As part of my PhD programme, I spent 6 months at the Department of Dermatology and Allergy at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in the group of Professor Marcus Maurer. My internship was supported through a Research Fellowship from the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI). The aim was to unravel the disease mechanisms accounting for chronic spontaneous urticaria, for which I developed a new ex vivo skin model to study mast cell activation in situ.