Camilla Gottlieb Andersen participated in 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting; novel protein structure in starch mobilization study

Camilla Gottlieb Andersen participated in 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting; novel protein structure in starch mobilization study

Women in Research #LINO75: Camilla Gottlieb Andersen - Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings Ethics and Social Impact in Focus

Published 6 August 2026 by Ulrike Böhm

Women in Research #LINO75: Camilla Gottlieb Andersen

Camilla from Denmark is a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark.

She combines structural biology and biochemical approaches to understand membrane transport proteins involved in carbohydrate trafficking in plants and plant-microbe interactions.

Camilla participated in the 75 th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting (#LINO75 – Interdisciplinary).

Enjoy the interview with Camilla and get inspired:

What inspired you to pursue a career in science

What inspired me to pursue a career in science was mostly my gut feeling. It is the feeling of “needing to know” that still keeps me going every day. When I was about to finish my master’s project, I had a brief moment of panic because I could not see myself doing anything else. Soon after, I applied for a PhD.

Who are your role models?

I am lucky enough that I get to surround myself with talented young researchers every day, who inspire me to become a better scientist and to grow as a person. I often admire my peers’ abilities to juggle multiple projects in a meaningful way, set hard boundaries, stay calm in stressful situations, or resolve potential conflicts. My peers therefore often act as my role models.

I have also been fortunate enough to attend many international courses and conferences and meet other young female scientists from all around the world, many of whom have had to leave their home countries and families in order to pursue a career in science. These women are one of my biggest sources of inspiration, and it is a pleasure to follow their scientific journeys. I truly feel part of something bigger when we happen to be in the same country and can meet to catch up.

How did you get to where you are in your career path?

I never saw myself as a researcher, but my mother is a lab technician, and I was often with her at work as a child, where I was fascinated by the way the world transforms when you step inside a laboratory. The strict rules for how you had to dress and work in order to keep an environment sterile, how coffee was only allowed in certain areas, how a room that looked like any other on the outside could be filled with fish tanks on the inside, and how they kept an elephant foot in their freezer. These visits always left me mesmerized and ignited my curiosity.

In school, I was absolutely terrible at languages, and I was often reminded of this, which didn’t help. Luckily, I thrived in STEM-related topics instead, such as chemistry, physics, and mathematics. I used this to shape my education and steered away from anything that remotely resembled the humanities, which is also why I went to a technical high school, often the unpopular choice where I am from.

After I finished high school, I had two gap years where I worked and travelled while figuring out what to do next. I wanted to study mathematics or medicine, but I did not have a good answer when people asked me what I would use mathematics for, and my grades were not high enough to study medicine. After a lot of back-and-forth, I ended up studying molecular biology. I quickly realized that my interest in biology was very low, but I loved inorganic chemistry and calculus, which made it clear that my decision not to pursue medicine was probably for the best.

During my bachelor’s studies, I had a course dedicated to studying the structure and function of proteins, and I immediately fell in love with the complex field of structural biology, which to me is the perfect overlap between mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology. I later learned that it is also a field that requires a high level of technical skill and sometimes extreme patience. I am still growing into the patience part.

This newfound passion guided my subsequent practical training, first in X-ray crystallography and later in cryogenic electron microscopy. I was initially trained by local experts but also went abroad to four different countries to learn from the leading figures in these fields. The skillset I have today is therefore a refined mixture of accumulated knowledge at my local institute, state-of-the-art theory and practice, and my own personal experiences.

What is the coolest project you have worked on and why?

I am lucky enough that all of the projects I have worked on have been super cool, either in a technical or biological way. I have always had the guts to say hard no to projects that, in my eyes, would be boring. The absolutely coolest project is one that I got involved in towards the end of my PhD, which is a collaboration with a research group in Germany. In this ongoing project, we study starch mobilization in plants and have found that the structure of one of the central proteins is truly novel. I think it is so rare to come across something that has not been described in the literature before, and it sometimes gives me butterflies in my stomach because I am just so excited about it.

What’s a time you felt immense pride in yourself

Recently, part of the work I did during my master’s project got published in one of the most prestigious journals. While this is objectively seen as an outstanding achievement in the scientific community, it is not so much the publication as the work itself that makes me proud. I obtained the featured results during a time that has been one of the most difficult in my life. I started to feel the pressure of other people depending on my results, which made me anxious about being around my colleagues, who all of a sudden were more interested in my project than their own. While I was still getting used to navigating such a situation, one of my close family members suffered from a permanent brain injury. Every day when I woke up, I had to navigate between wanting to escape from reality in my work and a personal need to support my family. This was a time when I felt an astronomical amount of pressure just by being present. No one expected me to deliver, but I still did.

