Professor Anna Slater MRSC

I was a pretty indecisive student – when I picked my A-levels, I was torn between chemistry, physics, and maths, or English, philosophy, and music. I think I'd have been happy either way, but for me, Chemistry gives me the opportunity to understand how things work, solve problems, and be creative, as well as working with people with a huge range of perspectives and experiences – it's ended up being a great home for me.

For me, a good research culture starts with listening, respect, openness, and transparency – being curious about other people's points of view, recognising when barriers are preventing people from participating fully as their full selves, and working to remove those barriers.

I think teamwork is absolutely critical in science – we solve more interesting problems together, and end up in completely unexpected and exciting places! For example, I never thought I'd work on non-thermal plasma, but in collaboration with Professor James Walsh, Dr Timothy Easun, and Dr Johnny Higham, Patrycja Roszkowska in our group has built a microfluidic NTP reactor which we are finding gives very promising results for some of the reactions we are studying. Without a chance conversation we'd never be trying this, and without our complementary expertise it would never have worked.

My favourite reaction is a Suzuki coupling, so I'd have to say boron – a bit different, sometimes a bit unpredictable, but can do some really useful things when you get the process right – I might be projecting a bit here! I've used boron as BF₃.OEt₂ to make porphyrins, or to make BODIPY compounds – it crops up in dynamic combinatorial chemistry – I really like what it can do!