Professor Steven Bell

My PhD supervisor, Professor John McGarvey, was a great role model both as a scientist of the highest integrity and as a mentor who really cared about his students.I've also been lucky to have been in the same school as Professor A P de Silva for many years. AP shows us all how to combine great science with the ability to share the excitement and beauty of chemistry and yet still has time to give help and guidance to anyone who asks.

Academic research in chemistry is just fun to do. It has the perfect combination of discovery and creativity. Every day there can be something new to puzzle over. I really like that quote: "Research is what I do when I don't know what I'm doing". Away from the selfishness of just wanting to do something I enjoy for its own sake, getting to help the next generation become independent scientists in their own right is a privilege.

The main thing is to find something that you want to do because you feel it is exciting and important. Everyone has setbacks in their research and careers, so you need to have a good reason to dust yourself down and press on; a long-term goal that you believe in and are working towards can provide that motivation.

Since chemistry really has a central role in addressing so many of the big issues in the world, ranging from climate change to antibiotic resistance, we need to ensure that the discipline stays strong by inspiring young people to study it. We will need the skills and imagination they will bring to solve these problems in the future, so it is important that we tell them about how becoming a chemist will mean they can go out and make a difference in the world. This is a great message and one that we can be proud to promote.

A good research culture should be one that allows people to risk following new paths instead of making safe, incremental advances in known directions. This can be difficult in a metric-driven system.

Over the years I've been lucky to collaborate with not just chemists but people from a huge variety of backgrounds. Of course, these included academics from different disciplines, but it is also really stimulating to work with researchers from industry and the public sector who bring a completely different set of challenges and mindsets.

Collaboration is vital because the problems we want to address are often complex, and we simply can’t make progress without combining our ideas with the knowledge and insight that only real experts in other areas can provide. It is easy to waste a lot of time doing things wrong because you don’t simply don’t know that there is a better way. Conversely, it’s really exciting that you find when casually chatting to a colleague that you already have just the answer that they have been looking for.

I really like the coinage metals, mostly because of the way the properties of the bulk metals are so completely different from their coordination compounds but they then have a whole new set of useful properties when we use them as nanomaterials.