Professor Marina Kuimova FRSC

I have been extremely fortunate to have amazing mentors who took time and effort not only to teach me about chemistry but to share their personal perspectives and to show me that research should be fun! I am forever grateful for this mentorship and try my best to mentor the next generation now.

Be bold when you follow your dreams and try to see your ideas through. This might be more work and effort than you initially thought but it's very rewarding when you get there. Collaborate outside your immediate discipline – an interdisciplinary approach often gives a unique angle.

Understanding aberrant protein aggregation is extremely important for health and for designing strategies for preventing or controlling neurodegenerative disease. We are very excited about the possibility to develop our (micro)viscometers – molecular rotors – to monitor the mechanism of amyloid protein aggregation.

I think as researchers we are very fortunate to have a very rewarding job with many perks: travelling the world, working with talented people, playing an important role in teaching a younger generation. But the best highlight for me is seeing the success of my students and postdocs as they develop into great scientists, publish great papers, win prizes and awards (and eventually fly the nest!).

The toughest challenge was returning to full-time work after my maternity leaves, when my children were very young. Even now when both my children are at school, maintaining a good work/life balance with a young family remains a challenge, but it's a surmountable challenge due to lots of targeted support offered to working parents and growing recognition that flexible working means happy people, means higher productivity!

Mutual support and respect that goes hand in hand with recognition of each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

Collaboration and teamwork are extremely important and have been instrumental in my career. Quite frankly, without my collaborators, I would not have the means not just to solve problems but sometimes even to ask the right questions! You can achieve so much more by working together, especially with those outside your immediate discipline. I would like to thank again all my team, past and present, made up of chemists, engineers, physicists and biochemists, as well as all my collaborators, for truly enabling the science that has been awarded this prize.