Another time was during my PhD, where I had my heart set on attending a very prestigious international course in cryo-electron microscopy. My PhD supervisor and others continuously told me not to apply; it would be a waste of my time as it was too competitive and too expensive. I ended up applying anyway, got selected, and wrote 16 grant applications to private and public foundations that covered all costs. It is the single most outstanding experience I had during my PhD, and frankly, my PhD supervisor agrees.

What is a “day in the life” of you like?

My days are quite variable, which is one of the things I like about being a scientist. A regular day for me starts around 7 am, when I am woken up by the church bells in my neighborhood (I despise alarm clocks). I often have a cup of black coffee and plain yoghurt for breakfast in bed, while I either read a chapter or two of a book, always fiction. This gives me a calm mindset to start the day.

I always bike to the university, which is about five minutes away, so I could walk, but by the time I leave my apartment, I like to be as efficient as possible. This is partly true for the rest of the day, whether it is filled with wet-lab work or office work. I do sometimes get caught in a pattern of using less important tasks as a way to procrastinate completing bigger tasks, which I have learned to recognize as a sign of my plate getting too full.

A typical workday for me is from 9 am to 5 pm. We always have a 30-minute lunch break at 12 pm sharp, where the entire group joins. I use this time to take a mental break from work, and we often discuss a wide range of topics, from politics to reality TV.

When I am done at work, I like to have a social and sometimes active thing planned, which could be a workout with a friend or going for a swim in the ocean. This shifts my mind from efficiency and optimization to a calmer state, and I often struggle to mentally pause my work otherwise.

What are you seeking to accomplish in your career?

As a female researcher, I often find it nerve-racking to be open about my high aspirations for the future. I think this partly comes from having spent most of my scientific career in environments with very few female leaders. This is part of the reason why I hope to become a future leader in science and act as a role model for other young women. Whether this would be by running my own research group or as a public science communicator, I still don’t know, but both career paths seem appealing to me. I strive towards being a strong scientist who is respected among my peers, no matter their gender.

What do you like to do when you’re not doing research?

I have about a million hobbies, and sometimes they also overwhelm me. The thing is that I love starting projects. I have renovated most of my apartment by myself, and I would probably still be doing it if my partner would allow me. I also enjoy being creative, but it very much comes in waves, where I will knit three sweaters and then put them on hold for months. I have always been an active person, and I used to be an equestrian when I was younger. Now I use sports as a source of getting new energy and being together with people. I often play padel, solve crossword puzzles, go for a run, work out, or play a game of football. As long as there is a possibility of winning, I will be happy to join.

What advice do you have for other women interested in science

Just do it. Try it out, see if you like it. While being a full-time researcher is not for everyone, I am sure that some aspects of science are. Thanks to social media, the image of female scientists is changing, especially among the younger generations. For many years, however, women in science have been faced with the idea that science and femininity could under no circumstance coexist. My advice to other women wanting to pursue science is therefore to be who you are, be visible, be confident, be feminine, and always claim your space. You have the right to be here.

In your opinion, what will be the next great breakthrough in science

It is crazy times to be in science, especially as a structural biologist, as so many major breakthroughs have completely reshaped the way we work within only a handful of years. These breakthroughs have also been acknowledged by the Nobel Prize organization, with the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry being awarded for the development of cryo-electron microscopy, and more recently in 2024, when it was awarded for computational protein design. We are living in a time where high-resolution structural information on proteins is more available than ever before, so one of the challenges we now face is not acquiring information but how to effectively use it.

With the rising access to computational power, I think we will see an increased number of collaborations between computational and experimental biologists using in silico approaches to understand protein motion and behavior, which is typically not explained by structural information alone.

Solving structures of proteins and protein complexes in their native environment is also progressing; however, technical development is still required to increase the availability of these approaches and to move the resolution limit. I think we will see advances towards these aspects on the instrumental side. Add-ons for beamlines and microscopes that aim to push the boundaries of time-resolved experimental setups are also ongoing, which could provide a dynamic dimension to the otherwise motionless structures.

In general, I think future and current experimental biologists need to be open to the idea of exploring biological questions from a computational angle to grasp and conceptualize the complexity displayed by biological systems.

What should be done to increase the number of f