Growing Up in Science – Berlin with Prof. Dr. Yee Lee Shing

The Official Story

Yee Lee Shing studied psychology in the United States. In 2008, she moved to Germany to conduct her doctoral thesis on “Dynamics of Episodic Memory Across the Lifespan” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB) Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She continued to work at the MPIB as a postdoctoral researcher and was awarded a Minerva research group leader position in 2012. In 2015, Yee Lee left Germany to work as a lecturer at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Three years later she accepted her current position in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Yee Lee is now Professor of Developmental Psychology at Goethe Universität Frankfurt, directing the Lifespan Cognitive and Brain Development (LISCO) lab. Further, she is a member of the IDeA research center of the DIPF (Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education). Since 2018 Yee Lee holds an ERC starting grant for her project on “Predictive Memory Systems Across the Lifespan”.

Her Unofficial Story

Yee Lee grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in a family of Chinese descendent. Her parents wanted her to study business or economics–preferably in Australia. Yee Lee decided to move to the United States to study psychology. Thanks to two young female faculty members that supervised her as a research intern, she was able to gather first-hand experiences of research in developmental psychology at the University of Nebraska. For her masters she decided to study educational psychology. This decision turned out to be a blessing in disguise: Yee Lee realized that it was not educational psychology she was interested in but developmental psychology. She thus took the offer to do her PhD at the Center for Lifespan Psychology, MPIB under the supervision of Ulman Lindenberger and Shu-Chen Li. After finishing her PhD, Ulman Lindenberger offered Yee Lee to stay at the MPIB as a research group leader. During these years she supervised three outstanding doctoral students, which all were awarded with an Otto Hahn Medal for their dissertation projects.

Knowing that the MPI position would end and after the birth of her second child, Yee Lee and her family moved to Stirling where she started working as a lecturer in psychology. In her first year, she worked on many grant applications, which all didn’t get funded. Looking back, however, it was precisely in this time that she was able to gather the insights and discussions she needed to develop her research idea for an ERC starting grant (which was then funded in 2018).

As the Brexit made the situation in the UK rather unpredictable, Yee Lee was happy to accept the offer from Frankfurt (to which she almost decided to not apply!) even though this meant that she and her family would have to move again. Having escaped (most) of the Brexit struggles, a pandemic might not have been what Yee Lee expected to influence her working life back in Germany. Nevertheless, being in Frankfurt for 3 years now, she has managed to expand her new group and research projects to Frankfurt and beyond.
Being a professor now, her favorite part in academia still is working out new research designs and diving into the data of her experiments–preferably with inspired colleagues and students on her side.

Her Biggest Mistakes

In 2011, I was offered a W2 professorship in Magdeburg at the German center for Neurodegenerative Diseases. I declined this offer. Back then, I did not want to leave Berlin and did not really know the differences that come along with working at a university or working at a research institute. Today, I see things in a different perspective: Being a university professor, I have to simultaneously manage teaching, faculty duties, and research. All in all, it can be quite overwhelming at times.

My motivation for telling this story here!

Obviously, academia is full of failures and doubts. Nevertheless, I want people to remember that being a scientist is a great job! Failures and rejections will come for sure, but they are not about you as a person or you as a researcher. They are about your papers and proposals. Try always to remember what you like about research and what brings fun into your work!