Stephanie Diezmann

At the age of six my mother took me for the first time to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin (http://www.museum.hu-berlin.de/). I suddenly fell in love with Brachiosaurus brancai (biggest complete dinosaur skeleton ever found and exhibited in a museum) and the butterfly collection (the minerals were not that exciting). That was probably my first contact with biology and the idea of evolution. Since then the Museum was the place to go for adventures; traveling abroad was not feasible at that time in East Berlin. Fourteen years later I explored the lecture halls of the Museum as a Biology student of Humboldt University. During my time as a student I worked as a lab tech in the Institute for Microbiology and Hygiene at the Charité (http://www.charite.de/imh/). There I worked on a study of population genetics in Candida albicans. In 2001 I completed my main course in Biology with a thesis on the evolution and phylogenetic relationships among hemiascomycetous yeast.

Now I am a graduate student with Fred Dietrich in the Center for Applied Genomics & Technology (www.genome.duke.edu) and yeasts are still my favorite organisms. In Fred’s lab I work on a comparative study of different Candida species. By analyzing phenotypic and genotypic diversity within and among species I try to understand what makes pathogenic species, such as Candida albicans, unique. I am also interested Saccharomyces cerevisiae and when I am not digging in the soil to get more isolates then I am in the lab, studying resistance to hydrogen peroxide in clinical and wild isolates of S. cerevisiae.

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