Volunteering in celebration of our 175th anniversary
175 minutes for chemistry
At our 2016 annual general meeting in London this summer, we spoke to a number of fascinating people from our community. We asked them all for their thoughts on the importance of looking outwards in our 175th anniversary year
Suze Kundu
Suze is a teaching fellow at the University of Surrey and investigates nanomaterials that can generate hydrogen from water and sunlight.
As an excellent role model, champion and ambassador for an inclusive culture and diverse future generation of chemists, Suze was named as one of our 175 faces of chemistry.
An ardent science communicator, Suze brings her enthusiasm for chemistry to a wealth of public outreach activities and delivered a lecture at our AGM on the importance of mobilising our membership to engage the public with chemistry.
In celebrating our 175th anniversary and in looking at the 175 faces of chemistry that we have, you can see not just the diversity of the people but also the diversity in the work that they do.
They’re not all academics, there’s people in industry, there’s people that are nowhere near a lab; there are people that are using chemistry in a variety of ways that are all interesting and inspirational to someone that is not in that field. In mobilising this army of 55,000 chemists we can showcase all of the facets of chemistry.
Even if we got a fraction of those people, to say that they’re going to share some of the science that they do and love, that’s going to be brilliant because it gives a better rounded picture of what chemistry is about and the chemists that are doing it.
The only reason that I got into science communication was because I was terrified of speaking in front of people and I decided to face the fear. I still get terrified every time I speak in front of any group of people, no matter how big or small they are, but I do it and I know I’ll survive doing it.
If it’s a daunting task, there is always the option of buddying up with someone – I spoke at the General Assembly with my friend Jamie and it was an absolute joy. It was a very different way of doing something I’ve done before but it was brilliant. So I think if it’s a daunting thing to go out there and talk about something that you’re not sure people will be interested in, maybe pair up or create a team.
The other thing I think is important is to contextualise what you’re talking about because all of the stuff that we do will have an impact on society Whatever it is that we’re working on is going to have an impact beyond just the lab that we’re working in and our careers.
Showcasing what that real life context is brings out the passion. If you’re stuck in the lab all the time working on a tiny area of science, it’s easy for you to lose your passion for that. In talking about it with other people and seeing the bigger picture, stepping back from it for a moment, it reminds you of why you wanted to do it in the first place and I think that passion just naturally comes through
I love using the phrase stealth science; a lot of the things that I do are stealth science. I have done lectures on superheroes where I haven’t mentioned the ‘s’ word – that word being science – at all.
I love using the phrase stealth science; a lot of the things that I do are stealth science
I have talked about all of the science, but I haven’t called it science. Because people are interested in superheroes and superpowers, they passively take in all this interesting stuff but if you were to ask them if they wanted to find out a bit about the science behind superheroes, they would probably say “actually, not really.”
So I think it’s finding a way of stealth science-ing people, whether that’s a cocktail chemistry lecture or whether it’s just talking about the context in which science is used.
You can do a lot by avoiding the ‘s’ word and that could be a way forward without completely alienating or disengaging the people that you’re speaking to from the off. It takes time to get used to doing that though. but there’s a lot that you can do without actually saying the words.
When I talk about my own work, it’s important to remember that people are not that into it at the level of detail that I’m into it. You can’t presume knowledge – I may be an expert in my area of work, but nobody else is, so you need to remember that.
In science communication the joy of talking about science and chemistry more generally is that “I’m doing it because I’m interested and I’ve gone on the journey of finding stuff out as well and there is a real pleasure in that”, as Richard Feynman famously said.
I think taking that journey and sharing that journey with people is a really great way to communicate the enthusiasm and the passion and the excitement of the journey that you took.
I also think it’s important that when we don’t know everything, to say that we don’t know everything, because one of these massive myths is that if you’re, say, an academic, you know everything about everything. It’s a load of rubbish; I know an awful lot about a very tiny area of science and the rest of it is still hugely fascinating to me. It’s ok to say, I don’t know, I’m not the expert in that, but I probably know someone who is. That’s alright, that’s humanising.
Donna Nelson
Donna is president of the American Chemical Society, and was the scientific adviser to the record-breaking, Grammy award-winning TV show, Breaking Bad.
I think it’s a great way to celebrate your anniversary. I especially enjoyed hearing about the public attitudes survey that was recently taken. It struck me that so many of the ways in which the public view chemists in the UK were really the same perceptions that our National Science Foundation found about chemists in the USA. Things are similar the world round – we have a lot of the same goals and the same methods to achieve them.
I think it’s a really great idea to have the 175 minutes for chemistry campaign. It’s a small enough time period and it’s certainly a worthy cause to engage the public because we are supposed to be serving the public and we want them to know what we’ve done.
I was the science advisor for the television show Breaking Bad. My main reason for doing that was because I wanted to engage the public and I thought that would be the best way to reach as many people as possible.
It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed doing that but it was a challenge. I was very used to speaking to scientists and suddenly I was speaking to artists instead. Scientists and artists often think in different ways; we’re very exacting, they were very creative.
I had to really embrace diversity and think constantly about how much I wanted to get along with them. I took it as a stretching exercise and I appreciated every bit of it.
Any time that you can stretch and embrace diversity that’s going to increase your creativity because they’re bringing different life experiences.
Andy Furlong
Andy is director of communications at the Institution of Chemical Engineers, as well as being a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and originally a chemistry graduate from Brunel University.
I think one of the important things to remember is whether you’re the Royal Society of Chemistry or the Institution of Chemical Engineers, without volunteers, in essence you’re nothing. Unless we can inspire and motivate our members, wherever they are in the world, to be outspoken advocates for chemistry or chemical engineering then we’re not going to get anywhere.
I have this absolute rock - solid belief that chemistry makes the world a better place
I have this absolute rock-solid belief that chemistry makes the world a better place. It’s done that through the course of the last 250 years of history, it will continue to do so in the future.
The relationship between chemistry and chemical engineering, as a vehicle to deliver the fruits of chemistry and make it real at a massive scale – and it’s a massive scale that’s called for in the years ahead with population growth and many of the other challenges that we face – is of paramount importance.
The public doesn’t always get that, and therefore, we need our respective memberships to actually be ambassadors for chemistry and chemical engineering. We’ve got to give them the confidence and arm them with the tools that will allow them to stand up and speak out for what is wonderful science and brilliant engineering.
We need to help them to understand the value of what they do. I see the role of communicators both at the RSC and IChemE like this: it’s our job to help our members find their story and to help them to tell it.
The best example I can give is a young woman, a design engineer I met down in Weybridge, and she was working on a cooling system, a heat exchange system, for tunnels.
I eventually found out that she was doing the cooling system for the Northern Line. I said to her “gosh, if you deliver this, you’re going to make the journey to work in the summer months for hundreds of thousands of people on the London Underground a much more tolerable experience.” And she looked at me and she smiled, and she said: “I never really thought about it like that”.
And we’ve got to get our members to think about it like that. Get them to understand that there is value and excitement in what they do and help them to find that story and tell it with a passion and enthusiasm that becomes infectious.
175 minutes for chemistry
As the oldest chemical society in the world, we celebrated our 175th anniversary in 2016. We wanted to mark this milestone by recognising the important contributions our community makes to the chemical sciences. We asked our members and supporters to dedicate 175 minutes to chemistry in 2016 and share their stories with us. We featured these stories throughout the year on our website, in print in RSC News, and on social media using #time4chem.
Tell us your story
If you've been involved in an event or activity, or just have an interesting story to tell, we want to hear from you! Please get in touch using the online form or tweet us @RoySocChem using #time4chem.