Simone Fulda PhD

Simone Fulda, 40, is an extremely inquisitive person who has managed to turn her passion into a profession. In 2007, the petite woman from Cologne was appointed professor of paediatric research at the University of Ulm (University Children's Hospital), where she is working on the relationship between apoptosis and cancer and the development of new methods for cancer treatment.

When she was a student, Dr. Fulda spent a lot of time studying abroad and she became involved in cancer research very early on. Her interest in apoptosis (programmed cell death) first became apparent when she attended summer academies and during her studies at the Harvard Medical School at the beginning of the 1990s, at a time when many scientists around the world started to focus on the cellular suicide programme.

Programmed cell death was soon connected with the development of diseases and has become one of the most dynamic fields in medical research. Approximately 50 papers are published on apoptosis every day. Simone Fulda became one of the international researchers to work on apoptosis, an area which she found more exciting and challenging than other scientific areas where a lot of research had already been done.