At the age of 7, she received her first microscope from her parents. “I ran around the house and the garden to collect samples; I even kept a little lab journal. My interest in science started early and to this day I am truly amazed by microscopy. I enter a completely different world, where time doesn’t exist. I’m fascinated with seeing something that is otherwise invisible”.  Her home environment always supported her academic passion, in contrast to a few teachers at school. Schueth, who is also a FEM ambassador at Maastricht University, channels this experience in her mentoring work, where she is supporting and encouraging high-school girls to follow their STEM curiosity in an online platform during the last 10 years. “One teacher or a negative comment shouldn’t stop you from following your dream and if you have a true passion for something: Go for it”.

Now, Schueth is taking microscopy to the next level for brain and cancer research. Her technology will aid researchers in analysing entire human brain areas and prostate cancer biopsies in one go. “If you want to look at specific large areas in the human brain, using classical methods, you’d have to use hundreds of tiny slices of that area. Also, you would destroy valuable information, such as large 3D brain cell and vessel constructs. Now, you can examine very large pieces without actually cutting it."

Outside of doing things faster and bigger, this new technology also creates new possibilities. Together with the Departments of Pathology and Urology at the Maastricht University Medical Center (MUMC+), Schueth is looking at biopsies from prostate cancer patients. “With my new method we can scan the entire patient biopsy for tumours and that will increase the chances to detect more tumours overall". The clinicians at the hospital see many possibilities and would like to push this to a pre-clinical stage for cancer diagnostic in the future.