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Shahina Akter trained as a pharmacist before she became a structural scientist — and that background never left her. "Peptide drugs have enormous therapeutic potential," she says, "but their poor intestinal permeability makes oral administration extremely difficult." Most patients who need these medicines have to inject them. Changing that is what drove her PhD.

What happens when you spend years studying something as ordinary as water — and discover it behaves in ways nobody expected? Hanno Holzinger set out to understand how cellulose nanofibres and water interact, and ended up uncovering something that challenged the basic assumptions of his field. His PhD taught him that the deeper you go, the less certain everything becomes — and why that's actually the most exciting place to be.