Sleep I need seven or eight hours. My daughters, aged 10 and five, are in bed by 8.30pm. My husband and I have different methods of getting them to bed: he likes nature television programmes; I like reading in German. Both my father and husband are German, so we try to maintain the language. Before I go to sleep, I read books such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, or essays from Harvard Business Review. I am usually asleep by nine and wake as early as 4am; it gives me a few hours to think about work before the rest of the family wakes at 7am.
Eat I try to have a low-carb diet. In the morning, my husband cooks scrambled eggs and I’ll have lunch on the Wellcome Genome campus in Cambridge. I am a creature of habit so I always have a salad, melon and coffee – I drink too much coffee. I try to have supper with the family three times a week. Our nanny - a retired academic from Uruguay - often cooks whatever is in the fridge. At weekends we cook but it’s very much dominated by what the kids like: pasta and pizza. There are no phones at the table and we try to get information out of the kids about school, sports and friends; they are not always forthcoming.
Work There’s a difference between how many hours you work and how many hours you are “at work”. I am at work from 8.15am to 6pm and a lot of that time is spent in meetings. At weekends I work four or five hours around the family’s schedule. As well as being head of a programme in Cambridge, I coordinate the Human Cell Atlas consortium, an international project to map all the cells in the human body, which involves a lot of travel.
Family On Saturday mornings the children go to the German school, to playdates and to play hockey. There’s a routine to our annual holidays. My mother is American, my sister lives in Italy and we have family in Germany, so we alternate between those countries.
Fun Research is so all-consuming and so exciting that it is in your mind all the time. But when the weather is mild I cycle to work, run and play tennis, which help me recharge. When you work at the cutting edge of human knowledge, the problems are so challenging that you are not going to solve them in a day.
