Wunmi Sadik: ‘I still see myself as the young girl explaining chemistry to my mother’

I come from a family that really encouraged me to enter into the sciences. My dad was very, very encouraging. My older brother was my first contact with chemistry. He would come home from school and tell me about Boyle’s law and Charles’ law. I would look at his textbooks and just start to read, fascinated. I also remember my first chemistry teacher, in form three (age 12–13). He showed us all different apparatuses, and I was captivated.

When I decided on chemistry as a major at university, I had never met a practicing chemist. I simply enjoyed chemistry, and I found that it challenged me in a very positive way.

It was a challenge to convince my mother that chemistry was worth studying at university. She did not understand the concept of chemistry. With my own minimal knowledge of chemistry at the time, I struggled to explain what chemistry was all about. Nigeria is a petroleum-exporting country, so I started by explaining where the kerosene she used to cook came from and progressed from there. Her conclusion: ‘if anybody is willing to pay you to work as a chemist, then it’s probably worth doing.’