“My granddad was a baker and together with my grandmother they had a shop before I was born.

They always managed to gather the whole family together – my aunts, uncles, cousin, sisters and my parents. “I have wonderful memories of staying at my grandparents’ place. “I lived in a neighbourhood that was new when we moved in and there were lots of young families – we had lots of friends in the street and we were constantly playing outside. When Manou was growing up as the eldest of three girls (twin sisters Kim and Lea are two and a half years younger), it was in a thriving community. Manou tracks her adventurous spirit back to her childhood in Wesel, a German town set on both banks of the Rhine not far from the Dutch border. Manou as a child with her twin sisters Kim and Lea and her beloved Grandad Paul. We don’t tend to live all on campus at home – I loved it.” “In the UK I was living on campus in the fresher’s complex and it was so different to anything I had experienced before. You could be in the city of Perth and there was still lots of nature around and then in no time you were out in the middle of nowhere. “It was beautiful and so remote in many ways. “Australia was everything I had hoped it would be and more,” she grins. The first, in 2013 was at the University of Nottingham in the UK, which she likens to “being in a Harry Potter movie” and the second, two years later, at the University of Western Australia. Never daunted by a challenge, the maths and science whizz took the opportunity to take part in two exchange semesters while she was completing her Masters at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. She may have been lost for words but Manou wasn’t lacking in action.

“My violin teacher was from the east coast of Australia and maybe that influenced me, I knew I had to see it, I couldn’t find the words for why. “There was something about the vastness of the land that intrigued me.”

“I’d always been fascinated by Australia, without even really knowing why,” she says. German-born Manou Rosenberg smiles when she admits she gave living in Western Australia a ‘test run’, two years before she was selected as a Forrest Foundation Scholar.

Liveprofessor 2 crack