Katrin Reichel

She/Her

I am gay and I am a computational biophysicist at ProteinQure Inc.//

My story of LGBTIQ+ working in STEM story is also related of women being highly underrepresented in my research interest. Starting in high school, where I already joined the computer science class, I felt that the basic computer science class is more appropriate for me than the advanced one, where only the guys attended. I was happy to see that during my undergraduate (Bioinformatics) the distribution was half women / half men with me the only one being gay. During my Ph.D. around 20 % of the lab group were out and proud, which is basically above the 10% threshold of humans being not cis straight. Besides that, in almost all scientific project meetings I have attended, I was/am either the only women or one another female scientist joins the conversation. So, please, everyone who has to say something in STEM do it! It’s not about gender, sexual identity, sexual orientation, it’s about the work you are doing and the results you produce.

Twitter: @katrin_reichel, linkedin: katrinreichel