What is driving and motivating you personally?
I am a very curious person and I try to apply learnings and insights to both my private and professional life. This means that I am fully bought into the concept of constant learning and informed risk taking. To accept the idea of learning both from successes and failures has allowed me to explore new ways with a good amount of confidence.
You studied biology - what inspired you to pick this discipline?
Studying biology has fascinated me since school because every aspect of life is connected and follows evolutionary paths that connect from single genes to the ecosystem. The initial spark to study biology in university came from my sports teacher who was very passionate about connecting the biochemistry of nutrition and training to athletic performance.
After your PhD thesis and work in cancer research, you opted for a corporate career. What was driving that decision?
The long and short of it was simply the need to earn money and secure income for my family. At that time, academic contracts in Germany were relatively short timed. I also felt that I had spent enough time in research and was eager to move to something else. My daughter was already six years when I moved from the academic field to business life.
How exactly can Tecan contribute to improving healthcare?
Tecan covers the fascinating span from research to the patient. We work with the researchers in biologic and clinical research who discover disease mechanisms. We then move on to work with pharma companies and biotech innovators who convert these insights into the development of novel drugs and medicines. In our engagement with diagnostic companies and clinical laboratories Tecan facilitates the increasingly personal diagnostics of patients, allowing clinicians to prescribe the drugs that will be most effective to treat individual patients.
What is special about Tecan’s role to improve human health and deliver on its purpose?
Tecan facilitates the value chain from innovation to concrete applications for many disease areas like oncology, metabolic disorders, infectious diseases, rare diseases and many more. Most importantly, we do this at scale. At scale means, that we ensure enabling workflows can be used safely and cost effectively to allow as many patients as possible to benefit from such innovation. It also means that we work globally to drive improvements of healthcare in all geographies.
You have a passion for people and corporate culture. Why is this an area of focus for you?
It is my strong belief that the culture of a company is the main factor of success. Clearly, processes and strategy are important guiding rails to ensure consistency and compliance. However, at the end of the day it all comes down to the individual passion and ambition combined with collaboration in teams and across functions that makes the difference. Tecan has a clear set of core values like Trust, Ambition and Highest Standards which are the basis of our “brand house”. To bring these values to life, I strongly believe that it is the behavior and communication of each colleague that brings culture to life. Here at Tecan we like the culture concept of a professional sports team. This resonates to a large extend to how we want to connect personal high energy contribution and radical collaboration of a high performance team. Also, this is why for me diversity in all its aspects is a key enabler along our evolution.
What is your vision for Tecan in 5 years?
Tecan has shaped laboratory automation for over 40 years and empowered researchers and clinicians globally. Just looking at Tecan´s contribution in managing and containing the Covid-19 pandemic is a powerful proof of our impact. Going forward, Tecan will continue to drive translation of innovation from research to diagnostics to address the most pressing issues in disease treatments. Leveraging our strong robotic, liquid handling and regulatory expertise, we will further expand our solutions offering for genomics, proteomics as well as for cell and tissue analytic applications. Driving digitalization is another key strategic focus for us that will be essential to allow users to manage and control workflows and entire labs in research and regulated environments.
Coming back to culture and people – over the next years we will also work with high energy to make Tecan an even better place to work, attracting the best talents and offering an energizing work environment with exciting career development opportunities.
What is important to you?
I strive to have a positive impact on the lives of people around me.
I find energy and passion in teamwork and collaboration aiming for progress particularly around human health.
Working on me to be as curious, courageous, respectful and brutally honest as possible will be my lifelong quest.
What do you do in your leisure time – do you have hobbies?
Sport has always been important to me to balance my energy. Running, tennis, mountain biking, hiking and Nordic skiing are currently my favorites.
My biggest passion, however, is music. I play in rock, brit-pop and R&B bands since I was 20 years old and I actually wanted to make it big with a band during my university time. Well, that didn’t work out exactly, so I continued to play electric bass and sometimes guitar in various bands ever since. Since 2015, we have formed a band at Tecan called the Dilutorz. We are playing at company events, but also at large industry conferences in Europe and the US. The Dilutorz is an all-Tecan employee band featuring exceptional musicians from various functions of the company and different countries. For me it´s a privilege to be part of such a creative group. Our repertoire spans from rap over pop and R&B to hard-rock.
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