Eden Tanner

Chemist Eden Tanner didn’t recognize her own disability for many years. She had always been more fatigued than others; as an undergraduate at the University of New South Wales, she could hardly stay awake during lectures and needed naps throughout the day. Despite her challenges, one of her professors invited her to join their lab, and that research sparked an interest in what would become the focus of her career: ionic liquids.These unique compounds are bulky and asymmetric, which prevents them from fitting together. “It's like a forbidden love story between the cation and the anion,” says Tanner, who heads a lab at the University of Mississippi. “They desperately want to align their charges, but they can’t, so they end up being liquid.” These liquid salts can make strong ionic bonds with other molecules, which allows them to be used in many applications of chemistry, including synthesis and energy production.Tanner continued researching ionic liquids as a graduate student at the University of Oxford. But during her final year, her symptoms reached a breaking point. After pushing herself to run a half-marathon, she couldn’t get out of bed for a week, and even everyday tasks like showering became difficult, as did research. Despite her condition, Tanner didn’t apply for formal accommodations at Oxford due to the unclear process, but her adviser was understanding and allowed her to take breaks when she needed to rest during the workday.Not until Tanner began her postdoctoral research at Harvard University was she diagnosed with dysautonomia,