During International Day for Women and Girls in Science, we’re talking to 
some of the inspiring women scientists who are making their marks at Nutreco. Birgit Köhn is passionate about building awareness around the incredible power of plants through her work at Nutreco’s Garden of the Future in Switzerland. She is harnessing her natural curiosity, along with her love for the natural sciences, to have a long-lasting impact on the industry.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role in Nutreco:
I am a researcher in Nutreco's Garden of the Future, and part of the Nutreco Exploration team. My role is to uncover the full potential of our unique plants by characterizing their phytochemical constitution. I work together with the laboratory team at our site in Arbon, Switzerland, to drive the discovery of our PhytoComplexes. 

What inspired you to pursue a career in science?
I enjoyed natural science lectures in school, because I was always curious to understand the riddles that the world has in store for me. Also, I loved getting explanations for the fascinating, invisible world of the basic fabric that you and I are made of. My science teacher in high school made a huge impact on my career choices after school, because she had an unending wisdom on both chemistry and biology, and a witty way of explaining the scientific background of all processes in the whole world to us.

Can you share a moment in your career that made you feel especially proud?
When I printed my doctoral thesis and put it as a book on a shelf written by me, I felt really satisfied. It was in the middle of the COVID pandemic. I had completed my PhD in chemistry with "summa cum laude" and three nice publications, while having a family of two beautiful little girls and a great husband at home. Due to health legislation, nobody except a few people from the university board were allowed in the room for my final thesis presentation and there was no big ceremony. In that moment when it was all accomplished, I was still in organizing mode and did not much care. But when the accomplishment became part of my C.V., and the thesis became part of my bookshelf, I realized that I had reached an important stepstone. 

The thesis tells the story of the invisible but incredibly fundamental construction of our machinery of life that I was investigating over the course of five years. But for me, those years also tell me of the endurance, the resources and the long-lasting impact that my curiosity can yield if I put it to work.

How do you hope your work will influence the scientific community and the animal protein production in the future?
I hope that my work in the discovery group will further advance the scope of opportunities that we have to develop customized PhytoComplex solutions to meet the needs of the industry. 

I think that our approach can be a flagship for others in the industry to follow. Our PhytoComplexes reduce the need for antibiotics in animal production by causing a health benefit to the animal. The scientific community needs to become aware of the scope of opportunities that can be tackled successfully by our approach, bringing both the animal and the human working with it a higher standard of living.

One great impact that I would love to leave behind is the awareness that a single plant, just as green and usual as it may look, has more power to beneficially influence a mammalian body than an army of diagnostic tools and remedies. This is not due to pseudo-scientific invisible energy theory, but because of the evidence-based pure interaction between plant chemistry and animal chemistry, that is transmitted within the consuming organism. 

Can you share a fun or surprising fact about your research or field of expertise?
Using the tools of chemistry, humans have mastered synthesizing a plethora of complicated structures, one of the most labour-intensive being Vitamin B. It took over 100 PhD trainees to discover its synthetic assembly! 

Chemists have synthesized millions of different compounds nowadays, but this is a small number, relative to the theoretical possibilities. We still are lagging far behind the unreachable master chemist on our planet: nature. This holds true especially for the kingdom of plants: they are equipped in the most efficient way to produce the most diverse metabolites, and for the majority of those, we don't even know the precise structure and are far from synthesizing them ourselves, however advanced our laboratories are.