PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

I always loved nature and was interested in art, so in high school, I loved biology & arts classes and I thought I have to pick one of these two when it comes to my future career. I couldn’t imagine myself drawing digitally, so I decided to study biology.

Before I started my Bachelor in biology in Cologne, I did an internship in a laboratory specialized on a genetic disability running in my family & I used blood samples of my family members to investigate its origin.

Afterwards I did my Master in Dusseldorf where I focused mainly on plant sciences, which were my absolute favorites! I did my bachelor & master theses in a lab working on transport proteins in mitochondrial membranes in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. 

After finishing my studies, I went to the Michigan State University for half a year, working on acylsugar transferases in tomato plants. By then I have decided that I want to do a PhD & in 2013 I went to Umeå, Sweden to do a PhD on leaf senescence in Arabidopsis.

THE BEGINNINGS OF DC SciArt

During my PhD I connected back to my artistic roots, but in a different way than I could have imagined before. I realized that scientists constantly need to draw and illustrate their work! Be it for presentations, meetings, posters, grant applications, publications: everywhere we needed to visualize what we actually worked on and I loved it! I could combine my scientific interests and my love for art! 

I started to do illustrations for all my projects and with the time passing, others around me realized this and I got asked to also do work for them. In addition to that, I had some projects about plants going on in my free time and I realized I really loved to draw funny and easy comics about plant-related topics. At some point I got the possibility to draw comics for a scientific journal (Physiologia Plantarum), reaching a much bigger audience.

Needless to say, sometime during my PhD I decided that this is what I want to do in my life! After I graduated, I started working on opening my own Scientific Illustration company called DC SciArt and officially registered it in January 2019. Since then I have been working on making different types of scientific illustrations for other scientists and at the same time, I am learning finances, bookkeeping, marketing, PR & much more. But I won’t dive into details about all this here ☺. I am very glad I made this choice and I am looking forward for my future development and all the illustrations I will be able to do!

MY MOTIVATION

Why am I doing this? I guess it became clear that I really love to combine science and art, but this is only one reason for starting my own company. Another quite big reason is, that I feel my work is valued a lot and I am still able to support science and the scientific community. 

Each scientist I worked with is very glad about having a great illustration about their work and it makes me so happy to see satisfied customers! For them it is very advantageous to have a professionally made illustration, as their chances drastically increase to get a grant for money, get published or find a new collaborator. Most of the scientists are not trained to do well visualized and aesthetic illustrations and more often than not, it is rather painful for them.

With what I do, I cover not only what I love, but also what others need and I am able to build a bridge between a certain scientific topic to a potential audience. I think the best description of how I feel about what I do professionally can be described with “Ikigai”, seen here: