Finding Success Where Theoretical Science and Practical Uses Meet

I am fascinated by life sciences. I grew up in a nature-loving family with gardening and a lot of outside activities; my father could identify each bird from only hearing its call and he was a very good hand craftsman, fixing everything in our home by himself. In my country, East Germany, kids attended the so called polytechnical school system, which included life science courses from the beginning. I remember, maybe in the fourth or fifth class everybody had to buy a herring in the fish store, and we had to dissect it, it was fascinating for me to see the structured parts of the fish. Once a week, we spent half a day in a workshop, planning our pieces and sawing, polishing, screwing and gluing them. That, and a lot of handicraft work at home together with my father, probably got me into engineering (in terms of technical abilities my mother was completely the opposite).

In primary school, I had a world class math teacher who herself had five children. She inspired us by setting us lots of exercises and it was a kind of competition to see who could do them first, that was fun! There was also a strong inspiration in my family and their friends. The best friends of my parents Prof. Dr. Heinz Leike – a famous researcher in practical plant breeding – and his family, including his two technologically-addicted sons who were a bit older than me, lived close to us. During our frequent get-togethers, Uncle Heinz spoke a lot about his research, I remember for instance hearing about his discovery of breeding orchids in nutrient solutions only without earth. That fascinated me. He and my father and both our families participated actively and with a lot of fun in discussions about those scientific topics.

Besides that, my father was a teacher in history and sports and my mother a librarian. I got many scientific books from my parents, for instance I remember a book about cells, how they are built, how they function; that fascinated me, and I decided to study biochemistry. Our family friend’s son went to study abroad and that inspired me also to look for studies abroad. I went to the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary to study chemical engineering with a specialization in bioengineering. The course was difficult in the beginning since it was in Hungarian, but I succeeded. During my studies, my main interest started to be analytical chemistry, especially modern separation sciences such as the emerging technique HPLC. I did my bachelor’s and master’s degrees as well as an after-master year in the department of analytical chemistry of the Technical University Budapest. It was, at this time, under the leadership of Professor Ernö Pungor, a very inspiring, clever and practical solution-oriented scientist who was well known worldwide, with whom I was in contact until the end of his life.

After finishing my studies, I returned to East Germany to a fully newly constructed “Biotechnicum” associated to the Martin Luther University Halle, Saale, where I did my PhD work in a peptide synthesis group. Here, I applied my knowledge in HPLC separations to the analysis of novel opioid peptides. I was able to convince the peptide chemists about the usefulness of HPLC to characterize their novel peptides, since it was faster, easier to use, more precise and accurate than the established, conventional techniques.

It was the time of reunification in Germany. The two German chemical societies started to establish a common annual meeting of young “German–German chromatographers” in Hohenroda, Germany, where young analytical scientists and their professors held a mini-symposium covering all areas of chromatography. We got to know each other—many personal relationships from that time have accompanied me during my career to this today. Here, my husband and I met the world-renowned Professor Klaus Unger, a great German chromatographer and analytical scientist, in person; he wrote one of the first books about the emerging technique HPLC. Today, HPLC is the main quality control technique in industrial pharmaceutical analysis. We had many inspiring discussions with him, and after his personal invitation, we visited him and his students in Mainz where we learned from his students about his winemaking (he always tasted his new wines with his students – they told us that they measured its pH and found it sometimes to be 2!). He helped us to get in contact with Professor Csaba Horvath to perform our postdoctoral studies with him at the Department of Chemical Engineering of Yale University in New Haven, USA.

In 1991, they established a new program for young East German scientists to join a former Humboldt fellow abroad to perform postdoctoral studies. I was one of two East German young scientists who applied for and received a scholarship from the prestigious German Humboldt Foundation, which financed my postdoctoral studies for three years. During the application process, Prof. Horvath gave me a lot of advice and supported me actively with putting together the strong research proposal needed to apply for the scholarship. My husband applied for and received, also with the help of Prof. Horvath, a scholarship at the Istvan Halasz Foundation.

During our three years of postdoctoral studies in the Mason Lab of Prof. Horvath, both of us learned a lot, especially on the combination of theoretical sciences and practical applications. We both gained many scientific contacts with professors visiting Prof. Horvath. We started to give lectures at high-impact international scientific symposia, wrote our first high-impact publications (writing my first publication with Prof. Horvath took me six months, since it had to fulfil his high quality requirements – “every word is a drop of blood” was a frequent saying of Csaba), we got to know the whole international chromatographic society and found friends for life in the research group. We learned critical thinking, thinking “outside the box” and to look for cooperation with/applications in other scientific fields (e.g., we had meetings and lunches with the mathematician Professor Benoît Mandelbrot, the father of the fractal theory to find cooperation possibilities between HPLC/modern separation sciences and his mathematical fractal models). As many analytical scientists consider Csaba Horvath to be the father of HPLC (he was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times but died in 2004 at the age of 74 – too early), I consider him to be the father of my scientific career. In a group named the “Csabaites”, many former students of Prof. Horvath continue to maintain a strong, functioning network. Many of them pursue a successful scientific and/or industrial career and hold important positions in the pharmaceutical industry and/or at well-known universities worldwide.

