Professor Claire Carmalt CChem FRSC

I ended up choosing to do a degree in chemistry as I went to a lecture demonstration at a nearby university during my sixth form. Lots of flashes and bangs made me realise how exciting chemistry could be. My full interest developed during my undergraduate degree when I got the opportunity to do a summer research project. I knew at the end of that project that I wanted to do a PhD and go into academia.

There are two areas that really motivate me. First, it's around people, whether they are part of my research group, students I teach or members of the department. Here, it motivates me to feel that I am stimulating, supporting and mentoring people in a way that helps them with their own personal and professional development. Second, it's the research, particularly designing new materials, understanding their properties and potentially one day seeing them incorporated into a real-world application.

I've always found chemistry to be a very sociable subject. As an undergraduate student, it helped enormously to discuss the experiments with peers. As you move into research, you find that, by teamwork and collaboration your initial isolated project can expand out in all sorts of directions which you perhaps hadn't considered at the start. This also helps to bring varied expertise to a project, such as experimental researchers collaborating with computational researchers, where you can gain an understanding of the properties of a material or perhaps predict what material needs to be synthesised.

My favourite element is Bismuth. I even had a hamster called Bismuth at one point! I did a lot of research on bismuth compounds in my PhD and could always seem to grow beautiful crystals when making new compounds. Bismuth can adopt a range of coordination numbers as well as different bonding modes which made the research really interesting. More recently, I am enjoying seeing how it is being investigated in new materials in a range of applications.