A sustainable medical products advisor at Médecins Sans Frontières, Eléa Dheilly shares with us her rich and committed journey, punctuated by various passions combining intellectual and hands-on skills.
Eléa Dheilly grew up in Alsace, where she obtained her baccalaureate at the international lycée in 2011. There she developed a boundless curiosity for photography, art and languages, but also for science, which led her to choose EPFL and Life Sciences Engineering for her studies.
Despite a difficult first year, she found her balance by alternating classes, social activities and assistant work at the Point Vélo as well as at the science promotion service. For three years, she also joined the programming team of Balélec, the famous music festival on the Lausanne campus.
It was during her Master's degree that she specialised, through a programme in Neuroscience and then a year spent at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where she combined neuroscience research and music .
At the end of 2018, as the chapter of her student life was closing, Eléa took the time to travel for a year by bike, which she funded by giving kitesurfing lessons.
“My engineering background helps me enormously, as do my experiences in the medical and environmental sectors. For MSF, my profile is rare.”
Her career began on her return to France, in early 2020, with a position as scientific coordinator in Brest, within a research team on motor disability in children. She then became a project manager in a Nantes-based gene therapy research laboratory.
“The work involved experiments on animals and, ethically, I felt a cognitive dissonance, even though this research is essential. What's more, while the development was funded by public money, the patents were sold to industry. The price of a single dose could reach 1.2 million euros!”
She then made a complete U-turn in order to reconnect with her values, and co-created a bike repair workshop: “It may seem trivial, but repairing bikes voluntarily is a way, at my level, to fight inequality and work for the environment,” she explains.
She devoted herself to this mission for a year, before looking for a new salaried job. This would be in an environmental association, which she joined in 2023 as head of education and awareness-raising on environmental issues, and then at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), as a sustainable medical products advisor: “This last job ticks all the boxes. My role aims to reduce the impact of single-use medical items. They account for two-thirds of the items used in care for 16 million patients around the world. It calls for a great deal of creativity, as well as an overall understanding of medical practices and product development processes.”
Eléa still feels a form of incompleteness and a thirst for knowledge. To address it, she continues to feed herself intellectually, by taking up the study of German again, reading comics, or sailing.
“I would have loved to see profiles like mine represented at EPFL.”
She regards the side roads that have marked her path as meaningful experiences. To know that other paths are possible.