A sustainable career in sustainability

Growing up in Brazil, Lynette Holland was the only girl at school studying chemistry. But this didn’t deter her from pursuing her passion for Stem subjects.

From a young age she was driven by a desire to use her chemistry knowledge for good. For her International Baccalaureate research project she decided to investigate water pollution: ‘In Brazil there was a place called the Valley of Death, in a city called Cubatão, where [there was a lot of] very heavy chemical industry [leading to] birth defects,’ she explains.

‘I went to the water board and sat in their library for weeks, looking through their water quality data, trying to understand where the pollution was coming from and looking at these horrific figures.’