She has drawn recent attention for her ground-breaking research initiative related to neurodegenerative diseases. Her work explores the potential benefits of medicinal plants as supplementary treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s. In this edition of ‘EdPublica’s Women in Science’ column, we introduce Dr Claudia Ntsapi, a researcher at the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa. Addressing the significant underrepresentation of Black women in senior academic and research leadership roles in the country, she discusses her latest research, the challenges faced by women in science, and more in an exclusive interview with EdPublica.

Dr Ntsapi, PhD, is a registered Natural Scientist (Pri. Sci. Nat) with the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP). She joined the University of the Free State in late 2019 as a lecturer in the Department of Basic Medical Sciences. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Dr Ntsapi leads the NeuroCancer Research Group, overseeing a multidisciplinary team specialising in cell biology, cell physiology, microscopy, biochemistry, and pharmaceutical methodologies.

Could you share details about your educational journey and current professional role?

I acquired my undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications at Stellenbosch University, completing a Master of Medical Science in Human Genetics in 2015 and a PhD in Physiological Sciences with a specialization in Neurophysiology in 2018. My current job profile is that of a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Free State’s Faculty of Health Sciences, within the School of Biomedical Sciences, Department of Basic Medical Sciences. In this role, I occupy administrative, academic, research, and leadership positions at both faculty and institutional levels. 

“I admired professionals in lab coats and their selfless passion for finding answers and solutions to health-related conditions that remain clinical challenges using scientific methods and evidence

What sparked your interest in pursuing the Sciences, and what were your career aspirations?

As a high school learner, my academic strengths and interests were in chemistry, math, and biological sciences. While I was initially unsure about the exact career field I wanted to pursue, I was inherently curious and fascinated by professionals working in laboratories. I was a huge fan of TV series such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which follows a team of forensic investigators solving crimes using scientific methods and evidence, and Numbers, which combined crime-solving with mathematics. These shows inspired me to aspire to a field reminiscent of what I witnessed in these series. I admired professionals in lab coats and their selfless passion for finding answers and solutions to health-related conditions that remain clinical challenges using scientific methods and evidence. True to my nature as an introvert, I continue to find myself most “at home” when working in a laboratory setting. While I could not have imagined the trajectory that my academic career would take, I am without a doubt in the right profession given my innate curiosity, passion for teaching, skills transfer, and biomedical research.

What do you think about the current status of women in science careers in your country?

Despite the gains in women’s participation in science careers in South Africa, women remain underrepresented in these fields. While there has been significant progress in increasing the participation of women in science-related disciplines, studies have confirmed that men continue to dominate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. This gender disparity is further heightened among Black women. Although women represent the majority of young university graduates in South Africa, only 13% of STEM graduates are women, with Black women being significantly underrepresented in higher academic and research leadership positions. This can be attributed to systemic barriers such as gender bias, lack of mentorship, and limited access to resources, which continue to hinder true equality in science careers. 

At our institution, the University of the Free State (UFS), there is an increasing commitment to support emerging researchers, especially women, through mentorship and research development opportunities. This is part of our institution’s Vision 130, which aspires to foster excellence in research and increase the impact of our scholars on the broader societal context. I am privileged to be one of the selected candidates in our institution’s Transformation of the Professoriate Mentoring Programme, which aims to grow a critical mass of excellent emerging scholars at the UFS. This programme equips all its candidates with both academic and research mentorship to advance their development towards assuming senior academic and research positions. More importantly, this programme supports candidates in accessing networking and funding opportunities, contributing to their establishment as researchers with the potential to create centres of research excellence in the future. My hope is that those of us who have access to such opportunities can also use our privilege and positions to mentor more women researchers from underrepresented groups in the various fields of science.

“Although women represent the majority of young university graduates in South Africa, only 13% of STEM graduates are women, with Black women being significantly underrepresented in higher academic and research leadership positions

What are your suggestions to improve the participation of more women in science-related careers?

