fellowship was awarded to me!”
It took Oomen a couple more years before she visited the EMBO-EMBL grounds in Heidelberg, as an earlier EMBL meeting she was planning to attend was moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I’m really looking forward to attending the EMBO Fellows’ Meeting later this year. It is crucial for us, young scientists, to come together from different countries and build a network.”
