Best female PhD students 2018 - Jorine Eeftens
Next Friday we celebrate the International Women’s Day. In the lead up to #IWD2019, we'll be posting profiles of our 2018 Cum Laude female PhD candidates on our Twitter account. The best female PhD student at TU Delft for 2018 will be awarded at our annual DEWIS symposium on 4 March. With this award, DEWIS rewards the quality of the PhDs dissertation and places her extraordinary achievement in the spotlights. #IWD2019 #BalanceforBetter.
‘Hi, my name is Jorine Eeftens and I did my PhD at the faculty of Applied Sciences. I have a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Molecular Life Science.
In my PhD I researched one of the most fundamental questions in biology: how is it possible that in every living organism, meters of DNA are organised into a cell that is orders of magnitude smaller? Even though this process is essential for all life on earth, we don’t understand it. I’ve always been drawn to fundamental research. If we do not understand the healthy situation, how can we work towards correcting mistakes? I did my research at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, where instead of classic cell biology, I used biophysics to try and understand DNA organisation. Working in an interdisciplinary field is great, and the Bionanoscience department brings people together from different backgrounds. In my 4 years at the TU Delft I was able to make a tiny contribution to the field, but we are nowhere near understanding exactly how it works. That is why after graduating in November 2017, I moved to Princeton University in the USA, where I am now working as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2018 I received an NWO Rubicon fellowship to continue to work on the physics of DNA organisation.’
Read all the interviews with all female Cum Laude PhD students of 2017-2018 here.