The worldwide chemist
Bea Perks profiles Martyn Poliakoff, the internet’s favourite ‘mad professor’
Martyn Poliakoff, foreign secretary of the Royal Society, YouTube superstar, professor of chemistry at the University of Nottingham in the UK and honorary professor of chemistry at the Moscow State University in Russia, has a dazzling array of strings to his bow. But he doesn’t hesitate when asked how he would describe himself. ‘I’m a chemist,’ he says. ‘A researcher first, and then a teacher’.