Barbara Pauly joined HFSPO on September 2, 2016 as the new Director of Fellowships. Prior to that Barbara was a member of the editorial team of EMBO Reports, most recently she was a senior editor of this very respected journal. She received her PhD from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, where she was working with Angelika Böttger and Charles David on developmental signaling in the simple non-bilaterian Hydra vulgaris. Following that she spent several years as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley in California, USA where she worked with David Drubin on molecular mechanisms of membrane trafficking in mammalian cells.