Soapbox Science Brussels 2024

On June 29, 2024, women researchers from across Belgium took the streets of Brussels to share their passion and knowledge in a fun and accessible way.

The publich had plenty of time to discuss with all the scientists, learn about their research and also discover how it feels like to be a female/non-binary researcher in Belgium.

Details of the events

Speakers and programme

14:00 – 15:00

Dr Ir Marta Luffarelli (LinkedIn), Rayference SRL
Français: De l’espace à la Terre : une vue depuis les satellites !
Can speak: français, English, italiano

Jill De Visscher (LinkedIn), Universiteit Gent (UGent)
Nederlands: Waarom zijn micro-organismen op de noord- en zuidpool belangrijk in klimaatopwarming?
Can speak: Nederlands, English

Lidia López Gutiérrez (Twitter, LinkedIn), Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
Français: Élucider la maladie d’Alzheimer
Can speak: français, English, español

Apeksha Shapeti (Twitter, LinkedIn), KU Leuven
English: The force behind brain blood vessel lesions
Can speak: English

15:00 – 16:00

Mariam Haidar (LinkedIn), Katholiek Universiteit Leuven (KULeuven), Institute of Astronomy
English: Fine tuning our search for other worlds
Can speak: English

Elien Vissers-Similon (LinkedIn), Universiteit Antwerpen(UAntwerpen)
Nederlands: Architectural Intelligence: achter de schermen van artificiële intelligentie voor architectuurontwerp
Can speak: Nederlands, English

Prof. Delphine Laboureur (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram), von Karman Institute
Français: Être une femme sur le terrain : mesure des événements catastrophiques
Can speak: français, English

Dr Ana Romina Fox (LinkedIn), Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Louvain Institute of Biomolecular Science and Technology (LIBST)
English: Crops genome edition, what is that?
Can speak: English, español

16:00 – 17:00

Margaux Evenepoel (Twitter), Universiteit Gent (UGent) and Katholiek Universiteit Leuven (KULeuven)
Nederlands: Autisme onder de loep: een samenspel van hersenen, bacteriën en gedrag
Can speak: Nederlands, English

Clara Tanghe (LinkedIn), Universiteit Gent (UGent)
Nederlands: Kwantumfysica in het groot
Can speak: Nederlands, français, English

Dr Béatrice Hoa-Ai Hua, Université de Liège (ULiège), Group of Research and Applications in Statistical Physics (GRASP)
Français: Etudier des robots pour mieux comprendre les cellules vivantes
Can speak: English, français

Darina Abaffyová, Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB) and Katholiek Universiteit Leuven (KULeuven), Laboratory of Computational Biology
English: Using AI to understand how genes are (des)activated to develop brains
Can speak: English, Nederlands, slovenčina, español

Presentation of the speakers

Marta Luffarelli

Marta Luffarelli was born in Rome, where she studied Electronic Engineering at La Sapienza University. She started her international journey in 2014 with an Erasmus in Brussels and continued with an internship in Darmstadt, Germany, in 2015. In 2016, she moved permanently to Brussels to work as Remote Sensing Scientist at Rayference, working in international projects for the European Space Agency and the European Commission. While working at Rayference she carried out her PhD research, completed in 2022. Within the same year she became Managing Director of the company.

Jill De Visscher

Jill De Visscher graduated as a bioengineer in cell and gene biotechnology with a specialisation in green biotechnology. After her master’s thesis focusing on the soil microbiome of strawberry plants, she decided to further focus her research on microbial communities but now in extreme environments. She is currently a PhD researcher within the Protistology and Aquatic Ecology group at Ghent University. Her research studies the diversity and functioning of microbial communities in the soils and lakes of Svalbard and Antarctica.

Lidia Lopez

Hi! I’m Lidia and I study the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). I studied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in Málaga, Spain, which was followed by a master in Physiology and Neuroscience in Seville. After the first contacts with neurodegenerative diseases during my bachelor and master final projects, I decided to pursue a PhD on this discipline. 3 years ago, I came to Brussels to work with prof. Karelle Leroy on tau pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. At this moment, we are silencing a protein linked to the tauopathy in AD and analysing the effect on the propagation of the lesions.