After my postdoc years at Yale, my husband Andras Kalman and I returned to Europe. At that time, it was hard for young (bio)chemists to find jobs as too many of them were coming out of universities. Again, Professor Horvath helped me and my husband. He had been invited to give a keynote lecture at a world-known international symposium on modern separation sciences in 1995 about my scientific results on structure-activity studies of proteins with the emerging technique CE. This lecture, he transferred to me, giving me the opportunity to present my results with lots of attention to a broad scientific audience. My future boss, from the Central Analytical Department at Ciba Geigy, Basel, Switzerland, was at this conference and heard my talk. Since they wanted to introduce the new separation technique CE, he contacted me, we spoke and I got a postdoc position with him (my husband found a job just over the river Rhein at Sandoz AG, Basel – also with the help and contacts of Csaba).

I introduced the CE technique at Ciba Geigy that I’d performed and published – among one of the first scientists to do so worldwide – while at Yale in Prof. Horvath’s group. I established myself on the interface between theoretical science and practical uses, developing many new pharmaceutical applications of this emerging separation technique and convinced the management that this novel technique is useful for pharmaceutical quality control purposes.

After giving birth to my daughter Lotti-Luisa in 1996, I established in the following years at Ciba Geigy a modern analytical test method development group with many enthusiastic young PhD students and postdocs who were experts in different analytical techniques such as HPLC, CE, analytical ultracentrifugation (AUC), fluorescence spectroscopy, circular dichroism (CD), matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS), liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) etc. Up to 12 specialized analytical (bio)chemists worked in this group, each an expert in their technique.

We had many discussions in the team to find rational, modern strategies that might solve the challenging analytical tasks. We developed and validated novel analytical test programs using techniques that, until then, had not been used in the pharmaceutical industry to analyze and characterize the emerging complex (bio)therapeutics such as monoclonal antibodies, peptides, proteins, glycoproteins, DNA, carbohydrates, etc. We succeeded in introducing many novel analytical techniques into the pharmaceutical industry and getting them into routine use. The analytical development and later-established quality control group were merged into the follow-up companies Novartis Services AG and Solvias AG in Basel, Switzerland.

Besides developing novel pharmaceutical applications, my team and I continued to publish our results, to promote those new applications and techniques to the scientific world and trigger new developments. Staying in an industrial environment does not circumvent participating in international scientific life, such as giving lectures and publishing. Publishing with high standards can be difficult in an industrial environment, be it due to time constraints or confidentiality. But with hard work, a fantastic, highly knowledgeable and highly motivated creative (young) team, with everybody interested in science and advancement, it is possible and provides a lot of satisfaction to do so (clearly our publishing output was smaller than the one in a university environment, since in industry we must write a lot of reports, standard operating procedures, etc. and afterward come the publications).

I participated as an invited speaker in many industry-oriented but also academic conferences. Among others, for many years, I was part of the scientific organizing committee of the industrial symposium “CE in biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries”, each year organized by CASSS, USA. I sent many of my best students who had grown up in academia to this industry-oriented symposium; it was like an eye opener for them, they realized that there is a solid reason why they are doing a certain kind of research and development, that there is a need for it.

To foster cooperation between academia and industrial research and development, I participated in the organization of several international scientific analytical symposia. There, I usually represent the industrial aspects and initiate cooperation and exchange between academic and industrial scientists. For example, together with Professor Jean-Luc Veuthey (Geneva University) and Dr. Gerard Rozing (Agilent Technologies), I chaired the 27^th International Symposium on MicroScale Bioseparations and Analyses, MSB 2012, in Geneva, Switzerland. Together with Prof. Dr. Eric Bakker (University of Geneva), Dr. Bodo Hattendorf (Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich) and Dr. Marc Suter (Eawag Dübendorf), I chaired the most important analytical conference in Europe in 2023, the Euroanalysis XXI in Geneva, Switzerland.

For many years, until the end of 2024, I represented the Division of Analytical Sciences (DAS) of the Swiss Chemical Society (SCS) in the board and steering committee of the Division of Analytical Chemistry (DAC) of the European Chemical Society (EuChemS). Here, I gained a lot of contacts and friendships with other analytical scientists all over Europe and learned about their academic systems.

