Professor Matthew Powner MRSC

I've been blessed with amazing colleagues (students, postdocs, collaborators, and mentors) throughout my career; working with talented, motivated, curious, and thoughtful people is always inspiring.

Always challenge yourself; think big, think deep, and think broadly.

Science is a record of human curiosity, and its advances drive the progress of human civilisation. We live in a chemical world; chemistry and chemical reactions underpins biology, and so physiology and medicine, genetics, evolution, metabolism, and photosynthesis. Food, drink, vitamins and hormones, minerals, fertilisers, drugs, disinfectants, soaps and detergents, fuels and explosives, adhesives, textiles and fabrics, plastics, paints, pigments, and dyes are all chemical, whether synthetic or natural. If you can see it, smell it, touch it, taste it, or feel it, then it involves chemistry and chemicals. Even if you are only imagining something, this is a chemical process too.

Freedom, curiosity, time, and resources are all essential for good research, but a good research culture is also about people being motivated, passionate, innovative, energetic, inclusive, and supportive.

Different people think differently, they have different experiences, knowledge, and skills. Good teamwork enables a breadth of perspectives and skills to be harnessed, directed, and united to solve a problem or realise a goal more effectively.

My first instinct, only half in jest, is to say the element in my kettle. I don’t find any of the chemical elements particularly exciting on their own. Many, of course, form allotropes, but chemical elements are best appreciated together in molecules and molecules are best appreciated in reactions rather than in isolation...so, my favourite molecules that are involved in the most interesting and important reactions, are nucleic acids. These molecules have underpinned four billion years of evolution on the Earth. Nucleic acids, like life more generally, are not dependent on one element. Nucleic acids are specific combinations, and importantly arrangements, of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus. If you add sulfur and a few metals too, then these are my favourite elements; together, they and their reactions hold the secrets of life.