Nadine was born in Amsterdam and after a happy youth in one of the many Dutch polders, she returned to Amsterdam to do her Masters in Medical Biology. Here, her passion for biology and science communication was born. For her PhD, she joined the lab of Ronald Plasterk at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht and dissected the mysteries of transposon silencing and RNA interference in the roundworm C. elegans. After graduating in 2006, Nadine moved to Cambridge to join Alex Schier’s lab at Harvard University. Funded by EMBO, HFSP, and the NIH, she fell in love with the first few hours of zebrafish development and spent her time investigating the role of chromatin structure in the regulation of embryonic transcription. In 2012 she moved back to Europe to start her lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden thanks to generous funds by the Max Planck Society, and the Human Frontier Science Program. In 2020, Nadine was appointed as an Associate Professor at the Center for Integrative Genomics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Since January 2021, she and her lab are trying to get some work done while Lake Geneva and the Alps are trying to lure them outside. Generous funding is supplied by the University of Lausanne, the Volkswagen Foundation, the German Science Foundation, and the European Research Council.