In 1989 she married Erich Diller, a German entomologist who specializes in parasitic wasps. She became Juliane Diller, the name by which she is known in her professional life, though the name Koepcke is the one by which most of the world knows her story.
She went to work at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich — now known as the Zoological State Collection, or Zoologische Staatssammlung München — where she became head librarian and eventually deputy director. The institution is a major research collection, with extensive holdings of preserved specimens and a significant role in taxonomic and biodiversity research. Her work there was scientific and institutional, the daily professional life of a researcher embedded in a major European natural history collection.
This is not what the tabloid narrative of survival stories usually points toward. The survivor becomes the scientist. The scientist goes back to work. The work is in the forest where the thing happened, and the work is careful and institutional and conducted over decades. There is no second dramatic act of the kind that a survivor narrative in entertainment would demand. There is science, continued.
## Returning to Panguana
In 2000, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke died. Juliane became director of Panguana, the station he and Maria had founded in 1968, the station that had been the childhood home that gave her the knowledge she needed to survive, the station that had been Maria’s scientific project and Hans-Wilhelm’s life’s work and that now belonged, in the most practical sense, to their daughter.