I’ve been a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Valais-Wallis, Sion-Sitten, Institute of Life Sciences, Unit of Analytical Chemistry for the last 15 years. My teaching duties comprise general instrumental analytical chemistry/LC/CE and modern separation sciences as well as industry-related topics such as test method validation and pharmaceutical quality management at the bachelor and master levels. I’ve supervised many bachelor, master and PhD theses and postdocs. Based on my scientific and industrial experiences, I established many theoretical and practical courses from scratch, always considering practical industrial aspects and topics like cost, benefit, practical feasibility, etc. That was hard work – “every world is a drop of blood”.

For 14 years now, my group has been performing research in endotoxin (ET) quantification and purification. We developed a quantitative chemical instrumental analytical ET test, which sounds simple but is quite complex. ET analysis is challenging due to their very complex chemical properties, which are a nightmare for an analytical chemist. ETs are built by several fatty acid chains (soluble in organic solvents) and several sugar chains (soluble in water), which differ from bacterium to bacterium that express the ETs. It follows that they aggregate heavily in any solvent and do not appear in samples as single molecules. They are heterogenous and have a very variable structure as well as a large molecular weight distribution even in one sample. They lack properties that an analytical chemist usually uses for analysis, like chromophores, etc. Today, there are no good chemical analytical tests available to identify and quantify them.

On the other hand, ETs are omnipresent in large quantities in our environment. They cover the outer membrane of all Gram-negative bacteria non-covalently (not chemically, only physically bound). Even trace amounts of ETs entering the bloodstream of humans can cause severe immune reactions, e.g., fever, sepsis (blood poisoning) or even death. It follows that ET testing is a crucial quality control requirement for drug release in the pharmaceutical industry. Due to their variable chemical composition, today, ET testing for product development and quality control purposes is performed with biological tests.

The gold standard is the limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL) test. When ETs enter the bloodstream of the horseshoe crab, its blue blood coagulates at the invasion point, preventing the ETs from spreading further and securing its survival. This is a kind of primitive immunoreaction by this prehistoric creature, which is exposed to ETs from the bacteria in the mixed sea and river waters where it lives, such as the Gulf of Mexico. That coagulation principle is used by the LAL test. For the conventional LAL test, the blue blood of the horseshoe crab is harvested, and ET-specific measurement kits are built using it (or recombinant parts of it). For ET quantification, the blood coagulation is measured depending on the amount and kind of ETs used in the test. These biological tests show very large experimental errors and variation (precision: 25%; accuracy: 50–200%) that lead to unreliable test results and conclusions. In addition, those tests suffer from the so called “low endotoxin recovery” (LER) phenomenon, which might even lead to false negative test results and the release of harmful medical products that may endanger human lives.

Conventional ET testing is therefore one of the biggest concerns of health authorities worldwide today. Recently, our group developed a quantitative chemical instrumental analytical ET assay based on HPLC that targets an ET-specific biomarker sugar acid. The assay provides the pharmaceutical industry with a simple, cost-efficient, specific and accurate ET assay that does not show LER. Now, we are working on lowering the quantification limits of the test to the levels required by the Pharmacopoeias, as low as, e.g., 0.25 EU/mL (0.025 ng ET/mL) for water of injection (the kind of water pharmaceutical injection solutions are prepared with). Therefore, we want to improve the sensitivity of our already very sensitive test down to 0.1 EU/mL (0.01 ng ET/mL). That will make it possible to pass the Pharmacopeia entry requirements, a crucial step for operating the assay in a regulated pharmaceutical environment. We want to bring the novel ET assay(s) to market by the creation of a HES-SO, Wallis-based startup “Endolab” planned to be founded in 2025 by one of my female postdocs. 

That is difficult to answer. One finds barriers everywhere, not only in science. It’s more a question of how deeply you let yourself be influenced by them and how you get out.

It was not easy for me to change from Eastern society (East Germany) to Western society. You kind of lose your home, the values you were raised with and the things you were used to. But I had my husband – he is Hungarian – who always supported me and was and is a great partner for finding solutions.

Raising a child in Western society with a lot of pressure to be successful in your profession was also difficult. But I followed the way of my mother, who led a large library with many employees in Rostock, North Germany. She always worked full time when I was little, and I went to nursery and kindergarten, but when my parents had spare time, we did a lot of things together in the countryside; camping, traveling and visiting a lot of cultural events. Every evening the family, sometimes with friends, had dinner together with many discussions and fun around the dinner table.

