MICCAI 2018 Daily - Wednesday

You have also done some mentoring for younger students. Do you want to tell us about it? Yes, I like to do that with young people who want to start a career in academics. I have to say that I’ve had more female PhD students than male PhD students. I didn’t choose that particularly, it was just by chance. I really appreciate helping new female scientists to grow up as researchers and to try to push them into the academic world. Do you have your own positive experience of mentoring from when you were younger? Yes, I really appreciate Pierre Jannin . He’s one of my best mentors, as well as Leo Joskowicz . They are really extraordinary. They don’t care about gender and they are so nice with everybody. They are full of advice and I really want to be like them. I am trying to be like them with younger scientists. They are both great friends of our magazine. When you say they don’t care about gender, have you found people who do care about gender in a negative sense? Yes, in my lab I’ve had some bad experiences with people who sometimes make the difference. I would not say that it’s said out loud, but you feel it. You feel that when you’re in competition with some male scientists, because you are seen as a mother. Yeah, I felt that. It’s not said openly, but I often felt it. I’m a mother of three, so I have to deal with family and work, and it’s not always easy. But you do it anyway and you will keep doing it. Yes, I will try to! When you see yourself advancing in your career, what kind of researcher do you want to be? What motivates me the most is to help patients and to help surgeons, so I would really like to see all the prototypes that we’ve built go into the OR and be used in clinical routine daily and for it to help them. Any message for the community? When I was younger, I was quite shy, and one of the things I have learnt is that it doesn’t help. I learnt to be less shy and more self-confident. Now, I see a lot of young people that don’t dare to do stuff. Don’t dare to talk to people, don’t dare to do networking, and so on. It’s a very important thing. You have to overcome your own shyness: try to go and see people, because it always comes up with enriching new ideas. You really have to go and see people and share ideas and try to collaborate. People are friendly around, so you can do it. Yes, people are friendly. Only when you dare to talk to people, you discover they are so friendly and it’s actually really nice! “ I really appreciate Pierre Jannin. He’s one of my best mentors, as well as Leo Joskowicz. ” 20 Women in Science Wednesday