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20<br />
Interview Aljoscha Wahl<br />
The redaction <strong>of</strong> <strong>LIFE</strong> got to interview Aljoscha Wahl. He is a pr<strong>of</strong>essor <strong>of</strong> at the TU Delft<br />
at the Department <strong>of</strong> Biotechnology and is also a staff member at the Cell Systems<br />
Engineering group. We went to his <strong>of</strong>fice and got to ask him a few questions.<br />
What is your background and what did<br />
your student days look like?<br />
I’m actually a classic bioengineer. I started<br />
my bachelor as basically just engineering<br />
and then there were possibilities to go into<br />
all sorts <strong>of</strong> engineering, and I thought that<br />
bioengineering was the most interesting. I<br />
was a very eager student. When I studied<br />
bioengineering it was still a different time,<br />
there were way less people involved in it. I<br />
was lucky that I was in an university in the<br />
east <strong>of</strong> Germany. While everybody was going<br />
to the west, I was going from the west to the<br />
east. At my university there was a capacity for<br />
1000 students and yet there were maybe 200<br />
students in the bachelors. And then in the<br />
master we were with 22 students and 11 staff<br />
members. It was a very comfortable situation.<br />
metabolic network. I still apply this approach<br />
today. That’s why I said the job description<br />
was a golden opportunity, it was exactly what<br />
I did, a perfect match.<br />
And are you still doing this research?<br />
<strong>No</strong>, I’m managing research now. It is nice to<br />
be involved in different projects. In the PhD<br />
you’re focussed on just the one project and<br />
now I run five to six projects parallel, and that<br />
for sure gives an entirely different movement<br />
forwards. You’re obtaining more insights and<br />
are working with more people.<br />
You’re also teaching now, what do like the<br />
most about teaching?<br />
I like to see people grow. They achieve<br />
Onderwijs en Carrière<br />
“I did my PhD in Ulrich, a small<br />
village between Aachen, Keulen and<br />
Dusseldorf, with a big research center”<br />
When and why did you decide to come to<br />
the Netherlands?<br />
I had just gotten an email, with a job<br />
description for an assistant pr<strong>of</strong>essorship<br />
and I thought, this is my CV. So I sent in my<br />
CV and I was selected, it was just a golden<br />
opportunity.<br />
What did you research during your PhD in<br />
Germany?<br />
I did my PhD in Ulrich, a small village between<br />
Aachen, Keulen and Dusseldorf, with a big<br />
research center. Even then, it was already<br />
about micro organisms. I was studying an<br />
Escherichia coli strain that was supposed to<br />
produce phenylalanine, an aromatic amino<br />
acid, and we developed different approaches<br />
to basically study this cell factory. I was using<br />
13C tracer experiments, using a substrate<br />
where you modify a carbon atom, and by that<br />
are able to look where the carbon goes into the
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