Deniz Gökengin thinks colleagues view her as “a very serious, hardworking, meticulous, control-freak type of person”. But she has another side. “I am very compassionate. I have a lot of compassion for people in need, animals, the environment, plants, and the world. So my inner and outer shells are different, but I think they complement each other”, she says. Gökengin is a professor of infectious diseases in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology at Ege University, Izmir, Türkiye.