We've all been in a situation where we have a goal we want to achieve, but it's unclear how to get there. I wanted to make my lab more sustainable, but wasn't sure where to start... What were the easy wins to implement first that can save lots of water/energy/waste?
 
That is where a free My Green Lab Ambassador training turned out to be extremely helpful. From this course, I got a ton of ideas on things that can be done. It also inspired me to assemble a team of colleagues enthusiastic about making our place a much greener place!

In September 2022, I asked if we could change the freezer temperature... Now, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has adopted a new energy-saving policy! How did this happen?

In the lab, we use Ultra Low Temperature (ULT) freezers set to -80°C to preserve our sensitive samples of DNA, proteins, and bacteria cells. One ULT freezer in our lab consumes ca. 12.500 kWh a year - five times as much as an average Dutch household! With the current energy prices, this is about 5.000 € a year for just one piece of lab equipment. And universities often have dozens of these ULT freezers. Switching the ULT from -80°C to -70°C saves around 35% energy! For our lab, this is equivalent to ca. 4.400 kWh savings (or six times my yearly energy consumption at home).

This is what #FreezerChallenge by My Green Lab is all about. Many academic institutions (University of Colorado Boulder, UCL, and Augsburg University, to name a few), company facilities (Amgen, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson, among others), and government organizations (The National Institutes of Health) already have implemented this practice and saved a total of 24 million kWh of energy since 2017 (ca. 10.000 households). As of the end of 2022, VU Amsterdam has also joined this movement by switching its ULTs to -70°C. If you are a scientist using ULT, maybe you can convince your colleagues and facility managers to do this too!

PS in case you have doubts about sample integrity of the samples or other aspects of the -70°C switch, check out this great piece from Radboud UMC with references, explanations, and personal accounts from people who have made the transition (pdf).

Switching the freezers to -70°C was just the first step. Now our lab is about to join a sustainability pilot in the Netherlands and start using the LEAF toolkit from University College London. This will help introduce various sustainable lab practices and cut down on the waste and emissions associated with our research. To give you an idea of the effect it can have, the LEAF pilot in the UK that lasted from 2018 to 2020 achieved incredible results by saving 641.000 £ and avoiding 648 tCO₂e of emissions.

I am very excited to be the [self-appointed] Chief Sustainability Officer in the lab and lead this shift!

Thanks a lot to my PhD supervisor Gijs Wuite for his support of my less experimental PhD endeavors, to Aram de Haas, Hannah van der Stok and the rest of Green Team at Amsterdam UMC for the inspiring transformation of their workplace into a model sustainable lab space and sharing their passion along with some tips and to Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for listening to bottom-up initiatives and taking steps to be a better institution!

In 2022, I have given a presentation to my department section about the Open Science, why it is important and what each of us can do to make it a new norm. You can check out my slides to learn more.

Also, I have compiled a short guide with  personal practices and steps to take to make the knowledge available to everyone, increase public trust in scientific research and prevent gatekeeping in academia.

All my papers have been published in Open Access journals by choice. For my last paper made dedicated effort to have all the raw data (DataVerseNL by Dans KNAW) and analysis script (Github) available to everyone for the sake of promoting transparency in academia.

I enjoy explaining complex scientific concepts and effects. Finding the right language, metaphors and story to make it clear in engaging is a lot of fun. Both when communicating my research projects to other scientists [from another fields] at a conference and talking to friends with non-academic background. 

In particular, in the past years, I have given two popular science lectures about synthetic biology and the concept of life. What can be considered alive from a philosophical and practical points of view? How are scientists trying to create an artificial life right now? What implications will it have?

Science communication is hard without a beautiful, concise and clear illustration. That is why I take special effort to design my poster and presentation to make them more engaging. Check them out the posters here.

Looking back, I wish I had had a mentor during my bachelor studies, someone who could help me ask the right question when choosing a project, get my head around the application procedure to universities abroad and set the right priorities depending on my career want to pursuit. Now a senior PhD researcher, I want to give back and provide this sort of mentorship to students. For that reason, two years ago, I joined The Science Mentors and have been helping students since with their career, studies and work-life balance concerns.