 To improve the participation of more women in science-related careers, it is crucial to address the systemic barriers that hinder their progress. This includes creating more mentorship and networking opportunities for women, providing financial support and scholarships for female students in science career fields, and implementing national policies that promote work-life balance and support for working mothers. Additionally, efforts should be made to raise awareness about the contributions of women in science and to challenge stereotypes that discourage girls from pursuing science careers. Encouraging more inclusive and diverse work environments where women feel valued and supported is essential for increasing their participation and retention in science careers. There is also a need for progressive policies that promote the employment of Black women academics in positions of authority in STEM fields. This will ensure the availability of a diversity of women mentors and academics to offer gender-sensitive support to students.

 Please tell us about your current research and its impact in the sector?

Our research group is assessing both pharmaceutically uncharacterized and the repurposing of well-known medicinal plants that have been previously reported to improve brain function in aging individuals. While these medicinal plants have shown promise in enhancing brain function in various brain-related conditions, their neuroprotective efficacy against neurodegenerative diseases remains unclear, especially as the disease progresses in severity. This is one of the focus areas of our ongoing research. I am involved in several multidisciplinary projects, collaborating with both national and international research experts from countries such as Denmark, the UK, and various national institutions, as well as colleagues from the University of the Free State. One of the primary goals of our ongoing research projects is to explore the therapeutic potential of underexplored nutraceuticals and indigenous medicinal plants in preserving vulnerable neuronal cell populations using 3D based neuronal cell models.

These models will be developed in collaboration with researchers in the University of the Free State’s School of Clinical Medicine, utilizing the CelVivo ClinoStar 2 System. This cutting-edge technology, mimics ‘animal model-like’, allowing scientists to generate cell-based models that closely resemble in-vivo like conditions. We will specifically focus on the technology’s applications in studying age-related neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease. The potential impact of this research is immense, as it may contribute to the development of novel therapeutic strategies for combating the debilitating progression of neurodegenerative diseases, ultimately improving the quality of life for affected individuals and their families. 

What is your message to aspiring students who wish to take a career in the sciences? 

Pursuing a career in the sciences requires dedication, hard work, relentless effort, and an unwavering commitment to learning and growth. It is a path filled with challenges, but the rewards are immense for those who are passionate about contributing to the betterment of humanity through medical science research. This means working tirelessly to uncover new insights, develop innovative solutions, and share your findings with the world. It means staying committed to your goals, even when faced with setbacks, and always striving to push the boundaries of what is known. Marie Curie once said, “I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.” This sense of wonder and curiosity should be at the heart of your scientific endeavours as an aspirant biomedical researcher. You must be driven by a deep curiosity and a desire to understand the world around you. The journey is not just about personal success but about making a meaningful impact on society. The hard work and perseverance you invest in your studies and research will not only advance your knowledge but also contribute to solving real-world problems and improving the quality of life for others. Lastly, remember that science is a collaborative field.

“Marie Curie once said, “I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.”

Seek out mentors, build networks, stay humble, and be open to learning from others. Your contributions, no matter how small they may seem, are part of a larger puzzle that future generations of researchers will continue to build upon. If you are passionate about making a difference, if you are committed to the relentless pursuit of knowledge, and if you are driven by a desire to contribute to the greater good, then a career in the sciences may be the right path for you. Embrace the journey, stay curious, and never lose sight of the profound impact your work can have on the world.

For Priyamvada Natarajan, her earliest exposure to scientific research arose from her childhood passion making star maps. Her love for maps never abated, and shaped her career as a theoretical astrophysicist. In the media, she’s the famous ‘cosmic cartographer’, who featured in the TIME magazine’s list of 100 most influential personalities this year.

“I realise what an honour and privilege this is,” said Natarajan to The Hindu. “It sends a message that people working in science can be seen as influential, and that is very gratifying.”

The Indian-American’s claim to fame arises from her pathbreaking research into dark matter and supermassive black holes.

