Detail

What I offer

As a mentor, I offer you my time, my experience, and an open ear. I work in pediatric cancer research, coming from a background in pharmacy and molecular medicine, and I use human 3D and organoid models to understand how tumors grow, spread, and respond to drugs. I love this science and enjoy sharing it: talking through the ideas, the questions, and the way research actually works. Most of all I am here to support you, to think through your decisions with you, to give honest perspective from someone a few steps further along a similar path, and to be a sounding board when something feels stuck, whether that means feedback on an application or a talk, weighing up a career choice, or simply making sense of where you are. My aim is to help you find and follow what genuinely excites you in science. As a mother of two myself, I am also especially glad to mentor students who are studying while raising a child; I know first-hand that balancing family and a demanding path is no small thing, and I try to be understanding and flexible about it. On a personal note, my own path has been an international one: I come from Serbia and spent time working in a lab in Naples, Italy, before settling into research in Vienna, so I have a real appreciation for international experience and am always glad to encourage it.

I offer also the topic "Studying with a child".

What I expect from the students

What I hope for most is that you show up curious and open. Bring your questions, your half-formed ideas, and the things that puzzle you, and be honest about what you actually want and where you feel stuck, so our time together is time well spent. I have a soft spot for students who take the wheel on their own path rather than waiting to be handed a map. Curiosity, initiative, and honesty go a long way with me, and the best conversations are the ones where we can both speak freely. What I would love to avoid is mentoring that turns into a box-ticking exercise, meetings for the sake of meetings. And if something shifts, or it simply is not clicking, just tell me: I would always rather hear it than watch things quietly fizzle out.

Time constraints for meetings

I am flexible about timing. Rather than fixed slots, I would rather we find a rhythm that suits us both and adjust it as we go, usually I would suggest a meeting every month for approximatelly 1.5h. As for where, I like meeting in person. We can settle on an office or a seminar room, or, if you are up for it, talk things over a coffee. Whatever the setting, the idea is that it feels relaxed enough to actually talk.

What else I would like to say

A little about me: I am a pharmacist by training (Mag. pharm.) with a PhD in Molecular Medicine, and most of my career has centred on therapies for childhood cancers. I did my PhD at CeMM (Research Center for Molecular Medicine, Vienna), where I now also mentor, working on high-throughput drug screening, which taught me a lot about rigorous, collaborative science and led to papers in Nature Chemical Biology and Nature. Today I focus on 3D and organoid models, metastasis, and oncology more broadly.

What I would most like to pass on is that a research career is rarely a straight line, and that is fine. Experiments fail and plans change, and the detours are often the interesting part. I am not one for checklists; I would rather motivate you, share what I have learned, challenge your thinking, and remind you that you can do demanding science and still have a life outside it.