Sever do Vouga – Illinois – Einbeck

When Sofia da Silva looks out the window of her office in Einbeck, she can see the house where she lives with her husband and their two children. That she has made her home in Einbeck now seems very natural to the 41-year-old, yet it was anything but predestined.

Sofia da Silva comes from Sever do Vouga, a town in Western Portugal around 70 kilometers from the picturesque city of Porto on the Atlantic coast. She left Portugal for the U.S. in 2003, where she studied “plant breeding and quantitative genetics” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for six-and-a-half years. “I started with a one-year internship, took my Master’s and then earned a doctorate,” she says.

Yet as successful as the time was in the U.S. for the then almost 30-year-old Sofia, the distance from her home was too great. “I missed Europe,” says the plant breeder. “I wanted to be closer to Portugal again so that I didn’t have to travel such a long way to see my parents and three siblings.”

A professor in Illinois knew KWS and gave her the tip to apply there. As it turned out, that was a piece of advice that changed her life. Sofia da Silva has now worked for KWS for 12 years. And she is not alone. Her boyfriend Greg, whom she met in the U.S., joined her in Einbeck just a month later. The two got married and he also works for KWS – as Head of Biostatistics at RD-DM.

For Sofia da Silva, everything in her life has come together so perfectly in a way she would never have dared hope. She loves her job as Principal Research Lead Biostatistics Maize and Oil Seed Crops. She has close contact with breeders and provides them with new technologies, such as statistical methods. In that way she supports the development of new varieties.

“The breeders collect details in the field, such as yield, plant height or resistance, and we use that and the genomic data to develop predictive models that enable the breeders to create more varieties without first having to sow them and observe them in the field,” is how Sofia da Silva explains her work. You can hear just how enthusiastic she is about genetics and statistics. “It fascinates me to discover something new every day – new results, ideas, technologies, algorithms,” she says. “I like the feeling of having a direct influence on the development of new, high-yielding and sustainable varieties.”

And the working environment, KWS as a company and her colleagues also mean that Sofia da Silva sees her future in Einbeck. “As an employee I feel that I have freedom in my work, my opinion counts and I have the opportunity to develop myself further with the training and courses offered.”

And the plant breeder and biostatistician goes into raptures when she talks about Einbeck and her social environment. “The town’s a wonderful place to live as a family and bring up children – quiet, safe, with nice neighbors and a great infrastructure,” says the mother of a four-year-old boy and twelve-year-old daughter. And being a passionate hiker, Sofia da Silva also adores the countryside in Southern Lower Saxony. “I like forests and think it’s great that taking walks in them is so common in Germany. People in Portugal don’t do that.”

Sofia da Silva and her family fly to Portugal around twice a year to visit her parents. She is looking forward very much to the upcoming festive period. The da Silva family celebrates Christmas with a blend of Portuguese, American and German traditions. “That’s always a beautiful time for me,” she says. “What I particularly like in Germany are the Christmas markets. We don’t have anything like that in Portugal.” |