Question: how important is your job to the human race? and why is it so important?

Jess Wade answered on 15 Jun 2015:

What I’m working on is something called plastic electronics, which basically means we make design special materials and make conducting inks. There are two reasons my science is important: one is to make people happy and enjoy their TVs and mobile phones, and the other is to stop global warming!

We can control lots of things about these inks, like the colours that they glow if we put electricity for them (great for TV screens and mobile phones) or the colours that they can absorb if we shine light on them. We can use things like your printer at home to print these inks on plastics, but unlike when we print at home our designs can conduct electricity ! This is all really great for light, bendy electronics.

It is also great for the environment. When we use electricity at home it is usually made from things called ‘fossil fuels’. Fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) are pretty bad for the world and are making the temperature go up. That’s pretty bad news for some animals. We can make clean energy though, from things like wind or solar power. Normally, solar panels (devices that turn sunlight into electricity) are made on glass and are super expensive. With our new materials we can print big sheets of solar cells on cheap plastics really quickly- soon we’ll be printing them like they print newspapers. We can print huge sheets and roll them across deserts, or wrap them around our homes or on the roofs of our cars. My friend took our materials to Brazil and they are already on the cars there! That means we can get clean energy all of the time.

Outside of the lab, I arrange lots of events to get women excited about science. This is super important because science is a tricky subject, so there are loads of questions we need to answer. If we don’t have as many people as possible answering the questions then we have no chance! So we need ALL the boys and ALL the girls we can get.

I go to tell lots of kids in schools how awesome my university is and how great a science degree is. With a degree in science you can basically do any job in the world: lots of famous politicians have science degrees, as do american presidents, doctors, lawyers, bankers- you name it! It is very important we keep studying science to find out more about the world and look after it. So when I can go to schools and tell them that- or how much money they will make with a science degree- then I can try to convince them to study science at university too.