Dr Alison Hill CChem MRSC

My dad was a maths teacher and I have always been interested in maths and science. I was very fortunate to have excellent science teachers at school, but it was in my first year of university that I decided to become a chemist. The labs were so much fun and the lecturers so inspiring.

I was fortunate to be taught by some truly inspirational people. My undergraduate project supervisor, Professor Jack Elix, was a brilliant lecturer and taught organic chemistry clearly and in such an engaging way. He introduced me to biosynthesis and I left Australia to join Professor Jim Staunton's lab to study polyketide biosynthesis. Both he and Professor David Cane (where I did my postdoc research) were amazing and innovative scientists with real vision but were also excellent and inspiring teachers.

My students and my children. I want to show them that it is possible to combine a demanding job with raising a family. I also love talking about chemistry!

To grab all opportunities with both hands and see where it takes you. There are many issues where chemists can make a real difference, such as drug discovery and decarbonising the world, to name just two areas.

I love teaching and one of the most fun parts of my job is supervising final year undergraduate projects. I let the students create their own projects to ensure they are really invested and interested. This means that we learn together and I am amazed at how creative their projects can be.

Chemistry underpins everything and understanding it is essential to tackling global challenges such as climate change and antimicrobial resistance. Chemistry education requires problem solving, mathematics, and critical thinking, all of which are transferable to many professions, but it has the added bonus of the lab experiments which are so much fun!

Becoming an Exeter Education Incubator Fellow and creating resources to support my students and ensure that all of them can succeed no matter what their academic background. That project funded the Smart Worksheet and gave me the confidence to develop unique datasets (with my colleague Professor Nic Harmer) for online assessments during the pandemic.

Combining work with raising my family has been really challenging and I have benefitted from the University of Exeter’s flexible working policy. I worked part-time from 2001 until 2020 so that I could do both and I have been able to increase my hours as the children grew. I finally went full time again when my youngest child finished school.

I think you can achieve so much more working collaboratively than as an individual. Having collaborators to bounce ideas off leads to a better project and makes everything much more fun, especially when it comes to writing (which I find the most challenging part). The unique datasets project was a true collaboration and was much more than the sum of the parts.

I have been fortunate to have some very good chemistry friends who have mentored and supported me since I moved onto the education track. I have also benefitted from the University of Exeter's support of innovative teaching through the Exeter Education Incubator, and being able to collaborate with colleagues who share an interest in innovative practice.