Carina Baer de Oliveira Mann has been a professor at the TUM School of Natural Sciences since 2023 (Picture: Astrid Eckert).
From A-levels in Portugal to a professorship in Germany
At the age of 19, Baer de Oliveira Mann moved from the Portuguese coastal town of Cascais, west of Lisbon, to Munich. She also considered Frankfurt and Zurich, but it was the structure of the degree program at TUM that won her over. “The focus of the degree program and the research topics at TUM sounded exciting,” says the TUM Alumna about her decision at the time, adding: ”I had a tough time.” Living alone for the first time, going shopping, meeting new people – in addition to a demanding course of study – was a lot. At home, she was one of the best A-level students, but here she failed half of her exams in the first semester. She lacked prior knowledge of Bavarian, so she sat down and made up for it. At the time, it also helped that she felt she was in good hands with her fellow students and lecturers: “I really liked it after all,” she explains. So she stayed. For her doctorate, Baer de Oliveira Mann moved to the LMU Gene Center and found the topic that would determine her future career path: Nucleotidyltransferases, or NTases for short – proteins that help to activate the body’s own immune defenses.
Prof. Baer de Oliveira Mann with her son and the certificate for the professorship at TUM (Picture: Philipp Baer)
We understand more and more, and that’s really exciting.
We: That’s her and her team, but that’s also the next generation of scientists: “Doing research as a team and seeing how the trainees are passionate about how they start their careers is something very special.” The TUM professor takes an hour every two weeks for each doctoral student, regardless of how much else she has to do; these appointments are blocked, which is important to her. She knows how overwhelming the academic path can sometimes feel, how difficult it was for her at times. But she also knows what she thinks every day: “I have no regrets”. So she talks to her doctoral students about their respective doctoral projects, about what they want to achieve, about the big picture. Motivation, says Baer de Oliveira Mann, is the decisive factor here, much more important than previous experience.
The career path may also have detours
When she looks back on her own path, Baer de Oliveira Mann finds it particularly important to say that there is rarely such a thing as a straight line in life. It is important to recognize opportunities as opportunities, but also to accept changes, to rethink, to listen to your gut feeling, to take a few steps back if it feels right. Women, says Baer de Oliveira Mann, should also not let themselves be persuaded that something won’t work and should trust in themselves. The path she has found for herself is one that fulfills her every day: “I would prefer never to stop learning,” she says.
She would also like to share these thoughts with the participants at this year’s Women of TUM Talk. Under the motto “Fierce & Fearless: Women of TUM Across Industry, Innovation & Science”, Carina Baer de Oliveira Mann will sit on the podium with two women and speak to the audience from the Women of TUM Network, which now consists of over 19,000 female students, 130 female professors and 40,000 female alumnae.
Carina Baer de Oliveira Mann (Picture: Astrid Eckert).
Bachelor Biochemie 2009, Master 2011
After studying biochemistry at TUM and completing her doctorate at the LMU Gene Center, the scientist researched the functions of nucleotidyltransferases (NTases), central building blocks of the immune system, during two postdoctoral positions at Harvard and Munich.
She has been back at TUM since 2021, where she heads an Emmy Noether Research Group at the Institute of Virology. She has been Professor of Biomolecular Cryo-Electron Microscopy since August 2023.
Here you can see a video from TUM’s “NewIn” series, in which Prof. Carina Baer de Oliveira Mann talks about her research at TUM: Watch video
