In her early career as a researcher, Euler mainly focused on studying harsh conditions and how organisms would adapt to them – that meant studying simple life forms. When we think of such extremophiles, we usually imagine hydrothermal vent creatures that dwell among the extremely hot regions on the bottom of the ocean. Euler, however, chose to study the organisms that would survive in the extreme cold. 

As her career progressed, Euler got onto one of the more famous discoveries in her time – arguably, not as much as she deserved. Women at the time weren’t supported as much as men; at the time, it was considered “progressive” for universities to even hire women as professors. Euler ended up finding numerous chemical properties of the element Ytterbium, such as the atomic weight. Later, her work shifted to the elements Lanthanum and Selenium.

After this brief period studying the elements, Euler eventually resumed her work on simple organisms, now focusing on plankton. Because of the harsh effects of climate change, some of the organisms she studied have gone extinct, which is why scientists today are still exploring these special types of plankton. Overall, Euler was extremely involved in chemistry, especially for her time. She served as a secondary school teacher, a lab assistant, a professor, and later a book author on chemistry.