 Hi, so I'm Penny Brothers. I am Director of the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian University. That means I'm head of a school of chemistry in which we do research and we teach students. Chemistry is the science that allows us to actually manipulate atoms at the level of bonding between individual atoms and whether we're talking about a diatomic molecule like O2 or N2 or whether we're talking about a polymer where we've got a huge number of atoms all bonded together in a chain or whether we're talking about a bulk material like a metal or an alloy where we have a whole lot of atoms held together there are different kind of interactions. It's chemistry that allows us to both understand those interactions and control them because more materials have such different properties. In order to harness those properties and make them do something useful we need to understand how to tailor their properties. So a really simple example is that glass in the window is just glass right but glass on the cover of your iPhone or your smartphone is conducting glass so when you touch the glass on your window you just leave a smudge but when you touch the glass on your phone you're communicating with your phone and that's because materials chemists have understood the properties of glass and understood how you need to manipulate those properties so that you can give glass get simple glass do something really quite fancy and complicated. To be a chemist I think you need to like thinking in three dimensions so thinking about atoms and molecules and nettles and different kind of bonding how things are put together and then it's a little bit like architecture on a nano scale so what you're really doing is you're designing materials with particular features to do particular jobs so being creative and imaginative liking to do problem solving and actually what really got me into it was I really just liked being in the lab and I liked doing things with my hands I still like doing things with my hands and I liked the visual aspects of it so you know chemical compounds or materials that have interesting colors or interesting properties that grow pretty crystals and that combination of working with your hands being creative problem solving and actually producing something that you can look at.