Eva-Maria Duerr

My role as a volunteer involved running seminars to prepare exchange students for their exchange (both German students going abroad and international students coming to Germany) and to help them settle back in after their exchange. I also interviewed teenagers looking to spend time abroad living in a host family. Now I work on revising and updating training materials to ensure diversity & inclusion is part of all seminars.

As a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Dr. Maja Köhn, I am working on developing new chemical biology methods to study protein phosphatases as part of an ERC-funded team.
This involves a range of molecular biology and cell culture methods, such as cloning, transfection, cell treatments, co-immunoprecipitation, Western blotting and MS-based proteomics experiments. Throughout this project I have designed assays and developed methods to validate them based on emerging published results. My ability to grasp new concepts quickly and foresee and solve problems are essential for progress of this project.
I have also gained experience using a range of software, ranging from GraphPad Prism and Perseus for data analysis, R and R Studio for data handling and visualisation to Adobe Illustrator for communicating results.

My role as a school convenor involves the representation of undergraduate students on the School Executive Committee as well as the coordination with the class representatives in the school and liaison with staff. I have organised and chaired meetings with student representatives and staff as well as social events for students in the school and brought student issues to the School's Executive Committee.

Learning Assistant in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, TCD, for the module Metabolism for 2nd year Science. The job involved preparing and giving small group tutorials to students on the topics covered in lectures (carbohydrate, lipid and amino acid metabolism and bioenergetics).

Working student in the Research Unit Protein Science My tasks included cell culture of primary cells, stable isotopic labelling with amino acids in cell culture, prefractionation of primary culture cells, protein digestion, quantification of newly synthesised proteins based on mass spectrometry data and analysis of selected reaction monitoring data.

Working student in the Research Unit Protein Science My tasks included cell culture of primary cells, stable isotopic labelling with amino acids in cell culture, prefractionation of primary culture cells, protein digestion, quantification of newly synthesised proteins based on mass spectrometry data and analysis of selected reaction monitoring data.

Final year project in synthetic organic chemistry: "Towards the synthesis of analogues of the modified nucleobase preQ0" In the course of this project, I synthesised a range of compounds that could potentially be used to investigate the effect of tRNA modifications. During the course of the project I not only developed my practical skills in synthetic organic chemistry but also deepened my understanding of biochemistry. In the course of my degree I have taken modules covering all disciplines of chemistry as well as some biology and mathematics modules. My optional modules include chemical biology, medicinal chemistry and computional chemistry.