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Gold reacts with hardly anything – you use it in Jewellery because it won’t react with oxygen in the air or water. Contrast this to iron (the main metal in steel) – put it in water or leave it in air for long enough and it rusts and turns orange. This is the iron reacting with the oxygen in the air. Gold doesn’t do this! My project revolves around trying to force gold to react with things it normally doesn’t – the oxygen in air, chemicals it normally wouldn’t – in the hopes that in forcing it to do these things we will end up with more interesting and useful chemicals. My research can be applied to help make other chemicals – things like drugs, agricultural chemicals (fertilizers or hormones) or industrial building blocks that are used to make other chemicals.

Day to day, I mix various gold chemicals with other reagents and test to see if anything has happened using complicated techniques which tell me how symmetrical the compound is, and what sort of environment each atom in it ‘feels’. I also supervise undergraduate students and advise them on what experiments they should do.

Doing science in schools can be hard – you’re limited by the chemistry you can safely do and the types of experiments you can show. If I won the £500, I would buy a high quality camera and have our resident glassblower make some glassware. The idea is that students can dissolve, precipitate or react chemicals in solutions, changing the colour and seeing the change, or using ultra-violet light to see luminous chemicals, I could take high quality pictures of their experiments to give them to take home and show their parents.