She devised a mathematical technique to chart out dark matter clumps across the universe. Despite dark matter being invisible and elusive to astronomers, they’re thought to dominate some 75% of the universe’s matter. Dark matter clumps act as ‘scaffolding’, in the words of Natarajan, over which galaxies form. When light from background galaxies gets caught under the gravitational influence of dark matter clumps, they bend like they would when passed through a lens. Natarajan exploited this effect, called gravitational lensing, to map dark matter clumps across the universe.

Simulation of dark matter clumps and gas forming galaxies. Credit: Illustris Collaboration

Natarajan reflected her passion for mapping in a TEDx talk at Yale University, where she’s professor of physics and astronomy. Though she’s an ‘armchair’ cartographer, in her own description, she has resolved another major headwind in astronomy – nailing down the origins of supermassive black holes.

Black holes generally form from dying stars, after they collapse under their weight due to gravity. These black holes would swallow gas from their environment to grow in weight. However, there also exists supermassive black holes in the universe, millions of times heavier than any star or stellar-sized black hole, whose formation can’t be explained by the dying star collapse theory. One example is Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way, which is a whopping four million times massive than our sun.

First direct image of Sagittarius A* at the Milky Way center. Credit: EHT

The origins of these behemoths remained in the dark until Natarajan and her collaborators shed some light to it. In their theory, massive clumps of gas in the early universe would collapse under its own weight to directly form a ‘seed’ supermassive black hole. This would grow similar to its stellar-massed counterparts by swallowing gas from its environment. In 2023, astronomers found compelling evidence to validate her theory. They reported a supermassive black hole powering the ancient quasar, UHZ1, at an epoch when no black hole could possibly have grown to attain such a massive size.

These observations came nearly two decades following Natarajan’s first paper on this in 2005. In a 2018 interview to Quanta, she expressed how content she would be with her contributions to astrophysics without having her theory requiring experimental verification done within her lifetime. For, she would be simply content at having succeeded at having her ideas resonate among astronomers for them to go search for her black holes. “I’m trying to tell myself that even that would be a supercool outcome,” she said in that interview. “But finding [the supermassive black hole ‘seed’] would be just so awesome.”

Beyond science, Natarajan’s a well-sought public speaker as well, with pursuits in the humanities as well. In fact, at Yale University, she’s the director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, which fosters links between the two disciplines. Her humanities connect comes at MIT, where she did degrees in physics and mathematics before taking a three-year hiatus from science to explore her interest in the philosophy of science. However, she returned to astronomy soon thereafter, enrolling as a PhD student at Cambridge, where she worked under noted astronomer Martin Rees on black holes in the early universe which seeded her success in later years.

It was in the wee hours of October 2nd, 2018, when Donna Strickland received a call from Sweden saying she was declared one of the awardees of that year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. With that she would make history, being just the third woman since Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert Mayer, to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Like many Nobel laureates before and even after her, it did take a moment or two for Strickland to digest the news. However, she couldn’t have felt more surprised when she realized that it wasn’t any of her research in laser physics she’d prided on being an expert on that won her the prize. Instead, she was awarded for her PhD work all the way back in the 1980s, squishing laser pulses to generate powerful beams. 

Her work came at a time in the 1980s when laser physicists faced difficulty increasing laser power beyond a threshold, when it could damage its casing and the apparatus.

By 1985, Strickland helped materialize a work-around solution proposed by her then PhD supervisor, Gérard Mourou. They had laser light pass through a prism, splitting them to produce a rainbow-like distribution of individually low power light beams. These would then be passed through a power amplifier, before being forcibly recombined into an extremely intense laser pulse. For this work developing the mechanism called, ‘chirped pulse amplification’ (CPA), Strickland and Mourou were each awarded one-quarter of the Nobel Prize. The other half was awarded to Arthur Ashkin, for his work developing tiny particle traps using optical laser beams. 

