“Tell us your story- how did your path lead you to Nanion Technologies?”

I was born in Südtirol (Alto Adige) Italy and spent the first 19 years of my life in the lovely town of Meran. At the age of 19, I moved away from my hometown to study and work in York, England for the next 10 years. In 2007 I moved to Munich.

I’ve worn many different hats during my professional career (In German we would say: Quereinsteiger). I went to the German-speaking humanistic gymnasium in my hometown where I studied ancient Greek and Latin. Usually people go on to study subjects like Literature, Philosophy, History or Law at the nearby universities of Innsbruck or Bologna. Instead, I decided to go to the University of York to study Chemistry.

After completion of my Master’s degree specialising in Biochemistry and Pharmaceuticals, I realized that physical Chemistry was really interesting and to the surprise of my classmates I enrolled for a PhD in high resolution Laser spectroscopy. After my PhD I stayed on in academia. With an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship I went to the LMU Munich and started my postdoc in the (here it comes) department of Physics, to work in the field of ultrafast Laser spectroscopy. In the following seven years I published almost 40 scientific papers and taught optics and molecular physics to the students.
All was set for me to try to become a lecturer at the university, but instead there was another one of those moments in my life where I felt that it was time to have a career change (again) and I left academia to move into industry. Due to the strong connection between the department of physics at LMU and Nanion, I knew that the company was looking for a software engineer. I applied for the position and got the job in 2014.

“Knowing what you know now, what 3 pieces of advice would you give your 21-year-old self?”

Since I have started practicing Aikido, I lead my life according to the principles underlying the Aikido training. If I could go back in time, it is these principles that I would give to my 21-year-old self:

1. Approach every task with a beginner’s spirit
2. Living means learning
3. Be natural in all things you do

“One Last Question- what’s the coolest thing about your job?”

Working for Nanion is really exciting, challenging and it never gets boring. If I had to say what the coolest thing is, I would summarize it into three points:

• The privilege to have experienced the development of our software team; ranging from the stage of commanded developers to the stage of agile lead developers acting independently.
• To be able to develop software freely and live out the software craftsmanship manifesto.
• To be able to use the rich experience I gained through my copious career changes all in one place.