My daughter Lotti-Luisa was born one year after our return from the USA. Since I wanted to continue to work (I just started my industrial career after three years as a postdoc at Yale), I had to search actively and with a lot of creativity for good and affordable nursery and day school possibilities in Basel, my first workplace after returning from the USA, in Steinen-Hofen, Germany, the village where we lived at that time and later in the larger Lausanne area, where we moved to. It was, in general, difficult to find something appropriate since, at this time, the convention in society was more that mothers stayed at home with their child for at least three years. But following the path of my mother, I found them, enabling me to build and lead my group at Ciba Geigy AG in Basel. I talked to my superiors to reduce my working hours from 100% to 80% and it was possible, so every Wednesday and the weekends, I spent the full day with my daughter, many times writing or reading publications and reports when she slept. I also got a lot of support from the young postdocs and PhD students in my group. We established flexible working hours, from which everybody benefited; sometimes even one of my team members picked up my daughter from childcare, and I could continue a just-started experiment or discussion to the end. They brought her into the laboratory and showed her simple chemical experiments, e.g., with colored solutions that fascinated her (but she did not become a chemist). We got a lot of support from my parents, not only in childcare when our daughter Lotti was little, they were always there to help.

I am proud of my daughter Lotti-Luisa, who is enthusiastically and independently going her own way.

I am proud of my husband, pursuing his own career and being at my side, always a partner in private and scientific discussions and supporting me in any regard.

I am proud that I get a lot of acknowledgments and trust from many of my former and current students, even though I am often asking more from them than other professors. I am proud that they become independent and respected in their own careers.

I am proud of my 88-year-old mother, living alone 1,200 km from us on the Baltic Sea, North Germany, who is still a daily partner for discussions, advice and useful remarks.

I am proud of my scientific network that I know I can always rely on and that always provides interesting and fruitful discussions and support if needed.

Fix the Leaky Pipeline FLP is a career-building program for young women in science in Switzerland. The term “Leaky Pipeline” stands for the decreasing proportion of women who are moving from university studies towards advanced and leading positions in research, industry and science. It gives young female scientists the opportunity to reflect on their professional situations and to develop a strategy for finding the career path that fits them best. The core elements of the program are coaching groups, courses on career-relevant topics, mentoring and networking events. The program – actively supported by all ETH Institutions and the ETH Board – also aims to provide opportunities to discuss alternative career tracks for young female Swiss-based scientists outside the academic system.

The program is financed by the six institutions of the ETH Domain and by the ETH Board of Switzerland. It was initiated in 2007 and is now in its fifth round (2021 to 2024). One of my best female PhD – postdoc students participated actively in this program and benefitted a lot to find her own path.

I was, among other Swiss women successful in science, invited by the program organizers to one of the networking events in Zürich. There, I gave a talk about my career path, what was driving me, what the stumbling blocks were, etc., to a large audience of young female scientists based in Switzerland. I had many discussions with those young ladies on how to organize their jobs and families, whether industry is a suitable and inspiring environment for a young female scientist, etc.

Until the end of 2024, I was a member of the board of DAS of the SCS. We organize, each year in Beatenberg, Switzerland, CHanalysis, a small symposium where young Swiss analytical scientists from all over Switzerland can present their scientific results in the form of lectures and posters. Here, the main analytical players from academia and industry, as well as vendors, are present.

Discussing her presented lecture, I got in contact with a young female postdoc from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (EAWAG); she was enrolled in the Leaky Pipeline FLP program. She asked me whether I could be her mentor. We had several meetings in cafeterias in Bern (she worked in Dübendorf, Switzerland, me in Sion, two hours away by train) and discussed many aspects of her career opportunities, e.g., does it make sense to stay for more years at her prestigious research institute in Switzerland as a postdoc or go immediately for a professorship to Austria (which was what she finally did), how to organize when she will have a baby, etc. It was fun, and I guess it helped her a lot to find her path. 

• Be yourself, follow your own interests, follow your dreams and be practical.
• Do not follow people who tell you to chase the latest trend without understanding them, even if they are your superiors, following fads will not bring you to excellence in science.
• Be aware that without hard work you will go nowhere.
• Go abroad for a while and see new horizons, get new ideas and new work practices.
• Present talks and posters at many international symposia in industrial and scientific areas.
• Build a strong and reliable international scientific and industrial network.
• Build a strong, enthusiastic team around you.
• Look for a partner in life who supports your scientific career.
• Do not give up building a family because of your scientific career, you can have both and it can make you happier.
• Work with people outside your specialization too, which can lead to new possibilities, applications and ideas in your field.
• Participate actively in powerful local and international society/symposia organizing committee(s) in your field that give you useful contacts and broaden your network and knowledge.
• Publish less but with high quality.