Growing Up in Science – Berlin with Tegan Armarego-Marriott

The Official Story

Tegan is a scientific Editor at Nature Climate Change, handling manuscripts related to ecological and biologicial responses to climate change. She majored in Biochemistry, Conservation Biology, Japanese, and Italian at the University of Western Australia, before undertaking a Molecular Biology honours and Masters program at the same university. She completed both her PhD and post-doctoral research at the Max Planck the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, focusing on the biogenesis and function of plant chloroplasts. In her spare time, she co-hosts Plants and Pipettes, a science communication podcast and blog.

Her Unofficial Story

Tegan grew up in Perth, Western Australia, raised by science loving parents who would only let their (two) daughters watch nature documentaries, and- for some unknown reason- Michael Flatley Irish Dancing. At the age of 5, Tegan declared that she was going to be a dancer, although it was immediately apparent to everyone that she had no talent for it. Luckily, the David Attenborough documentaries also found their way to her heart, and soon after she decided she would be a ‘Penguin Scientist’. As an Australian, Antarctica seemed not very far away, and also nice and cool. She held onto this love of science all the way to university, despite having decided by then that penguins might be a bit over-studied. She wanted to ‘conserve’ like Attenborough, but, not really certain exactly what to do, she enrolled in a university that let students hold off on their major choices until second year. The university also let her study Japanese and Italian at the same time, which let her keep up with more of the ‘arts’ side of things she also loved. In first year she had an incredibly inspiring organic chemistry lecturer (Bob Stick!) who taught her that chemistry could be more than just setting fire to mothballs and watching a clear solution turn purple. She decided to do Biochemistry as well as Conservation Biology.

At the end of a four year degree, she was a little depressed about the real-life implications of being a conservation biologist in Australia (a lot of mining and sad animals, plus a lot of 45 degree heat fieldwork), and decided to focus more on the Biochemistry/molecular biology side of things, as well as on plants instead of animals. She retreated to the lab, as her parents announced loudly that they were shocked that someone with such terrible hand-eye coordination would be allowed near glassware. A chance event led her to be assigned to an international lab group studying chloroplast function, with a German supervisor or two, which ultimately contributed to her decision to take up a PhD in Germany (there was something about a partner also involved there).

During her PhD and postdoc, she discovered that, while she loved plant science and the reading, writing and problem solving of being a scientist, she just wasn’t that great at or excited by all the labwork. She also liked reading about lots of things, not only the things directly related to her research, and also loved talking and writing about science, and doing science outreach (although there, here terrible German skills were a limiting factor). So to do more science talking, reading and writing, she and her close friend Joram Schwartzman launched ‘Plants and Pipettes’, a podcast and blog about plant science, for anyone who cared to listen/read. Although she loved academia for many things, she was also becoming aware of a lot of its flaws, and began to question if liking something and being fairly ok at it was enough reason to not try something else…