Dr Cameron Carpenter-Warren MRSC

Nominating a colleague is a great way to show them how much they're valued in your department!

I can't think of one event or time that set me on a path of science. I think I've just always been pretty curious. My mum always complains that from a very young age, I would disassemble her work pens and other gadgets, before becoming disinterested and leaving her the task of reassembly.

I've been fortunate enough to have some very good teachers. When I was in year 7, I had a passionate science teacher, Mr Carter, who would occasionally take a lesson or two to teach us whatever took his fancy. I'm certain that even back then, the Chornobyl nuclear disaster and the politics of drug classification were not on the KS3 curriculum!

I all but flipped a coin between studying product design or chemistry at university, and I think my appreciation for chemistry and its importance in technology and wider society has grown steadily since then.

I was financially strong-armed into demonstrating during my PhD and I immediately really enjoyed it. It was a few hours away from my research, just walking around a room chatting to undergrads about chemistry, reminding them to turn on the water supply to their condensers.

After that, I tried to demonstrate as much as I could! My supervisor was incredibly supportive, and the inorganic lab convener at the time was really good - I learnt a lot from working with him.

Despite all this, I was still planning on doing a postdoc, but my PhD funding ran out in March 2020, and with the lockdowns, any tentative arrangements I had in academia evaporated, and I lost my other 0-hour contract positions.

I had a think, applied for a PGCE, and here I stand three years later with zero regrets!

For a multitude of reasons, I believe that chemistry is a subject worthy of study, and I have an inherent drive to share my knowledge of it.

I have the fortune of working with an incredibly driven group of young people who are constantly challenging me to think about chemistry in different ways. They make it easy for me to go the extra mile. Whatever additional sessions I put on or resources I make, they engage enthusiastically and make it clear they appreciate the effort.

I also believe I work in the best chemistry department! Our head of department makes sure to praise and highlight our strengths. He also works hard to find ways to minimise staff workload without sacrificing student outcomes. He encourages individuality in teaching style and abhors standardisation for standardisation's sake.

The result is an experienced group of chemistry teachers who take pride in what they do and are always striving to try out new pedagogies and improve upon their practice. We regularly share our teaching problems and try to offer one another solutions.

The study of science provides us with a knowledge and understanding of how the physical world around us works. The more we know about it, the more we can appreciate its intricacies and beauties as we go about our daily lives.

The more we understand at a young age, the greater our drive becomes to learn more, and this results in a passionate group of adults who want to discover things about the world that nobody has ever discovered before! These people will work to solve global issues not because they feel they ought to, or because the job pays more than any other, but because they have an inherent drive to do so.

We should encourage and support these people at every step of their journey.

I'm typing a response to this question on my laptop, looking at its bright OLED screen, typing with its robust, lightweight polymer keypad, sending signals to its silicon motherboard - all powered by a lithium-ion battery.

If I were to sit here and try to list every product, field of study, industry and group of people that has been enhanced by our knowledge of chemistry - I would die a failure.

Perhaps the best way of looking at it is to consider some key metrics: medicine, education, technology, leisure, transport, sanitation, and public safety.

Think where we are with these right now and then cast your mind back 100 years and compare. Penicillin was yet to be discovered, a good education was afforded to so few, and fingerprint and DNA databases were a long way off! I would argue that knowledge and developments in chemistry hold a lion's share of the credit for these stark improvements we see today.

It is true that some of these developments have themselves created problems, but I strongly believe that, again, it will be advances in chemistry that will facilitate the solving of these.

I trained to be a teacher during one of the lockdown years, and in retrospect, I think the University of Nottingham did an excellent job of it. I was not introduced to anything new, conceptually, during staff training during my first two years of teaching.

I had a very talented teacher as my mentor at my first training school who was incredibly patient with me and gave really effective feedback.

I now work in a department of experienced, kind, supportive chemistry teachers. They have all supported me and helped me become the teacher I am now. We regularly get feedback from students about how friendly, organised and approachable we are as a department, and I'm sure this leads to improved student outcomes, as well as making for a great working environment!

Oganesson. Although too short-lived to be good for any chemistry, oganesson aesthetically completes (for now) the periodic table, rounding off hundreds of years of element discovery and rationalisation.

More importantly, though, I enjoy the modern history of element discovery and particularly the unanimous vote to name element 118 after Uri Organessian - by both American and Russian scientists.

This gesture, and indeed the fruitful collaboration which preceded it, shows that science transcends any nationalism, political ideology and geographical location. Science can, and should, bring passionate people from all backgrounds together in the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit of all humankind.