GERMANY
From Karachi to Freiburg A biologist from Pakistan thought Germany would be a stopover in her career. Twenty years later, she’s one of the most prominent researchers from abroad BY EVA VON SCHAPER PHOTO LENA GIOVANAZZI
ASIFA AKHTAR, 49, FREIBURG
When she first arrived in Heidelberg, Asifa Akhtar was surprised by a phenomenon she observed at bus stops. All over the picturesque riverside town in southwestern Germany, passengers would appear promptly one to two minutes before a bus was sched40
uled to arrive. Punctual public transportation? This was a big change from London, where she had just received her doctorate in molecular biology.
Decades later, Akhtar still recalls how surprised she was by that sign of reliability, even though she’s lived and worked in the country since 1997. After a long stretch at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, her research took her not around the globe but just two hours by car to the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, where she’s been promoted several times. In July 2020, she was appointed the first international and female vice president of the Max Planck Society’s prestigious Biology and Medicine Section. It’s fair to say she’s now one of the country’s most prominent researchers from abroad. It wasn’t part of Akhtar’s original plan to stay so long in the EU’s most populous country. After completing her doctorate at London’s Imperial Cancer Research Fund, now part of the Francis Crick Institute, Akhtar looked very broadly at opportunities in the US and the UK. But she also became aware of Germany and, more specifically, Heidelberg’s EMBL. The organization had a very high profile in science and did “beautiful basic research” in the areas that interested her, she says. “And that’s how I decided to come to Germany.” Akhtar was born in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, in 1971, but her family moved around a lot. Her father worked for an internationally active bank, which relocated the family to the United Arab Emirates and then to France’s capital, Paris. Akhtar had expected that her own career would lead to just as many destinations. As a scientist, “it’s very common to move between countries,” she explains. All things relating to biology fascinated Akhtar early in life. Now, she sees that human cells interact like an orchestra, and biological research could help that orchestra play a symphony perfectly. Back when she was still a teenager, she chose to study the subject at University College London. Today, her research focus is epigenetics. This rapidly expanding field aims to understand how organisms that contain the same set of genetic information can produce a number of cells with a wide range of functions.