Professor Bruce Turnbull CChem FRSC

Maybe it was the chemistry set I had as a kid, but I also had some great chemistry teachers who believed that bangs and smells should be at the centre of the curriculum. They also gave us a remarkable amount of freedom to devise and follow our own sixth year studies research projects – that was an early taste of the satisfaction of scientific research. I’ve also always loved chemistry glassware – especially anything that can do continuous extractions like a soxhlet – they can be quite mesmerising.

Working with enthusiastic, intelligent young people is a constant source of motivation for me. Helping them to succeed in their research projects is always rewarding.

We know enough about chemistry itself that the most exciting discoveries and developments are going to come at the interface with other subjects. None of us can be an expert in everything and so learning to communicate and work together with people with complementary skills is essential for scientific progress. People with different backgrounds bring very different perspectives to a project and can often see solutions to problems that you would never think of yourself. It is also a great way to keep developing your own knowledge and broadening your own horizons. One of my current scientifically diverse collaborations involves developing methods to target microbubbles to bacterial infections – that involves researchers from chemistry, physics, engineering, microbiology and medicine. In another collaboration with a team of geographers, we are trying to unlock the information on historical rainfall records that is embedded in the cellulose of tree rings. You just can’t do science like this on your own – and it is always more fun working with other people!

In the earlier part of my career, it was definitely sulfur: thioglycosides in my PhD, helping to discover methylthioxylose to be a mycobacterial sugar as a postdoc, oxathiane glycosyl donors early in my independent career. I love the fact the oxidation levels of sulfur are named alphabetically: sulfuryl, sulfonyl, sulfinyl, sulfenyl, sulfanyl. A bit later, nitrogen became my new favourite with reductive aminations, oxime ligations and azide cycloadditions – who wouldn’t love the element with an odd valency and even mass. But in recent years, fluorine has caught my eye....