Profile

I grew up in a small village in Luxembourg where I spent a lot of time playing outdoors with my friends. I have always loved being outside exploring nature, observing animals, and learning about plants (especially which ones you can eat!). This interest in observing nature, food, and cooking soon developed into a passion for… Chemistry! I was fascinated by how we can use molecules found in nature and “cook” them to improve our lives, including new materials for a sustainable future, new medications for supporting medicine, or new foods for improving health.

This passion for science, in particular chemistry, allowed me to travel to and live in many different countries, meet amazing people, and go hiking across stunning landscapes. Therefore, I am immensely grateful to now call Galway my home, with the breathtaking mixture of amazing landscapes, friendly people, and tasty seafood.

My focus is on creating digital versions of ourselves, like a digital mirror-image. Our bodies are complex machines with many different processes happening at the same time. This includes considerations not only of our very own bodies, but also the millions of microbes living in our gut, as well as the foods we eat. By understanding how these processes connect between each other, we are able to create computer simulations of our bodies. We can therefore simulate what happens if we change our diet or how a disease affects us on a biochemical level.

Our vision is to create Virtual Humans, based on your own health information. This ‘Virtual You’ will be able to give personalized recommendations to you, such as, personalized diets for maximising your health, or what course of medications to take while minimising side effects. These Virtual Humans will enable us to make specific health recommendations to you as an individual, as opposed to a current “one-size-fits-all” approach.

I love starting my day with a freshly brewed coffee. Once ready, my morning is dedicated to catch up with emails, messages, and prioritise my to-do list for the day. I then focus on producing content, involving reading, writing, and sometimes making videos. After lunch, I prefer to interact with people, within my team and with people from teams all over the world. We will meet to discuss projects, progress, and how we will work together over the coming future. After reviewing my notes, I will leave work in the afternoon.

In the evening I like to go for a walk by the sea and work out at the gym before making dinner. My evenings are for relaxing, usually involving watching a series, meeting friends, or reading a book.

Since summer 2020, I am organising a fully virtual summer research programme for young students from all across Ireland. Participants collaborate on challenging research projects in Digital Health, learn about teamwork, science communication, and how to involve communities in health research. I would spend the money on supporting the programme, for example using it on communication materials to disseminate the results to a wider audience and increase access to, and understanding of, digital health, in particular, for young students like you – the future generation of scientists! In 5 consecutive years, we now have 84 alumni from 5 Irish universities, and over 2,000 community contributors!