Avril Arthur-Goettig combines her background in scientific research and many years of organizing scientific data, publishing papers, supervising graduate students, with subsequently working as a freelance scientific editor, writer, and translator. She established a freelance scientific writing and communication service in 1996.

Avril was born in Scotland and graduated from Edinburgh University with a BSc (honours) in molecular biology. She gained a PhD in molecular genetics from Sussex University, UK, and obtained a 2-year MRC postdoctoral fellowship at Glasgow University, UK. After 3 months as a visiting scientists at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, she joined the Department of Biochemistry at the LMU Munich, Germany, as a postdoc, moving on after being awarded a BMBF grant to the Munich Gene Center as a joint project leader.

Since 1996 she has helped scores of scientists from research institutes, biotech startups and pharmaceutical companies throughout Europe, international non-profit organizations, as well as media and clinical agencies with optimizing their scientific texts.

Experience gained from her own research career (writing, preparing and presenting posters and talks), and subsequently editing and revising papers, answering referees comments, and translating scientific texts, has provided her with in-depth knowledge about all the different aspects of scientific communication, particularly the needs of non-English speaking scientists.

She has now transferred this in-depth knowledge into training programs to provide soft skills in writing and presentation that are required for successful graduate programs.

Avril also specializes in highly interactive workshops for more experienced graduate students, postdocs and group leaders, to help them maximize their English communication and writing skills.

Workshops are individually designed to meet the needs of the participant group. Please contact us for more information.