Apeksha Shapeti

As a KU Leuven PhD researcher, Apeksha enjoys combining concepts in biomedical engineering, mechanics and cell biology to answer questions about vascular disease. She grew up in India but moved to the US to study Engineering at Cornell University. After 5 years in industry leaping from glass manufacturing in Japan, to microelectronics in New York – she quit her job to pursue her enthusiasm for biomedicine in Belgium. She derives immense satisfaction from community outreach programs in education, scientific communication, and mentoring. Besides her passion for science, Apeksha enjoys being active, writing, art, philosophy, food and sun.

Mariam Haidar

Mariam is a 1st year PhD candidate at KU Leuven, working on instrumentation for astronomy. Her passion is to learn more about the worlds outside our solar system, by helping the new observatory MARVEL achieve a better measurement precision. When she’s not thinking about instruments, Mariam likes to draw webcomics, play board games and play volleyball or go hiking.

Elien Vissers-Similon

Elien is an architectural engineer with a passion for coding and digital challenges. After her studies at KU Leuven in Belgium and Tsinghua University in Beijing, she worked as a project leader for metro stations in Berlin. In her spare time, she specialized in different programming languages and developed a passion for digital architecture. She currently conducts doctoral research at the University of Antwerp, where she combines her love for coding and architecture into a PhD about the use of artificial intelligence in architectural design. She aspires to make artificial intelligence accessible for all architects, no matter their technical background.

Delphine Laboureur

Delphine Laboureur performed her PhD at the von Karman Institute (VKI) and ULB, working on industrial accidents (BLEVE and Boilover). She moved to US, at Texas A&M University, to work on process safety related topics like LNG pool fires and dispersion, incident investigation, or offshore safety. In 2015, she came back to VKI as a research engineer and was appointed professor in 2018. Her current research areas focus on dispersion of solid and gas, nuclear safety, but also experimental characterization of heat exchangers in aeronautics. She is also diversity and inclusion officer at VKI and vice-president of BeWise.

Ana Romina Fox

Ana Romina Fox earned a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences in 2013, focusing on how plants respond to light. Subsequently, she conducted post-doctoral research on crops focusing on different topics that affect plant productivity. In 2016, she moved to Belgium to study aquaporins in maize. Returning to Argentina, she continued researching aquaporins in various organisms. In 2022, she received a fellowship to return to Belgium for two years to study aquaporins in plants. Currently, she’s investigating how aquaporins affect plant cell structure using molecular biology and microscopes, aiming to enhance farming practices by understanding crop biology.

Margaux Evenepoel

Margaux Evenepoel graduated as a physiotherapist with a specialization in neuromotor rehabilitation (KU Leuven, 2020). In October 2021, she obtained a FWO fellowship for her research project investigating the associations between brain connectivity, behavioral difficulties, and gut/mouth microbiome compositions in children with autism. This PhD project is jointly hosted by the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at KU Leuven and the Department of Microbiology at UGhent. Over the subsequent two years, she presented multiple posters and oral presentations at neurological and microbiological congresses and was one of the finalist of Falling Walls Lab Leuven 2023.

Clara Tanghe

Clara is a PhD student at Ghent University. After her theoretical master thesis in the Quantum Physics Group, she turned towards more hands-on experimental work. She joined that same group in their endeavour to start an ultra-cold atoms lab, currently the only of its kind in Belgium. Now, her daily life is filled with aligning laser beams and analysing how these phenomena influence the special quantum phase of matter created in the lab.

Béatrice Hua

Béatrice (Hoa-Ai) Hua, PhD, merges Physics with Biology in her research voyage, from exploring fluid-structure interaction inspired by bees’ nectar capture at Université de Bruxelles to investigating cell solidification in living tissues at Université de Liège. Now, she develops experiments with vibrating robots to activate synthetic membranes, exploring the complex connections between material properties, statistical physics and biological processes.

Darina Abaffyová

Darina is a passionate learner originally from Slovakia. She moved to Belgium to pursue higher education, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in electronics and ICT (information and communication technology) engineering technology at KU Leuven. She further expanded her expertise by obtaining a second master’s degree in bioinformatics. Now, as a PhD student at the VIB’s Laboratory of Computational Biology, Darina is on a mission to uncover the mechanisms that control gene activity during brain development.

We thank our sponsors for supporting our event