Asel Sartbaeva

Meet the researcher whose work will save lives around the world.

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Vaccines are incredibly important. A vaccine is a type of medicine that trains the body to fight a disease using its own defences. Every year across the world, they prevent as many as five million people from dying. Unfortunately, most vaccines need to be kept cool to stop them from going off. This makes it difficult to transport them to remote areas of the world because if they get too warm, they won't work. Dr Asel Sartbaeva is a scientist who is trying to find a solution to this problem. For more than 10 years, she has been developing a way to keep vaccines stable outside of a fridge or freezer. Sartbaeva spoke to The Week Junior Science+Nature about her love of science, her research, and the inspirations behind it.

Finding certainty in science

Sartbaeva grew up in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. It used to be part of the Soviet Union, a group of countries once ruled from Moscow, the capital of Russia. The Soviet Union broke up into different countries in 1991, when Sartbaeva was around 12 years old. At the time, she had been spending a lot of time in hospital. She immersed herself in reading science fiction and started with Isaac Asimov's novels. "I think reading sci-fi was one of my biggest passions, which then ignited me wanting to become a scientist," she said. While there was a lot of change going on in her country and her own life, she felt she "needed something certain", which drew her to topics such as maths and physics, where there was always an answer.

Keeping vaccines stable