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Growing up, Varinia Bernales had a family that instilled in her a commitment to devote one’s career to protecting humankind. She especially looked up to her aunt Belgica, who worked with the World Health Organization, doing research and developing policies on asbestosis to improve worker safety. Bernales couldn’t fathom it when she was a kid in Chile, but that family credo has guided her through a thriving career in science and advocacy.
Vitals
Hometown: Santiago, Chile
Education: BSc, chemistry, 2009, and PhD, chemistry, 2014, University of Chile
Current position: Lead research scientist, UL Research Institutes
Nickname: Avecilla (little bird). It was given to me by a dear friend who claims that I always flutter here and there.
Impactful book:Las venas abiertas de Latinoamérica (Open Veins of Latin America), by Eduardo Galeano. I keep several copies at home, both in English and Spanish, to offer to friends as presents. It is my way of sharing my origins and a piece of my world with them.
I am: Chilean, American (as I was born on this continent), and a Latino woman
Today, Bernales is one of the lead research scientists at UL Research Institutes, just outside Chicago, where she works on simulating and creating materials to make the world a cleaner, safer place.
Starting as an undergraduate at the University of Chile, Bernales fell in love with chemistry and was always looking for new research opportunities. She volunteered in laboratories that ran the gamut of the central science: supramolecular chemistry, inorganic synthesis, solid-state chemistry, and quantum physics.
As she approached the end of her undergraduate years, she read a paper that broadly changed how she saw chemistry. The paper explained how ionic liquids, a type of solvent that is easier to contain and recycle than more common solvents, could be modeled computationally.
The paper was entirely in English, so it took Bernales a while to get through because she grew up speaking Spanish, but by the end, she realized two things: not only could ionic liquids reduce the waste that chemical reactions create, but computational models could cut waste even further.
These models would give her the flexibility “to explore all the possibilities without having an immediate impact on the environment,” she says.
But as she began combining green chemistry with computational chemistry, she found that very few scientists in Chile were familiar with either field at the time. “People thought that we were just playing video games,” Bernales remembers.
Encouraged by her teachers, Bernales did a 4-month stint at the University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities in the middle of her PhD in computational chemistry. The way chemists at UMN approached science was revolutionary to her. Instead of everyone being siloed into their own projects, students and professors regularly gathered to share their results and generate new ideas as a group, and academia partnered with industry to advance research.
She went back to UMN for her postdoctoral studies and decided to step out of her comfort zone in ionic liquids. She collaborated with labs working on new problems to clean up the earth. She researched issues as diverse as developing materials for the recovery of nuclear waste and metal-organic frameworks that could transform harmful molecules into environmentally beneficial ones.
I’m a researcher; I do whatever it takes to solve a problem.
Her skills in computational chemistry enabled her to work on various models and calculations simultaneously; she could seamlessly transition between different fields as she learned how each laboratory conducted experiments.
During this time, Laura Gagliardi, a quantum chemist now at the University of Chicago, started mentoring Bernales. Gagliardi is originally from Italy, and Bernales says the mentorship by an immigrant woman who had assembled a multicultural working group helped her build the confidence she didn’t find doing research back home.
As a woman starting a career in a male- dominated field in Chile, Bernales navigated situations that threatened her mental health and career advancement—some of her male peers harassed and invalidated her. But in Gagliardi’s lab, Bernales flourished.
Credit: Sara Stathas
Varinia Bernales (front) and Conor Brew, a research scientist at UL Research Institutes, discuss how to combine simulations of materials with experimental data from a powder X-ray diffractometer.
“She really brought this research to the next level,” Gagliardi says. Bernales developed and used computational methods that combined classical molecular simulations and state-of-the-art approaches to study materials with complex electron behaviors. She became the face of UMN’s Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center, an energy-focused research institute, Gagliardi says.
Gagliardi remembers Bernales as a bridge between those creating the models and those conducting the experiments. “She was my second-in-command,” Gagliardi says.
Regardless of whether she was on the computer or in the lab, Bernales was willing to experiment with new fields and solve the puzzle in front of her. “I’m a researcher; I do whatever it takes to solve a problem,” she says.
Today Bernales has moved into a leadership role at the safety science nonprofit UL Research Institutes, where she’s using computational chemistry to develop new materials to remediate and protect the environment. Her position allows her to combine her passion for helping remove toxic chemicals from the environment with her dedication to developing products that are safer for human health and the world.
Her projects at UL Research Institutes include developing cutting-edge protective materials that would keep firefighters from inhaling toxic chemicals and devising materials to improve batteries’ safety. She’s also working with other scientists to design materials that can help remove heavy metals from water or filter out pollutants like benzene from the air.
Bernales’s contribution to improving the world doesn’t end with her research. She’s also a strong advocate for women in science and tries to help other scientists access the same opportunities she had. “She builds trust relationships very quickly,” says Peter Margl, a senior research scientist at Dow, where Bernales worked before taking the position at UL Research Institutes. “She is incredibly passionate about women’s rights, about equal opportunities for everyone.”
In 2018, Bernales began volunteering with FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition to encourage girls to become interested in science. She says she wants to support the women she works with—and scientists in general—whether as a colleague or a mentor, in the same way that Gagliardi did for her.
She has also spoken at Current Trends in Theoretical Chemistry conferences in Peru and Ecuador about quantum chemistry and how it can help provide a more accurate description of molecules. She hopes to organize her own initiative to continue bringing quantum chemistry conferences to Latin America and conduct them in Spanish to lower the language barrier surrounding computational chemistry. As Margl says, Bernales is on a mission to fix the things that are not right in the world.
Along her journey, Bernales remains in touch with her roots and the family that inspired her to improve the world. Her aunt Belgica felt particularly happy when she learned that Bernales would be working with renewable energy projects at UL Research Institutes, Bernales says. “She told me that it was wonderful that I could dedicate myself to something with so much purpose,” Bernales says.
Her aunt had encouraged Bernales to pursue her dreams and get a PhD despite the advice of other family members to specialize in a seemingly more pragmatic field, like engineering. Ultimately, following her passion paid off.
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