First action of the newly established SBQ Women’s Nucleus will reward women for their contributions to chemistry.
SBQ has just created its first award dedicated to recognizing the work of women who excel in chemistry and / or strengthening the Society. The Vanderlan da Silva Bolzani Prize will be conferred for the first time at the 42nd Annual Meeting (from May 27 to 30 in Joinville), and was established by the newly created SBQ Women’s Center. “SBQ was already organizing activities focused on women’s roles in science, chemistry and the country. At IUPAC 2017 and Foz 2018, we highlighted this theme and had a great public success, so we saw that the Society was sensitive to this, a real problem for us”, says Professor Rossimiriam Freitas (UFMG), vice president of SBQ and one of the coordinators of the Nucleus. “Now with the SBQ Women’s Center, we are going to stimulate debates, highlight the work of women and put women’s leadership in the spotlight. It is necessary to set an example and inspire the younger ones”.
The first action of the Women’s Nucleus was precisely to create the Vanderlan Bolzani Prize. “SBQ already has five awards with the names of former presidents: Simão Mathias, Ângelo da Cunha Pinto, Fernando Galembeck, Hans Viertler and Jaílson Bittencourt de Andrade. Vanderlan made it easier and has done on the way for all of us. It is only fair that the award takes its name”, says Rossimiriam.
“I’m surprised, envious, and extremely excited”, says Professor Vanderlan. Dear to the students, admired by her peers, respected throughout the planet for the quality of her work, her activities in favor of chemistry and in defense of women in science, this young woman from Santa Rita/Paraíba is approaching 70 years of activity. In addition to his undergraduate and post-graduate courses at the UNESP Institute of Chemistry in Araraquara, Vanderlan coordinates several scientific research groups and activities, participates in some scientific societies, such as the SBPC, of which she is Vice-President, she is member of superior council of FAPESP and gives an average of two conferences per month in Brazil and abroad, and still finds time for family and friends.
“I think my trajectory is a compound of doing what I like and persist,”, reflects the professor. “When I was a newly formed teacher with two small children to take care of, my husband had an ischemic stroke, and he was disabled. Many times I took the kids to class, and they kept quiet while I worked. My career began to unfold at age 45”, she says.
With a passion for natural products she inherited from her Indian grandmother – “we played with natural pigments from the saffron of Grandmother’s small farm – Vanderlan attended two years of medicine school before realizing that the path was different. “With the support of my parents, I locked my license in college and went to do a pharmacy course, when I was enchanted by the chairs of organic and analytical chemistry. I really got into chemistry when I came to São Paulo with nothing to do my master’s degree. I was not sure what I was going to do when I met Professor Otto Gottlieb”.
Like Marden Alvarenga, Gottlieb was a key name in Professor Vanderlan’s career. “They gave me a lot of security and support for my research initiation”, she says. Today, the professor Vanderlan sometimes sleeps four hours a night to devote herself to many projects. “I’m very electric and at one with life. Besides work, I want to be very present with my grandchildren, who love museums, and my students and friends at bar tables, a great place to discuss science”, she says.
Vanderlan is a former SBQ partner who presided over 2006 to 2010. She is currently developing research in natural product chemistry with an emphasis on the search for bioactive substances, secondary metabolites and peptides, metabolomics and medicinal chemistry of natural products. She coordinates INCT BioNat and is Vice-Coordinator of CEPID-FAPESP CIBFar. She is a member of IUPAC and has relationships with dozens of scientific societies and universities outside Brazil. She has 267 articles published, with index h = 34 and 4,516 citations, in addition to a book published and four patents. She is a member of the editorial board of several high impact scientific publications and has dozens of national and international awards.
“I’ve always been very studious and pawky. My mother wanted me to play with the girls, but I wanted to play with the boys, I thought play marbles was very interesting. Now I want to write a book of poems.”
Text by Mario Henrique Viana (Assessoria de Imprensa da SBQ)
Original Text: http://boletim.sbq.org.br/noticias/2019/n3373.php