Understanding the Natural Products: A Profile of Ipek Suntar

Abstract

Ipek Suntar's main aim was to become a pharmacist in order to explore medicine in every approach. She received her bachelor's degree from Faculty of Pharmacy, Gazi University. She obtained her master's and PhD degrees from the same institution, in Department of Pharmacognosy. “Pharmacognosy is a discipline where one can follow every step of drug discovery and development” she says. She was born in 1983. The family stayed in many different districts in Turkey, due to her father's occupation. They were always living in small districts and moving to another in every 2–3 years. Her early life passed by trying to be accepted by her schoolmates. “The best thing that I did in my childhood was studying” she says. She assumes that success is a way of acceptance. She continued to work hard in the university during graduate and postgraduate education, she almost never left the lab at the cost of being unsocial. She got married in this very busy period. Immediately after her marriage, she was awarded a project grant to conduct a part of her PhD thesis by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) to study in Europe. At the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom for 6 months in the year 2009, she worked with Prof. Satyajit Sarker. “It was a very difficult but a very fruitful period for me that a foreign country provided me different perspectives” she says. She learned the importance of working together, studying much more organized and being patient. “Collaboration is essential to produce effective work if each researcher knows their responsibility and works timely and truthfully” she says. She got her PhD degree in 2011 and was assigned as an Associate Professor in 2014 in Gazi University Faculty of Pharmacy. She is still trying to do her best in the research area even with her eight-year-old daughter, coming together to the lab out of working times including the weekends and holidays. The main thing about pharmacognosy that attracted her attention was the fact that natural products (plants, animals, minerals, microorganisms, and marine sources) have been used in the treatment of many diseases for centuries and the hypothetical basis of the scientific studies on the natural products originated from the ethnobotanical reports, which provide a high success rate in the experiments. Indeed, the majority of the natural sources whose active compounds are currently employed as medicine has an ethnomedical use. Since 2005, she has been conducting in vivo and in vitro biological activity studies on natural products, revealing diverse biological effects of a wide range of plant derived compounds in various classes of chemical groups. Her research field mainly focuses on the investigation of the in vivo wound healing, anti-inflammatory, antinociceptive, anti-endometriotic, and anti-urolithiatic activities of the natural sources used in traditional medicine through biological activity-guided fractionation and isolation assays. She has published 80 scientific articles (SCI and SCI-exp. indexed) and 15 book chapters and edited one book. She is a member of Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research (GA), Phytochemical Society of Europe (PSE), and Association for Medicinal and Aromatic Plants of Southeast European Countries (AMAPSEEC). She has received many awards including Scientist Training Group Scholarships for master and doctorate programs provided by TUBITAK; Scientific Encouragement Award-2014 given by Pharmacy Academy, Association of Turkish Pharmacists; Patent Encouragement Award of Gazi University; The Best Oral/Poster Presentation Awards in scientific meetings worldwide. She has been working as Vice Dean in Faculty of Pharmacy, Gazi University since 2018. “Choose to take a part in the microenvironments in which efficient scientific discussions can be carried on. Not only one aspect, try to be faced with differences in order to enhance your vision. Always believe in yourself to produce a valuable outcome without hoping to have a motivation in your way. Your motivation will come to you spontaneously in the end when you finalize your aim.” she tells the young researchers.