Researchers in Germany from the USA and Finland
Scientific home in Germany: Brenda Schulman from the USA and Nina Huittinen from Finland teach and conduct research at German universities.
Brenda Schulman: biochemistry research in Bavaria
It wasn’t the first major breakthrough in Brenda Schulman’s scientific career, but it was a particularly fulfilling one: in a study published at the beginning of 2024, teams led by Schulman, an American director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, and Gary Kleiger of the University of Nevada in the USA showed how cells identify proteins as defective or superfluous. Among other things, this has implications for targeted protein degradation, a new area of drug development. As Brenda Schulman says: “This work is of particular importance to me because it’s a decades-old puzzle that I was trying to solve when I established my first independent research group 23 years ago”.
That was long before she came to Germany. Schulman has been conducting research at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Bavaria, since 2016 and has been a professor at the Technical University of Munich since 2018. Germany has long been a scientific home for the researcher, who has also been a member of the Leopoldina since 2019 – Germany’s National Academy of Sciences.
Nina Huittinen: from Finland to the Free University of Berlin
There wasn’t much that attracted Finland’s Nina Huittinen to Germany at first. When her mother asked her as a teenager if she wanted to learn German, she replied: “What good will that do me?” It wasn’t until she went to the renowned Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) as a graduate student and then again during her doctorate that she changed her mind. Nina Huittinen initially began working at the Institute of Resource Ecology at Helmholtz Centre Dresden-Rossendorf. One of her research interests was inorganic materials that are important for the disposal of radioactive waste.
In April 2023 she moved from Dresden to the Free University of Berlin, where she has held a deputy professorship in inorganic chemistry ever since. As she says: “The professorship is a great opportunity for me to advance my research in radiochemistry while at same time inspiring students and young researchers to opt for this fascinating field.”
