Thesis with comic strip

Anyone leafing through Jiaying Li’s doctoral thesis will find not only the usual scientific texts, formulae and tables, but also comic strip drawings. Her summary appears twice: as a written text and as a comic strip. Li drew all of these illustrations herself. Two characters recur most frequently: a little pig, representing Li herself, and a little fox, standing in for her supervisor Wiebe de Vos.

‘I’ve been making comic strip drawings since the very start of my research,’ says Li. ‘It’s about presentation. People are often only engaged for five minutes before they lose concentration. This way I make my work more accessible to a general audience.’ Her doctoral research was funded by ARC CBBC, a national research centre for sustainable chemistry in which universities and major industry players collaborate, and that was a bonus for her. ‘I was able to work in the academic world, but also had close contact with large companies.’

Li focused on a pH switch that gives a polycation a charge during evaporation. The polycation can then form a complex with a polyanion, producing a thin layer. This allows you to create polyelectrolyte complexes (PECs) in a single step. One potential application of these PECs is as a gas barrier in food packaging. This could offer an alternative to aluminium, for instance, making the packaging easier to recycle.

In her first year, Li was still searching for an application for her complexes. ‘These films are not as robust as proper plastic.’ Li is now rounding off her part of the research in a postdoctoral project, and ARC CBBC has funded a follow-up study for the next doctoral candidate.

Ukulele

Li is proud of how she has developed as a presenter. ‘I gave many presentations outside the university, including to lab technicians and non-scientists, for example at the Dutch Coatings Association. That audience has spent their entire working lives dealing with coatings, but they don’t concern themselves with the scientific background, so the challenge was to make that connection nonetheless. I was genuinely encouraged to do a great deal of science communication. That has helped me get as far as I have.’

During her defence, Li was of course required to give a lay talk, but even there she put her own spin on things: she played a song on the ukulele. ‘I had a few weeks after submitting my thesis and had always wanted to learn to play an instrument but had never got started. Now I had a deadline for myself. The audience reacted with surprise, but positively. Everyone sees the defence as something serious, but the first fifteen minutes are yours.’