Only an interdisciplinary approach will do
The “interdisciplinary sciences” degree programme at ETH Zurich is challenging—which suits Leif Sieben just fine. Rather than limiting his knowledge to just one single subject, the twenty-two-year-old student wants to understand processes in relation to one another. A Werner Siemens Foundation Excellence Scholarship is helping him realise his scholarly ambitions.
Leif Sieben almost embarked on a career as a philosopher. After all, philosophy was his favourite subject at the Alpenquai upper secondary school in Lucerne and, as the twenty-two-year-old says with a smile, “I thought it was my thing.” When he was seventeen, he wrote his final school thesis on the theories of Nāgārjuna, a Buddhist philosopher who is little known and often misunderstood in the West. Sieben explains that Nāgārjuna’s teachings follow a strict logic that nevertheless allows for incongruences. “Nāgārjuna says a street can be wet and dry at the same time. In the West, thinkers like this are often seen as mystics.”
After receiving his school-leaving certificate, Sieben had plans to travel the globe. However, the coronavirus pandemic threw a spanner in the works, so he decided to start studying and resolved to take a break as soon as travelling was possible again. He says he had narrowed his choice of degree programmes to philosophy and interdisciplinary sciences. “But for the life of me, I just couldn't decide,” Sieben says. So he decided to leave it to fate—and flipped a coin.
As fate would have it, the answer was “no” to philosophy and “yes” to natural sciences. Today, after having studied interdisciplinary sciences at ETH Zurich for four years, Sieben is convinced that the coin’s decision was providential. He was immediately so taken by the natural sciences that he gave up all travel plans just a few weeks after starting his studies. And, he says, the programme is getting more interesting with each passing semester.
More than just a study programme
The programme for interdisciplinary sciences is much broader than an ordinary degree programme. Chemistry forms the backbone of the programme, but students also attend lectures in biology, physics, maths and computer science. What makes the curriculum so unusual is that these lectures aren’t offered in a simplified form as is done in chemistry courses for medical students. “We go to the same lectures as students who are studying a subject as a major,” Leif Sieben explains.
This is also what makes the programme so challenging. Sieben relates that the introduction to programming in computer science was one of the most difficult classes he’d ever taken and that he had to invest a lot of time to master the coursework. “But it was worth the effort. It gave me a deep understanding of the field and it helped me overcome any reservations I had about the topic. We really engaged with the subject matter in detail.” He adds that he really appreciates this aspect of the programme: “I lose interest when a topic is only touched on superficially.”
The in-depth exploration of different subjects in the programme is designed to foster interdisciplinary understanding. Sieben says that discovering interconnections between subjects gives him a sense of great satisfaction. For example, he wants to learn more about a molecule than how it’s structured: he also wants to know how it’s found, how it’s synthesised, how it affects the body, how it breaks down in the liver.
Construction of a greenhouse gas detector
This broad interest is also mirrored in Leif Sieben’s hobbies: he hikes, runs and skis, he plays piano in a jazz band, he’s made films with a friend. He used to belong to an English debating society, and he writes a column on philosophy in science for a student newspaper.
The projects and internships he has completed during his studies have also been quite eclectic. For example, in his third semester, he joined the research group of his thermodynamics professor Alexander Barnes, where he developed a model of electron beam neutralisation for a gyrotron, a type of powerful microwave that plays an important role in nuclear fusion experiments. The project was so successful that it led to two scientific publications.
Sieben wrote his bachelor’s dissertation in Professor Máté Bezdek’s Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry. He intended to develop a device for detecting nitrous oxide (also known as laughing gas), a highly potent greenhouse gas produced when, for example, too much fertiliser is used in agriculture. “But because nitrous oxide is difficult to detect, we have no clear picture of where and when it’s produced.” Sieben’s device worked, but the results were strange. “Or they were until we realised that it’s able to detect nitrous oxide, but it’s 100 million times more sensitive to oxygen.” This work also led to a publication.
WSS excellence fellowship enabled next project
The Swiss Study Foundation has supported Leif Sieben from the start of his academic career. He regularly participates in the foundation’s activities and has even organised a seminar on alchemy. The people he’s met on these occasions have helped him adjust to life in Zurich: “It’s nice to meet fellow students who don’t give you a strange look for being interested in a lot of things and for studying hard.” In addition, the Study Foundation places value on interdisciplinarity. “That suits me very well.”
The Swiss Study Foundation has already awarded Sieben a Werner Siemens Fellowship for two funding periods. The fellowships, which are given annually to ten outstanding students in the STEM subjects, medicine or pharmaceutical sciences, are excellence scholarships that enable ambitious and gifted young people to focus their energies on their education and their personal and professional development.
The first WSS fellowship opened the door to Leif Sieben’s next project, which was initiated at a mixer event for WSS fellows held by ETH professor and WSS fellowship mentor Simone Schürle-Finke, he says. “Her labs were fantastic.There was a physics lab, a chemistry lab, a biology lab. It was basically my entire study programme united in three labs.And I knew that’s where I wanted to go.”
Soon afterwards, Leif Sieben developed a device in Schürle-Finke’s labs that can measure the activity of enzymes in a wound. “It’s an aid in finding out what’s happening inside the wound and how healing is progressing,” he explains. He’s currently writing a paper for this project, too—meaning Sieben will have already published four scientific articles before even starting his master’s dissertation.
Research in Boston
For his master’s dissertation, Leif Sieben had something special in mind. Because he wants to learn more about research culture in the US, he applied to four research groups there. He says the Werner Siemens Foundation is what enabled him to pursue this idea: “When I learned I was awarded the second fellowship, I promised myself I’d do something bold.”
Sieben soon received a letter of acceptance from his preferred choice: Jim Collins, a biomedical engineer and bioengineer at the renowned Massachusetts of Technology (MIT) in Boston. Collins was a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, but he switched his focus to artificial intelligence (AI) about ten years ago. His research group has already used AI to develop three novel antibiotics effective against resistant bacteria.
This is the topic of Sieben’s master’s dissertation, which he began under Collins’s supervision last autumn. Once again, interdisciplinarity is the defining feature of the project. Programming and instructing the AI tool forms the focus of the first part of the work. In the second part, he’ll draw on chemistry to produce and test the molecules proposed by the AI tool.
Going deep, seeking interrelationships and approaching research questions from an interdisciplinary perspective: that’s how Leif Sieben likes to work.
