A personal touch of Anique ter Braake

1 February 2018

My name is Anique ter Braake, Dutch, PhD candidate at the department of Physiology and part of the theme Renal disorders.

When you were a kid what did you want to be when you grew up? Can you tell us something about your child years.  

Apparently my parents knew all along that I would become some sort of biologist. My mom bet on research because of my curiosity, my dad on business because of other aspects of my personality. When I was a young girl I was always looking for bugs in the garden. I would collect all kinds of dead insects in my glass boxes and display them all around the house, which was kind of an issue as not everyone (my parents) really appreciated their beauty the way I did. I was especially obsessed with butterflies and wasps, which sometimes meant that I discovered empirically how insects defended themselves against predators (me). I was curious about all aspects of life and because my parents (smart people) suspected that I was a little too curious, there was a rule that I could only collect dead insects and take those apart... The bottom line is that I always tried to pursue my curiosity, which resulted in me jumping into ponds to pet ducks or catch fish for example, or sitting in the aviary for hours to observe the behaviour of our birds. In retrospect I may have been quite weird as next to collecting bugs I was also obsessed with horses and princesses, like most girls. Anyway, it turns out my parents were right, but the bet on biology-based research or business is still on. Time will tell who is right. Knowing myself it may easily be both, if I find a way to clone myself.

What was your previous academic training, where did you study and why that study?  

After high school I started to study general biology in Leiden. Biology was my favourite subject and I figured that being broadly educated made sense as I did not know yet what I wanted specifically. During my Bachelor I was attracted to conservation and evolutionary biology so this is what I pursued. However, after an internship chasing songbirds at 4 in the morning, I realised that I wanted switch to biomedical sciences to focus more on the medically relevant parts of biology. With my background only in evodevo I worked hard to get into the Cardiovascular Research Master at the VU, which is a specialization of biomedical sciences. I was lucky to be able to do some good internships that filled my biomedical blanks and thereafter I decided to go for a PhD in the same field, with a renal angle. Now, I am studying cellular mechanisms related to magnesium mediated inhibition of vascular calcification in chronic kidney disease, and enjoying every minute of it.

The RIMLS motto is ‘to understand molecular mechanisms of disease’. What does this mean for you? 

I feel that this motto makes the necessity for basic research extremely clear and that I, as a researcher, also need to remind myself sometimes what the purpose of my work is. In a world of molecular mechanisms, we need to understand pathways and molecular interactions that often go far beyond the actual disease you are researching. The challenge is to connect the dots in the right way that it makes sense for clinical cases.

Who is your great example as scientists? And please give a motivation why. 

Some people have role models as external motivators for what they do. I don’t really have that. Of course there are a lot of people that motivate me to get the most out of myself every day. These are people close to me, who I want to impress and make proud such as my supervisors, some colleagues, friends and family. And these are also people that have achieved what I only can hope to achieve one day. However, every route is unique and the dominant feeling I have is that I have to find my own, regardless of what people may have done in the past. But to answer the question, Charles Darwin was a pretty awesome guy. If only I had a finch collection that large. I’m currently trying the same with studying fly diversity of the RIMLS staircase… I doubt this will make me legendary, though.

Which research discovery that you have made has made you most proud?  

While the results of my PhD research are currently making me quite happy, the ‘discovery’ that I am proudest of actually happened (long) before starting my PhD. Together with my research partner, I studied stress coping styles in zebrafish larvae to see if behavioural and hormonal responses to stress depend on personality during my bachelor. We found that we could split these fish into different personalities, such as bold and shy, and that these two groups could be distinguished based on their cortisol response after a stressor. We created all methods and hypotheses together with our supervisors from scratch and the result was actually published. It was amazing to find out for the first time that our own ideas and methods actually yielded results.

Given unlimited finance what experiment would you perform?

I would sequence all authors of Nature papers and find out what the gene responsible for scientific success is. Then, I would use CRISPR/Cas9 technology to create my own superlab and while using a conditional knock-out for Klotho to make them age faster as I have little to no patience.
 

What does your working area (desk, office) look like and what does it say about you (or your research)? 

I am not sure if I want my desk to be a reflection of my personality, as the longer I am a PhD the more disorganized my desk seems to become. There are calendars displaying people on horses and with/on rowing boats which I try to hide. My colleagues seem to think I like calendars as I keep receiving them for my birthday. There is a 96-well plate in which I collect my flies and there is a day planner, which I use to keep track of my to-do lists. The free space that is left is usually filled with pens, drawings of cellular processes, an issue of JASN open at page 2424 since 2015, pipet tips (?) and cables for my laptop.

Nominate a colleague to be in the spotlight and what would you like to ask him or her? 

I would like to ask Lisanne Gommers how she managed to grow all those extra hands. Teach me master.

What type of person are you, quick insights:

a) Mac or PC?                                : Mac. Of course.
b) Theater or cinema?                 : Theater
c) Dine out or dine in?                 : Dine in and have desert out.
d) Ferrari or Fiat?                          : Ferrari, Fiat falls apart.
e) Shopaholic or chocoholic?      : Shopaholic
f) Culture or Nature                      : Nature