What are you investigating? 

I am a bioinformatician in the lab of Jan Cools. We are looking at leukemia, T-ALL more specifically. What are the molecular mechanisms behind it? How can we treat it? Currently I have a project in which we perform single cell CRISPR screening to find out what happens in normal ProT cells when you knock out a gene that is often mutated in T-ALL. We can now study a lot of these genes at the same time.  

What’s your favourite thing about your job? 

Certainly the diversity. I am involved in a lot of projects, so I see the leukemia from all sides. Each projects looks at different genes, has different ways of looking at the leukemia, and I find it interesting to discover overlap between it.  

What keeps you busy outside the lab? 

I have one big passion next to research: art. I love to paint. Almost every evening you can find me in my studio. I find my inspiration in the world around me, and as I often travel, this world is quite diverse. I like to show how I perceive the world, which is often absurd with a sauce of humor. There are always multiple ways of looking at situations. My latest paintings are big ones, around 2m x 1,7m, but during lockdown I made hundreds if not thousands of small portrait paintings of models that were on zoom.  If you want to see some of my artwork, you can find it here: www.sofiedemeyer.com/artwork 

How did you start art and science?

Art has always been in my life. As long as I can remember I was doodling away, crafting things, etc. In school I was good in maths and sciences, so I had to first study something serious. Luckily, I also liked this something serious. I love solving problems, understanding how things work, it’s like the world is full of little puzzles. 
I now love the combination of both art and science, triggering the different parts of my brain at different times. They can both give inspiration to one another. 

How do you manage both things?

I paint in almost all the free hours I have, you can find me in my studio at least three nights a week and on Saturday. So, a night at home watching television does not happen often. But as long as I am having fun..