Obtaining her PhD cum laude in less than four years, winning the university prize for the best dissertation and still leaving academia behind? Marina Pilz Da Cunha stepped out of academia after her PhD for a job at an Amsterdam startup.

Marina and I entered the university bachelor’s program in Chemical Engineering in Eindhoven ten years ago along with about sixty other first-year students. I had lived in the Eindhoven region all my life so I stayed close to home, but Marina had relocated from Brazil and had only lived in the Netherlands since she was twelve. Her family moved for her father’s job at DSM and Dutch was her third language, after Portuguese and English. Undergraduate classes were in Dutch at the time, as were most of the conversations between students, which makes her accomplishments all the more impressive.