“….They dance around us with such invisible elegance. Elongated shiny legs hold together their heavy waterlogged heads as they embark in synchronized choreography all around us every morning. We impolitely disregard their show and let them slip down the drain: In the end, what matters is a clean face for a fresh onset feeling….”
Scientist Federica Sebastiani who recently finished her postDoc position with us at CR have recently been published in a new, and quite different, scientific publication, the Esperluette, a free monthly journal aimed at outreach in a new and artistic way.
Esperluette is founded by Fernanda Haffner and Émilie Schmidt who together realized they wished to connect two opposite and fascinating worlds together: research and art. Both wanted not only to share scientific knowledge, but to marry it with compelling illustrations in a single piece of artwork. Now, Federica’s project on biodegradable surfactants has been taking part of this wonderful marriage and her story and its illustration can be found in the most recent publication of Esperluette: The Super-Secret Chemical Dancers.
In her work with us, Federica used several different techniques to reach the deeper understanding of the behaviour of this new set of surfactants. Among these was cryo-TEM, the technique awarded the attention of a Nobel Prize (2017). It is our strong belief that the passionate dissemination of scientific work that Esperluette is an example of will lead to more people joining the sciences and ultimately to new prizes and a better word. Thank you Fernanda, Emilie and Federica.
Illustration from Esperluette by Laurene Gattuso.
