Chemists amid coronavirus five years on: Anya Gryn’ova

Ukrainian native Anya Gryn’ova was a junior group leader at Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) in Germany during the pandemic and now is an associate professor of computational chemistry at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Her group’s research wasn’t much disrupted by Covid-19 since it involved theoretical chemistry that could be done remotely on supercomputers, but her job at HITS was a temporary one. So, in 2023 Gryn’ova began looking for a permanent position elsewhere and landed at Birmingham in April 2024.

‘I always knew that there will be a time when I would need to move on and so I looked around and received several offers, but Birmingham’s was the best,’ she recalls. There Gryn’ova primarily focuses on research, leading a group of eight that includes graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, but she also works with undergraduate students and is tasked with various teaching and administrative duties.

When Covid-19 shut everything down in March 2020, Gryn’ova had just started her junior group at HITS and had begun hiring a team of researchers a few months earlier. While more established colleagues were able to capitalise on the quiet time and finish writing up research papers that had been in the works for some time, she didn’t have a backlog of research to work through.

‘It was really a time to generate new, exciting science, and it was much harder when you had to do it all via hybrid meetings,’ Gryn’ova recounts. It wasn’t until the summer of 2021 that her team started meeting in person again, holding group seminars for example, and towards the end of 2021 they began working together physically almost daily.

She noticed a huge boost to productivity and creativity when her team was able to be together again. ‘The group can be more than the sum of its parts – when people are together physically, they can just quickly chat and bounce ideas off of one another rather than having to rely on scheduled bits of time when we are all in the same computer window,’ Gryn’ova says. ‘The number of research projects we were working on really exploded once everyone was back in the office.’

Loved ones in the line of fire

Although born in Ukraine, Gryn’ova has spent her adult life living abroad – not only in Germany and the UK, but before that in the US, Switzerland and Australia. She still has family and friends living in Ukraine but has not visited since 2022.

Since Russia’s second invasion of the country three years ago it has become ‘very complicated and scary’ to travel back there, Gryn’ova says. ‘I still have very close family back in Ukraine in the direct line of danger, some of them are in the armed forces, and I have some elderly family members who just cannot travel out of the country.’

Fortunately, her mother moved to Germany to be with her in March 2022, but Gryn’ova says she remains there without a clear path to join her now because ‘the UK doesn’t have such an accommodating policy anymore for Ukrainian war refugees.’

There are several ‘really great lessons’ that came out of the pandemic, and one is that meetings don’t have to be in person, according to Gryn’ova. After Covid-19, for example, if one of her team members was travelling, they would do a hybrid group seminar so that person could still be included. That wasn’t really an option before, and it’s a significant improvement.

Big scientific conferences returned around 2022, but before that there were virtual conferences, including on Twitter – now known as X. But it became clear that they were not the same as in-person events, especially in terms of networking, according to Gryn’ova. But she still believes that conference planners should be selective.

‘As a coping mechanism, I try not to think about it’

‘There should be some reasoning behind organising conferences in different locations, with environmental impact in mind,’ she says. ‘But they cannot be completely replaced with online meetings.’

As a scientist from Ukraine, one thing that greatly concerns Gryn’ova now is Donald Trump’s election to second term as US president. ‘As a coping mechanism, I try not to think about it because it’s so terrifying,’ she states. Research-wise, however, Gryn’ova feels quite safe in the UK, suggesting that the Labour party’s landslide victory in the 2024 UK general election this past summer produced an election outcome that was quite encouraging for scientists.

‘We’ve seen what Trump is willing to do, and in terms of research this means unscientific regulations and deprioritisation of certain areas of research,’ says Gryn’ova, who has research collaborators in the US. ‘I feel for my colleagues in America – I think they will be braving very hard times and hope that they still manage to maintain their research agendas and their research directions despite this.’