For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in mathematics, but I didn’t know how to apply mathematics in practice. When I studied business mathematics in Karlsruhe, I finally discovered statistics for myself. I immediately found it exciting to recognize correlations from an initially meaningless and confusing data volume using statistical instruments, and to understand which things influence one another and in what form. I completed my doctorate at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, where I helped perform clinical trials and basic research in oncology as a doctoral student and later as a postdoc. When, after 13 years at the DKFZ, I accidentally discovered a job advertisement at BASF that was a perfect fit for me in terms of its content, I applied. Since then, I have been applying my statistical knowledge in research and development, e.g., by using predictive models to help find out which product parameters need to be adjusted in order to achieve the desired properties of the end product. The chemists “tick” very differently than the statisticians, but we quickly develop a common language and it works very well.