A laboratory set up consisting of lasers passing through lenses and mirrors. These are continuous wave lasers, as opposed to pulsed lasers. Credit: Wikimedia

Their work removed the roadblock to building lasers with shorter pulses that were below femtoseconds (a billion times shorter than a microsecond) and ever higher power beyond pettawatts (thousands of billions of times powerful than a kilowatt source). Frontier research today uses these pulsed lasers to cut through metals, in experimental nuclear reactors to trigger fusion in pellets of hydrogen. But their usage extends well beyond the confines of the laboratory too. For example, LASIK surgery to correct eye power became a reality after intense ultraviolet pulsed lasers were shown to reshape the eye’s cornea. They’re a basic concept behind military applications such as directed-energy weapons.

Pulse waveforms of a 2.5 nanosecond pulse duration (much bigger than the lasers Strickland and Mourou worked on, that clocked in picoseconds – a thousandth of a nanosecond). Credit: Wikimedia / NIST

In the wake of CPA’s invention, Strickland and Morou moved onto researching different problems within laser physics, and led diverged career paths. However, Strickland, for one, had rather a very slow progression up the ranks. In fact, when the Royal Swedish Academy announced the 2018 physics laureates, Strickland wasn’t even a full professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Worse still, her recognition was stalled outside of academia until a Wikipedia page had to be propped after the Nobel Prize was announced. 

This became a hot topic after Strickland’s win since it ruffled the feathers of scientists, particularly women commentators at one point, who saw in Strickland, a potential to be an influential role model for girls and women in STEM. For she was just the third physics laureate at the time, after Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert Mayer, and the first in a very long time after Mayer was awarded in 1963. 

It turned out Strickland didn’t really apply to be promoted, and only did so following her Nobel Prize upon being beckoned by her well-wishers. Waterloo fast-tracked their final decision to promote her in just three weeks, which in any other scenario would have been an intense and long-drawn process altogether. 

But the lack of sufficient academic recognition did color views on her and her work in public. As it later turned out, Wikipedia editors denied a page in her name, deeming her three decade research into laser physics as insignificant. 

In fact, Strickland herself recalled being stunned that she was being awarded for her contribution decades ago.  “This work was done over thirty years ago so it’s not something that I am living and breathing every day … No one is expecting, in my position, to win a Nobel Prize,” she said. 

It’s unknown why exactly there has been a three decade long wait for laser physics to be awarded any Nobel Prize at all. Delaying consensus within the Nobel committee for the award can mean researchers may not even live to be awarded. The Nobel Prize doesn’t award posthumous awards. Arthur Ashkin, the third 2018 physics Nobel laureate, was already 96 years old and a retired emeritus professor. He passed away in 2020. However, understanding how the Nobel committee made the decisions that they did will have to wait another 44 years. when the nomination lists for the 2018 prize will be publicly released. 

For Strickland, life can’t have been more different after winning the prize. To girls and women, she was a rockstar in science, being the first woman to win a physics Nobel in a long time. However, she knows how much it means to them what being a scientist is like in her younger days. 

During her school days, Strickland stood out to gain both positive and negative attention. Positive, because she aced physics modules. But negative, in that, she was studying physics which was seen traditionally as a boys’ subject, and was questioned for her choices. Although her contribution to CPA wasn’t publicly acknowledged as much as it ever did only after three decades, Strickland did find some admirers soon after her work on CPA was published in 1985.

“I would like to acknowledge my homeroom teacher, Jim Forsyth, who was also my physics teacher in Grade 13,” Strickland said, as quoted in the 2018 Nobel biography. “When I returned to Canada as a faculty member at the University of Waterloo, he read that I had developed chirped pulse amplification. He contacted me through my mother asking if I would be willing to be placed on [her school’s] wall of fame. I wasn’t sure that I belonged on this wall that included John McCrae (a famous Canadian poet). Jim said that he wanted to have a female scientist on the wall as a role model for the female students. I agreed to his request and he made it happen. I have been on [her school’s] wall of fame for two decades for the development of CPA. They recently have rewritten the citation to say that I have received the Nobel Prize for CPA. Now it doesn’t seem so strange for me to be on [her school’s] wall of fame.”