“Thanks to my job in agricultural research, I’m making a contribution to the foundations of nutrition. I work for something meaningful. That, and the wide variety of topics, from wine, to soil, through to feedstuffs, is motivational!” says Corinne Jud. Since 1 January 2017 she has been Head of the ‘Method Development and Analytics’ Competence Division (CD MDA). Her remit is manifold: researching, organising, managing – “I have an extremely varied job. The mixture is right.”
Corinne Jud cites getting to know the various activities of the new division, and bringing them together in technical and human terms in order to develop a feeling of unity across the different sites, as the short- and medium-term goals she hopes to achieve. “I want our Division to be a reliable partner for research, whose state-of-the-art infrastructure and methods provide researchers with results on which they can build.”
It’s no coincidence that Corinne Jud (born in 1979) became a researcher. “As a child, I bombarded my parents with questions in an attempt to understand living things” she explains. Her parents eventually got her a leather army shoulder bag in which she could store her flora and fauna guides safe and dry. Her kit also included a whistle for summoning help when she – yet again – became stuck in the undergrowth somewhere.
Corinne Jud attended the Wattwil SG High School. After earning her Matura (the Swiss equivalent of ‘A’ Levels serving as a university entrance qualification), she spent a gap year in Geneva at Ares-Serono SA working as a data typist for clinical trials, and improving her French and English. At the end of this period, her career goal was clear: to work in biochemistry. She enrolled at the University of Freiburg, where she graduated with a bilingual degree. Following her degree thesis on circadian rhythms in 2003, she completed her doctoral thesis on “the influence of light on the circadian clock of mice and humans” in 2009, for which she received a Chorafas prize – a worldwide award for outstanding research – in the same year. Whilst working on her doctorate, she also completed her training in University Didactics.
The next stage of Corinne Jud’s career consisted of postdoctoral posts and a stint as a Group Leader at the Adolphe Merkle Institute for Nanotechnology in Freiburg: from the beginning of 2010 to mid-2011 she headed the Protein Laboratory of the Chair in Soft-Matter Physics, working chiefly on improving the purification of calf-lens proteins. The aim was to investigate the interaction of lens proteins in order to understand the physical and molecular causes of cataracts over the longer term. From mid-2011 she was employed at the Chair of Bionanomaterials, and was responsible for the setting-up and subsequent management of the cell-culture laboratory. At the same time, she was in charge – on behalf of future users – of the conversion of the Garcia Clinic into the Adolphe Merkle Institute. In January 2013, she was promoted to Group Leader, and continued to work on establishing a lung model of the alveolar region in cell culture, with a view to using this model to study the interaction between nanoparticles and the lowest lung region. She came to Agroscope in mid-2013 as Head of the Feed Analytics Research Division at the Institute for Livestock Sciences.
Corinne Jud is married and lives in Marly (canton of Fribourg). Her hobbies used to be walking, Egyptology, sport, and taking care of her two cats and two rabbits – used to be, because since August 2016 her family has grown. “Our son really keeps me on the go” she says, laughing.
Date: September 2017
