Paulina Ciepla grew up in the south of Poland, where she hiked and skied throughout her childhood. Fascinated by the complexity of chemical reactions, Paulina moved to the UK to study medical chemistry at the University of Surrey, then pursued a PhD in chemical biology at Imperial College London. Her PhD thesis focused on development of bioorthogonal lipid probes to study Hedgehog protein cholesterylation, under the supervision of Ed Tate, Tony Magee and Maggie Dallman. After years of rain and fog, Paulina moved to Stanford University and joined the James Chen lab, where she expanded her chemical biology skills and learned more about zebrafish developmental biology.

During this time Paulina also became interested in how the regulation of RNA translation, stability and localization can influence cellular function both in development and organism homeostasis. After a brief postdoctoral stint in Yimon Aye’s lab at EPFL (Switzerland), Paulina joined the Geneva Platelet Group at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine to decipher the role of miRNAs in thrombus formation using zebrafish as a model system.