Soapbox Science 2021

Soapbox: What is the most exciting aspect of your research?

Chiara Turrina: The research area of drug delivery allows influencing the development in health care and patient treatment positively. This makes my work meaningful and allows me to have an impact on our future. Furthermore, my job is rich in variety. I work together with students and my colleagues to synthesize, characterize and analyze drug carriers, test the interaction in various ways with my drug, and further explore the drug activity in microbiological experiments. Also, there is always something new and exciting to learn.

SB: If you were stranded on a desert island, what scientific equipment would you bring with you?

CK: For my daily work, I use strong magnets to develop a magnetically controlled drug delivery system. Certainly, these magnets could help find valuable stuff on a lonely island that could be used to build a shelter or escape the island.

SB: What challenges do you encounter in science?

CK: Working in science always brings new problems and challenges every day. I had to learn how to handle throwbacks in research and how to break down barriers in my scientific work. This needs a lot of patients, discipline, and creative thinking.

SB: What motivates you to give a talk in Soapbox Science?

CK: Often, it is hard for people who do not work in the scientific field to understand our work and why it is important. For me, it is essential to improve the communication between science and the general public, especially in times when populism and simple answers are often chosen over the more complicated or sometimes not satisfying scientific truth. Furthermore, I think it is an exciting and really important challenge to explain my research area to a non-scientific audience. Moreover, it is crucial to make women in science more visible.

SB: Do you have a few words to inspire other women or young scientists?

CK: If you are interested in science, go for it, try if you have fun and are interested in the subject. Don’t hold back because maybe the majority is male.

SB: In these quarantine days, what funny/interesting experiments, books, talks or podcasts can you recommend to our audience?

CK: I want to recommend a youtube channel called MaiLab, which has become more and more popular due to the good and easy-to-understand scientific explanations of the topics around the coronavirus. But it also has a lot of other interesting videos that explain important subjects from a scientific few of a chemist.