Gillian Greenway talks to Freya Mearns about taking analytical chemistry out of the lab and into the real world

	Professor Gillian Greenway is Head of Environmental Monitoring at the Hull Environment Research Institute and the new president of the Analytical Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Her research interests include chemical miniaturisation and environmental analysis.

 

Who inspired you to become a scientist?
I was really inspired by family. My father and uncles were engineers and my aunt was a pharmacist. I lived near the sea and when we went to the beach to play, my uncle, who was a civil engineer, had us using scientific principles to design dams.

What motivated you to specialise in analytical chemistry and environmental monitoring?
One of the other people who inspired me was a chemistry teacher. He was really enthusiastic and we used to have a chemistry club. My project was to analyse metals in the docks in Sunderland, which meant that most of my time was spent boiling down vast amounts of water to try to concentrate the metal ions to analyse them. For some reason, I didn't get put off by that!

Another person who inspired me was Gordon Kirkbright, my PhD supervisor. He set up the department where I studied for my PhD in Manchester, the Department of Instrumentation and Analytical Science. It was a new idea, sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, to put different scientific disciplines together. That's where my approach to research was developed.

What projects are you working on?

My main project is trying to take measurements out of the laboratory and into the environment or to crime scenes. I'm working with engineers and physicists to try to make truly portable systems. Although there have been a lot of lab-on-a-chip proof-of-concepts in the lab, there are still very few instruments that actually work out in the field in a reliable way - trying to convert the lab based systems into something that works is challenging. The sort of concepts that I'm working on are: trying to make the systems robust, immobilising reagents, including redundancy, using engineering approaches to fault testing, using feedback to find out when things aren't working and determining how to overcome problems. It is also important not just to repeat the way the chemistry is carried out in the lab but to find different ways that will work better in the environment.

You work across a broad range of subjects. How do you strike a balance between specialising in one area and knowing enough about the other areas?
I think you do have to specialise in one area, so the key thing is learning to communicate with people from other disciplines. That can be surprisingly difficult. It takes patience because each discipline seems to have its own language; often the same word has different meanings. So it's important to overcome these barriers and be able to tell biologists and engineers, for example, what you need and to understand what they are telling you.

Do you think the language barriers between different disciplines are becoming lower?
It's probably getting better for certain groups of people but if you talked to a hard-core engineer, communication would probably still be difficult. It's those people who are prepared to work together that are making progress.

Do you remember your first experiment?
Apart from doing the civil engineering on the beach, it was either doing chromatography with a felt tip pen or using a prism to split light - that was in junior school. And I'm still using both optics and chromatography in my analytical science!

What's the secret to being a successful scientist?
I think having an open mind. You shouldn't just look at your subject, you should be prepared to read around the subject and talk to people from other disciplines to see how you can apply what they're thinking about to what you're doing. Also, being persistent and having some imagination.

What's the trickiest problem you've had to overcome in your research and how did you get around it?
I've got dyspraxia, which is a coordination-specific learning problem. That means that, practically, I can be a bit of a disaster in the lab. The fact that I became a chemist must show my determination. I need lots of practise with practical skills. Fortunately, I chose a degree with industrial placements and the day-to-day experience in the laboratories gave me the confidence I needed. After that the number of breakages, spills and floods decreased.

Does seeing you make mistakes make your students feel more comfortable?
These days I don't get in the lab as often as I would like so I am out of practise. If I see the students looking concerned as I pick up something that is very delicate, I remember how I felt as a student when the professor came into my lab and I put it straight down again!

Obviously you haven't let dyspraxia hold you back. You have been elected president of the Analytical Division of the RSC - congratulations!
Thank you. It is good to know that your peers have confidence in your ability to do the job.

What's the role of the Analytical Division?

The role of the Analytical Division is to promote analytical chemistry and science. It's about promoting research in the area and communicating with the public so that people understand the importance of good chemical measurements in their everyday lives. It's also about working with industry, encouraging collaboration between industry and academia and going into schools and encouraging children to be interested in science. The Analytical Division's there to support the members too, to organise meetings and to help people network. It's been very useful in my career to network through the Royal Society of Chemistry.

What would you like to achieve as president?
Obviously, what's really important is to keep promoting analytical science and to get people to understand its importance. Within the Analytical Division, I'd like to get people more involved by getting them enthused and willing to participate and to promote their ideas. We're very lucky in the Analytical Division because we have the Analytical Chemistry Trust Fund - if you have good ideas, you can go to the ACTF to get funds to promote them. We have a lot of initiatives at the moment including the development of a new studentship scheme and the encouragement of science in developing countries.

Speaking of enthusiasm and new ideas, if you could solve any scientific problem in the future, what would it be?
I think finding some kind of renewable energy.

That would make you very popular! Finally, if you weren't a scientist, what would you do?
I think I would be a teacher. It is a really good feeling when you are able to inspire people although it is hard work.