Building research groups: three new permanent group leaders

Overcoming challenges

Daniela Thommen is a medical oncologist and immunologist by training. In 2016, she joined the NKI for a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Ton Schumacher, planning to return to Switzerland after a few years. Experiencing the inspiring and collaborative environment of the NKI, she decided to stay on and became a junior group leader of the Precision cancer immunotherapy Lab in 2020. Her research on immunotherapy will hopefully contribute to the development of personalized immunotherapies by identifying new biomarkers or treatment strategies.

Thommen is excited to get this sign of appreciation for her work. ‘The NKI really is one of the best places to do this kind of research, as dedicated patient care and highly innovative research are under one roof. Starting your own lab in the middle of a pandemic has been a challenging experience and very different from how I imagined my start as a PI would be. I am extremely grateful and proud of my fantastic team who took on the challenge to join a new research group in this uncertain situation. The tenure is, first and foremost, a recognition for all the amazing work they did during the last years.

Gratefulness, personal connections, and collaboration

Just after she submitted her tenure package in May, Leila Akkari shared her lessons learned in an honest and personal Twitter thread. She describes what helped her along the way of building her research group. Becoming a mom. Combining the two. She is very open about all this, in an effort to support fellow scientists in their scientific adventure. Recurring themes along her own journey: gratefulness, personal connections, and collaboration.

“Since my early training, I have always wanted to develop my scientific interest in a place where not only research was excellent, but also where I could feel at home. With colleagues becoming friends and trainees forming an ensemble making me altogether excited and profoundly happy to come to work every day. I have felt all of this at the NKI for the past 6 years. Despite such famous and globally recognized group leaders constituting its workforce, everyone here is always approachable, helpful, supportive, insightful. These constant exchanges were absolutely central to making my lab integrated here.”

Teamwork and tenacity

Tineke Lenstra: “getting tenure feels like a recognition for my and my team’s hard work, and we are happy to continue our efforts at NKI in the coming years. We started our journey at NKI 6 ½ years ago. In the first years of our lab, we invested in setting up imaging techniques at the NKI, building new microscopes, writing automated analysis scripts, and adapting cell lines to visualize molecules inside cells. At the time, this felt slow and took longer than we wanted, but it was essential to get reliable and quantitative results. In recent years, this investment paid off, and gave us an advantage in the field, resulting in several discoveries that we could publish. In the future, we will keep pushing the boundaries to move the field forward to understand the basic principles of gene regulation.”

“The NKI has a lot of excellent science and offers an incredibly supportive environment. During setbacks, like when my second son was born with some serious medical problems, my colleagues in the B4 research division did not hesitate to support me and my lab. This experience also taught me what is important in life, which has been a valuable lesson to keep in mind daily, being a mom of two small children while running a lab during a worldwide pandemic. Overall, I am proud and honored that I can keep going to work at such an amazing and inspiring place every day.”