Rumiana Dimova
Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces
Editor, Membranes
Biophysical Journal

At a cocktail party of non-scientists, how would you explain what you do?

This is (almost) a true story. It was not a cocktail party as such, but just a party with two “camps” of guests. One of them consisted of friends from my institute. The others were mainly from the circle of political scientists. I was fed up with communicating only with people of my “camp” and went straight to the political scientists group. Naturally came the question of what do I do. I said, “Well, look at your skin — it is composed of tiny little cells and these cells have a membrane to keep them safe and sound. This membrane would not allow bad things to enter your cells and kill them. It has to be tough not to break, but soft to deform, and depending on what swims around it, it can change. This is what we do in my group: We look at how different molecules, that swim around the membrane or from which it is composed, alter its properties.” Some days later, the person that asked me this took me to a dinner and on the paper tablecloth of the restaurant, I started drawing little heads with legs (to explain lipids as the building blocks of membranes) that would then make round vesicles. Later, he married me. One day, he told me that he is proud he knows there is a difference between lipids and vesicles. I specialize on the giant ones and recently even published “The Giant Vesicle Book”, which is both giant and about giant vesicles. We are still happily married with two kids and the book decorates our library.

How do you stay on top of all the latest developments in your field?

You might laugh, but for the last year or so, I do that by following some nice feeds on twitter, where I have come across tons of interesting research. And of course, I am happy that I have very invested students and postdocs who bug me with papers that we occasionally discuss in our journal club.