 Hi, my name is Nick White and I'm a lecturer at the Australian National University. And so this module is introduction to the fundamentals of chemistry led mostly by my colleague, Catherine. Since you're doing Meristem from ANU, I'm going to tell you a bit about what we do here at ANU, and my group does. So chemistry is the study of matter and matter is basically everything around us. And chemists kind of do, I guess, one of two things. One thing is that they study existing molecules and the other is that they make new molecules. So we can study existing molecules. So that might be, for example, but we think something in a tree is believed to have some medicinal properties. So we can take that apart. We can look at all the molecules in it and see which one is actually having the effect. Something else we might do is analysis so we can find out how much of a certain compound is present. If a certain compound is present. So, for example, when you go on a plane and they do the explosives test, they're looking to see if you have any explosives on you. And if you do, you've been around explosives. That's probably a sign you shouldn't be allowed on the plane. And in medicine and biology, we can kind of measure how much of certain chemicals are present and that might be associated with disease or things like that. The other things chemists can do is make new molecules. And so chemistry is not limited by molecules that exist. And in theory, chemistry can be a really creative science. We can come up with new molecules that have never been made before and see what they do, see what their properties are. So one of the things we can do, for example, is make pharmaceuticals, make drug molecules to cure disease. We can make, for example, dyes to make our paints better, longer lasting and less toxic. But there are also a huge area of materials where we try and make new materials with new properties. So we can maybe make materials that are lighter or stronger than previous things. And often when we do this, we're inspired by nature, but we're not trying to copy nature. So you can think about this with a plane. An aeroplane is not a copy of a bird, but it has quite a lot of similarities to a bird and that enables it to fly. And as chemists, we can do this. We can get inspired by molecules around us and we can sort of take inspiration from those properties and try and make better materials. So my group uses a technique called self-assembly to make large, complicated molecules. And we do this for a range of applications, either things like trapping gases or actually protecting enzymes, which are very fragile molecules, but we can kind of build cages around them and hold them together. To do this, we have to have a really good understanding of both atoms, but how they bond and how these bonds can be used to create materials for these useful applications. So in this module, we're going to start learning about this. And then I'll be back later on to talk in more detail about some of the materials we make.