Medical student with a three-step plan
Flora Chiper used to be a figure skater. Now she conducts research into cartilage regeneration and is one of Switzerland’s youth delegates to the United Nations. This year, the multi-talented medical student also received an excellence scholarship from the Werner Siemens Foundation.
Anyone as busy as Flora Chiper needs excellent time-management skills. The twenty-three-year-old studies medicine at the University of Basel, researches joint cartilage regeneration, works as a UN youth representative for Switzerland and is active in Reatch, an association that builds bridges between science and society. Small wonder that the weekly calendar on her laptop sports every colour of the rainbow. “To make sure it all works out, I have to plan pretty much every detail,” Chiper says.
That Flora Chiper has more energy than the average person was apparent very early on in her life. School was easy, so she invested a lot of time in activities that were important in her family: her father, from Romania, is a former competitive figure skater, while her mother—a Swiss-Australian dual citizen—works as a choreographer and manages a dance school. After learning to skate at a young age, Flora was selected to Switzerland’s national figure skating team when she was fourteen. What’s more, she also danced ballet at an advanced level and is an excellent pianist. To help manage all her interests, she attended upper secondary school in Zurich, at the Rämibühl school for arts and sports. “Creativity and sports were very important during my childhood,” she says.
World travels and a research stay
Despite this background, however, she knew she wanted to be a doctor when she was still quite young. “Not long ago I found an essay I wrote when I was eleven,” Chiper says. “We had to imagine a class reunion when we were all thirty years old, and I wrote that I was a doctor.” Her career aspirations became clearer towards the end of her time at the arts and sports school. “I realised that I like helping people, and that medicine is a very interesting subject,” Chiper explains, adding that she also began to suffer injuries and her willingness to push her body was waning. “I trained about twenty hours per week but, for several reasons, my performance stagnated after I turned seventeen.”
After earning her university-entrance qualification, Chiper took a gap year and embarked on a trip around the world. In Australia, she learned how to surf and dive, went to an acting academy, and she helped out at an Australian figure skating club. After returning to Switzerland, she earned her bachelor’s degree in medicine at ETH Zurich; she then decided to switch to Basel for her master’s degree programme. First, however, she spent four months doing research at Harvard Medical School in Boston in a field she finds especially fascinating: tissue regeneration, in particular cartilage regeneration.
Cartilage doesn’t regrow. If it degenerates in our hip and knee joints—due to osteoarthritis, for example—pain and the loss of mobility often make joint replacement surgery necessary. At Harvard, Chiper worked in the research group of April Craft to study how pluripotent stem cells develop into cartilage cells. “The idea was to learn more about how cartilage cells arise and organise themselves—and then to find ways to reactivate growth in damaged cartilage,” is how she explains the project.
A home at the Swiss Study Foundation
She was able to continue her work in Basel thanks to a collaboration between Harvard and the research group of Ivan Martin, a specialist in cartilage tissue engineering and regeneration. She’ll use the findings to write her master’s dissertation, which will certainly be much more involved than an ordinary thesis. “Sometimes I run to the lab during a lecture break to finish working on an experiment,” she says.
For the past few years, Flora Chiper has received scholarships from the Swiss Study Foundation, and she even represents scholarship holders in the Foundation’s education commission. This year, she received a Werner Siemens Fellowship, which the Swiss Study Foundation awards annually to ten outstanding students in STEM subjects, medicine or pharmaceutical sciences. The fellowships are excellence scholarships that enable ambitious and gifted young people to focus their energies on their education and development.
Chiper says she’s grateful for the support: through the Foundation, she has access to a large network of people who are delighted when a young person works hard and wants to make a difference in the world. “At the Study Foundation, I can be the Flora I want to be,” she says. “Nobody asks why I want to do so many other things while I’m still studying, or why I sometimes spend my days off going to symposia and conferences to learn more about a topic that interests me—or just to expand my horizons.”
UN youth representative
The WSS Fellowship also makes pursuing her many interests much easier. “Now, in addition to my studies, I can work on projects that are important to me without worrying about finances,” she says. One of these projects is international diplomacy, another discovery Chiper made at the Swiss Study Foundation, first as a member of the Foundation’s delegation to the National Model United Nations in New York, then a year later as a coach for the Swiss participants.
At National Model United Nations conferences, international students simulate UN meetings. At these events, Chiper learned both how the UN works and how negotiations are conducted, and she was introduced to the world of Swiss diplomacy. All of which motivated her to apply for a place as one of Switzerland’s three youth delegates to the United Nations last year. Her application was a success: “Right now, this work is a big part of my life.”
She has a two-year assignment to represent the interests of Switzerland’s youth (age group fifteen to twenty-five) on behalf of the Swiss National Youth Council (SNYC) and with the support of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA). In the scope of her activities, she took part in a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in autumn 2023 and held a speech at a side event.
A three-step plan
In the meantime, the world stage has even earned a place in Flora Chiper’s vision for her future, which encompasses three different areas. She says her goal is a career as a surgeon scientist—a surgeon who also conducts research. “As a doctor, I can help patients directly, but only a limited number.” As a researcher, however, she believes she could be of service to many more people—by helping develop regenerative therapies, for example.
And yet, she adds, there’s even more leverage in international bodies—in matters such as drawing up and enacting public health measures: “While a single person might not have much influence in these organisations,” she says, “the agreements and resolutions passed there help people across the globe.” She can well imagine working in this area later.
For the time being, however, she still has to complete two more years of her medical studies before taking the medical state examination. She also says it’s a little too early to talk about what she’ll do later. That said, it’s clear that Flora Chiper has already made plans. Which is no great surprise: people who manage their time well don’t just fill in their appointment calendars for the next couple of weeks.
