Featured Eyewirer: @susi

featured eyewirer collage

A behind the scenes look at the Eyewire community.

Meet the Eyewirers who are mapping the brain. Today’s featured Eyewirer is @susi.

Introduce yourself!

My name is Susi (what a surprise :), actually Susanne, but everyone calls me Susi. I’m married and live with husband Roland, dog Georgy and cat Moritz (and mice, birds, slowworms, hedgehogs, frogs, spiders, plants and many other amiable creatures) in a house with a large garden near Basel, Switzerland. In this beautiful environment I can well act out my large love of nature. I for example like to grow plants from seed or from cuttings I have collected during vacations. The result: 3 winter gardens and about 300 potted plants creating a mediterranean atmoshpere. My favorite and one I’m most proud of is a lemon tree, it produces up to 200 fruits per year, with excellent flavour notabene.

I am in retirement age, but still work half-day as a general accountant. I also keep some smaller accounts for friends and local museums. Numerals are kind of hobby of mine, also like puzzles like Sudoku. Mathematics and logics always have fascinated me.

My first professional career though I made in biology. My Masters-work in 1972 covered the 3-dimensional reconstruction of the brain, brain-neurons and olfactory organ of a Caecilian, based on light microscopic sections. You know now, why I just love Eyewire! Of course these times you had no help from computers, you typed the text by a typewriter (and typed several times if you made a typing error), and you had no program like AI presenting the sections and helping you with tracing and illustrating things! All was hand-made :).

Later I made PhD and some years after that studies and publications about the ultrastructure of Larger Foraminifera and their symbionts. A quite interesting interdisciplinary field between Paleontology (Foraminifera are unicellular marine organisms with a shell and are quite important geologic index fossils), TEM, Cell-/ and structural Morphology, Ecology and Marine Biology (The Foraminifera I investigated live in shallow tropical waters). Later on I made TEM-studies on Nautilus-siphon and sensory cells. You see, the reconstruction of cells as we do in Eyewire and finding relations between shape and function has always been a most interesting topic for me!

Why do you play Eyewire?

I guess I answered this question above. I like to do something for science in a field that reminds me of earlier times. I like playing Eyewire because every cube is new, and many of them are quite challenging. I like being a Scythe and Mentor and the involved responsibilities. I like to be part of a great, friendly, cooperating family! And I must add a compliment to all admins and engaged people in Boston and Princeton: You do very well! As an example: As beginner, 3 years before, I got a personal mail from Amy showing my monthly cube-count. I was just overwhelmed being contacted by one of the “bosses”, and it inspired me to go on even better :).

How did you discover Eyewire?

I read about citizen science projects in a Swiss paper. Out of Foldit, Galaxy Zoo and others, I liked Eyewire best.

Share a story that helps the world get to know you.

Lol, think you know me now. Aside family, science and nature, I love the sun and the sea. My favored vacations were in Maldives, New Caledonia, Caribbean and Mediterranean countries like Italy and Greece (where I met Nseraf, he likes cooler temperatures, and we once discussed to change countries…). Earlier days I was diving, these days I just snorkel to detect the wonderful world under water. Motorhome-trips brought us to Canada and the west-coast of the USA and their impressive National Parks. (Sequoia-seed I brought home didn’t want to grow though, not even under my green fingers – that’s ok, we do not have as much room in Switzerland….)

Anything Else you’d like to add?

I’m not good in linguistics. Aside German, I “speak” French and English, and understand Italian. But I have problems to convey something in words even in mother-language, and small talk is not my thing. I hope Eyewirers do not misunderstand, when I sometimes do not take part in chat conversations or when I comment something (aside language problems, I’ve got a quite dry humor).

Many things therefore I tend to describe in pics, and naturally a further hobby of mine is photography. I create yearly printed calendars for our friends, photobooks of vacations and friend’s weddings, birthdays etc. and I also like to create collages and sort of art in photoshop.
Eyewire is big part of my life.

Would you like to be a featured Eyewirer? Submit your questionnaire here:

Featured Eyewirer Questionnaire

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