Anja Boisen is one of the world's leading nanotechnology researchers. She garners international recognition for her application-oriented research and has received prestigious awards and accolades for her groundbreaking results.
As Professor of Micro and Nanotechnology at DTU Health Tech she heads the Center for Intelligent Drug Delivery and Nanomechanical Sensors (IDUN), which conducts research into drug delivery.
Here she is creating medicine containers the size of sugar grains which will administer medicine to the body through the digestive system and make injections superfluous. She also develops inexpensive and groundbreaking diagnostic tools that, for example, offer hope of eradicating nasty infectious diseases.
Last week at DTU's Commemoration Day, Anja Boisen received the Innovation Prize, which is awarded to researchers who see innovation as a natural part of their research and who inspire their colleagues.
"The prize is a huge recognition of the way we work with innovation. I've always seen innovation as a natural part of our research, and I've never found that one excludes the other. I think top-level research and innovation go hand in hand. And I also find that we're seeing more and more innovation at DTU," says Anja Boisen.
Things should not be too easy
Curiosity is the driving factor for Anja Boisen as a researcher. She is curious to hear about new fields of study and likes meeting people from other cultures. She thrives on challenges. And if something does not work, she does not give up. Instead, she thinks the technology can have other applications than what it was originally developed for.
Anja Boisen often gets new ideas and inspiration when she attends conferences. In 2010, she attended a lecture given by a researcher who talked about growing small larvae of the type C. elegans on a DVD disc with built-in channels. The purpose of the experiment was to examine how the larvae reacted when exposed to a large g-force when the disc was run very fast. The result showed that the larvae survived and multiplied.
"I thought it was really cool to hear this crazy lecture about living organisms on a disc. But I didn't know to use it for. It only made sense when, a few months later, I went to Taiwan, where I saw how researchers disassembled DVDs and used the optics part to measure how much a small microcantilever bent up and down. This led me to start making small laboratories on a disc," says Anja Boisen.
Today, she is developing a rotating disc with integrated microchannels that can measure the concentration of drugs in the blood in a short time, which will improve blood sample analyses.
