Meet Natalia Manousi

Natalia develops green sample preparation techniques and analytical methods with reduced environmental impact for food, environmental, and biological samples. Her work also includes developing and evaluating metrics that assess the practicality, performance, and greenness of analytical methods.

“Analytical chemistry has a very paradoxical role,” she says. “On one hand, we use it to monitor contamination levels in environmental and food samples, while on the other, it contributes significantly to environmental contamination.” For Natalia, the prospect of helping address that contradiction is a strong motivation: “The possibility of contributing to environmental protection so that we can offer future generations a healthier planet than the one we inherited is truly exciting to me.”

Her concern about AI is not the technology itself, but how it may be used by the next generation of analytical chemists. “The challenge is the risk of confusing easy access to information with understanding,” she says. “Future analytical chemists will have unprecedented access to instant answers, but they still need the knowledge to question those answers, identify mistakes, and understand the underlying analytical chemistry principles and fundamentals.”

Natalia also worries that the pursuit of funding is crowding out other parts of academic science. “Writing proposals consumes an enormous amount of time that we could otherwise spend on research, mentoring students, and pursuing new ideas,” she says. “When we constantly focus on the next funding call, there is less room for curiosity, risk-taking, and long-term thinking.”

Exchange programs, meanwhile, have given Natalia experience in international laboratories, introduced her to new techniques and research environments, and broadened her perspective. She now encourages younger researchers to seek opportunities abroad and embrace unfamiliar challenges.