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Alumni Profile: David Combosch |
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DAAD grant(s): Diploma Thesis Research Fellowship 2006 for Panama; Predoctoral Fellowship 2007/08 for Boston
Current occupation: Biology Ph.D. student at Northeastern University
Current city of residence: Cambridge, MA
Contact: combosch.d@neu.edu
David Combosch studied Ecology at the University Essen, worked there at the University’s Student Board (ASTA) as Referee for Ecology and was a member of the Students Parliament and the University’s Senate. In 2001 he went on a self-organized study year to the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela. With the Caribbean literally around the corner, he focused on Marine Sciences and fell for the fascination of coral reefs. During his research project on coral diseases, he also noticed the growing importance of molecular techniques. Back in Germany, he thus shifted his career from Environmental Politics to Marine and Molecular Biology.
A DAAD Thesis Research fellowship enabled him 2 years later to go back to Latin America to study the genetics of Pacific corals at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. After finishing his Ecology career in Essen, he worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Dortmund and studied coral reproduction at the Sesoko Marine Science Station in Okinawa, Japan.
Since 2007, David has been a PhD student at Northeastern University, Boston, supported by a one-year DAAD pre-doctoral fellowship. He followed one of his former advisors from Panama to Boston and continues to do research abroad in Central America and French Polynesia. The high quality, the commitment and the impressive internationality of the academic environment in the US and particularly in Boston are the main challenges and pleasures for him in the US. He is, for example, living in a house with five people from five different countries, in the heart of Cambridge in between Harvard and MIT. After his studies, he would like to go back to work in Germany for a while.
Exemplary of his own experience, he mentions a recent conversation with three of his housemates, in which they realized that they all decided upon their careers during their first long-term stays abroad, changing or at least adjusting their pre-existing plans.
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