Nordic Life Science 1
70 ”LATELY IT HAS BECOME MORE INTERESTING WITH AP
PLICATIONS WITHIN LIFE SCIENCES, WHERE AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH IS CRUCIAL TO ACHIEVE THE RESEARCH GOALS.” MAR I ANA DAL ARS SON For Women in Science in Sweden honors outstanding Swedish female scientists. The prize is awarded by L’Oréal Sweden, The Young Academy of Sweden and the Swedish National Commission for Unesco. The prize aims to promote “the scientists of tomorrow” by supporting them at an important stage in their career and encouraging more women to pursue a career in research. The laureates receive SEK 150,000 and a one-year mentorship program arranged by the Young Academy of Sweden. One of the two 2021 winners was Mariana Dalarsson, researcher and assistant lecturer in Electromagnetic Theory at the Division of Electromagnetic Engineering (EME) at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (EECS) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. “My research field is strongly dominated by men, which has from time to time resulted in practical problems. For example, it was difficult to find a female member for the examining committee at my disputation. I have also never had a female teacher during my university studies,” she describes. “However so far my collaborations with male colleagues have been completely correct and even very supportive, both during my studies as well as during my scientific career. Therefore, as a female student and young scientist I have basically only experienced very positive and encouraging treatment from my male teachers, supervisors and colleagues,” Dalarsson adds. Mariana Dalarsson’s most important advice to girls and young women, which she will also pass on to her two 70 NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG daughters when they grow up, is to not let yourself be affected by different gender stereotypes that unfortunately still exist in our society. “Mathematics and technology is not hard, and absolutely not something that is “only for boys”. Children are equally curious and have the same imagination and creativity, regardless of their gender, when they are young. Somehow girls are discouraged and lose that curiosity and imagination later during their schooling. Therefore my advice to girls and young women is to ignore stereotypes and fight to retain their curiosity, imagination and creativity,” she says. Dalarsson received the L’Oréal-Unesco For Women in Science award with the motivation that she “with an innovative combination of electrotechnology and biophysics has studied how gold nanoparticles can be doped with nutrients so that they are selectively taken up by and destroy cancer cells.” Studies have indicated that biological tissue can be heated up quickly and targeted using gold nanoparticles (GNP) that are conductive. Hopefully an non-invasive method to treat cancer can be developed. The GNPs might also be used as contrast agents for imaging diagnostics. Dalarsson is investigating this kind of local limited heating using GNP, known as hyperthermia-based methods to treat cancer. The cancer cells attract GNPs doped with nutritions, for example folic acids in order to target the cancer cells’ specific biomarkers or antigenes. When the GNPs have been taken up by the cancer cells, an electromagnetic field is added, which indirectly destroys the