More than once I wondered about how many Marie Curie researchers are based here in Berkeley. In the absence of publicly available official data, I could simply try a personal assessment: about 150 Global Fellowships are awarded every year, and about one hundred of them regard the United States (quite unsurprinsigly, indeed). Then we cannot know where those researchers actually go, but I think it is quite sensible to guess that the most important universities (Harvard, MIT, Berkeley or Stanford, just to mention some of them) are the most favorite destinations. So I had come to the conclusion that at least a couple of those researchers might be here.

Now, in the past weeks I was contacted by a former Marie Curie Fellow, Catarina Ferreira, a Portoguese researcher who had spent her outoing phase in Canada and that has been working on the creation of the North American Chapter of the Marie Curie Alumni Association, which gathers past and present fellows. Again, the list is not available, but Catarina managed to have the European Commission contact all the potential participants in the initiative, telling them to refer to her. About 30 researchers (including me, of course) replied from the US and in this case the list has been shared by Catarina among the group. I immediately took the opportunity to check if someone else from Berkeley was in the list…. and indeed one was there! It is Johannes Schoeneberg, biophysicist from the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Frankfurt.

Also because I needed to clarify some bureaucratic issues concerning my fellowship – and a direct feedback from another Marie Curie Fellow could obviously be very useful – I decided to contact him and last week we had a coffee together (by the way, the very same morning of the international interview which I talked about in one of my previous posts). A photographic proof cannot be missing 🙂

Apart from discussing about the bureaucratic issues that I mentioned above, we naturally talked a bit about our research. Indeed he also has a personal website where, differently from me, he doesn’t talk about stupid things, but he focuses on his research 🙂 Here’s the link. I am not an expert in biophysics, but apparently he does very cool stuff! Plus, he was very kind and easygoing, so it will be a pleasure to meet him again for a coffee.

Precisely due to the complicated process that I discussed above, we don’t know if we are the only Marie Curie researchers here in Berkeley (Johannes was not aware of it either). And naturally it is better to avoid writing to someone here in Berkeley (to whom, by the way?) to ask for such information. No problem, though: for the moment, the two of us are enough!