I am quite bad at cover letters and CVs. However, I am relatively ok with this bio adapted from the one at the end of my PhD thesis.
Ioana was born in Iași, Romania, on a day her mother could remember, the 5th of May 1988. Ioana comes from a long line of humans who had an unfortunate combination of characteristics: curiosity, common sense, and critical thinking.
Growing up, in Ioana's case, this combination was mostly unfortunate for her teachers and class mates.
Ioana loved to learn, anything and everything, and hated uninspiring teachers and bullies.
At age 11 she was enticed into child labour by her mother, who had just started a company organising medical events. There, Ioana learned how to wear a skirt, solve very varied problems, and the fact that physicians are not beyond petty theft. At age 14 Ioana was dissecting her first onion to the tune of metal music (her mentor's choice genre), when she had the realisation she wishes to do something in life sciences.
At age 16- 17 Ioana translated live a speech about tuberculosis. The universe was foreshadowing.
Ioana decided on going to medical school in her hometown with the initial intent of becoming either a forensic doctor or a paediatrician. The first option fell through because of Ioana's love of bioethics and hatred of lying and the second option fell through because she realised she could not handle (other) children's families.
In the end, a combination of good mentors and blanket curiosity led Ioana to train in internal medicine.
She eventually found her second home in the Lung Hospital and, within it, an affinity for tuberculosis. There was something about a disease directly and indirectly bullying the people it affects which spoke to Ioana's lifelong ethos. When her most important mentor from Romania met his brother from another mother from the Netherlands, it created the perfect circumstance for Ioana to leave her home country.
Ioana has always been lucky with mentors -and in general with attracting interesting, kind, lovely people - this was no different in the Netherlands where, because of amazing people, Ioana did primarily research and secondarily many other things.
Ioana has thus gotten to the point where it is increasingly difficult to describe the full range of skills, abilities, and experience on a CV.
Philosophically speaking, Ioana is very good at organising people and things. She likes finding ways that different people with different personalities, backgrounds, and skill sets can work together, make each other shine, and improve the existing status quo. She has also at least dabbled in so many things that she can have a good overview of a situation and her mind automatically goes to imagining ways processes can be improved upon. Ioana has always held the belief that if people understood "more things better" they would end up making kinder choices for themselves and others.
Practically speaking, Ioana has done graphics design, photography, web design, SEO, copywriting, translating, writing, and editing in English and Romanian, event organising, been part of several boards of her peers, designed pub quizzes, treasure hunts, (co) owned an escape room and team building small company, performed all manner of research activities, presented at various conferences, taught various things from physiology to critical thinking (now she teaches research methodologies), and, somewhere along the way, became a board certified internal medicine physician.
In her spare time, she plays video games and board games, travels, plays various sports, does improv theatre, and consumes culture, from music to books to museums and art installations with a firm tendency towards fantastical storytelling.
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