At her home university in Amritsar in the Panjab, Richa Bharti first studied life sciences, then biology and bioinformatics. She switched to the renowned Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi for her master's, where she worked as a research associate after graduating. Before she came to Germany to do her PhD at Kiel University in 2012, she had never left India. "So that was a big and not all that easy step for me, but also a wonderful opportunity!" Bharti won the promotion prize of the Bruhn-Stiftung in Kiel, which is awarded once a year to support outstanding PhDs in medical research. In her doctoral thesis, she studied the factors that influence the balance of the microbiome in the gut. "The interplay between our bodies and the roughly one hundred trillion bacteria that live in symbiosis with us is incredibly interesting", she believes. Bharti is also working with microbiome data in her current project.
Within Germany, Bharti has moved ever further south: after spending two years as a postdoc at the University of Würzburg, Straubing in Lower Bavaria is now the third place in Germany where she is working and living. "In Kiel it was always cold and windy, so I hardly went outside. I like the weather in Bavaria much better, and really enjoy jogging and hiking here." In her free time, Richa Bharti also loves to play board and card games such as chess, Monopoly and Speed: "Before the pandemic I would often meet colleagues from Würzburg and Straubing for game nights." She feels that she has now arrived, both professionally and personally.
