Sacha Walters, Staff Reporter

Dr Marvadeen Singh-Wilmot is committed to her job as an inorganic chemistry lecturer and crytallographer at the University of the West Indies. - Photo by Sacha walters

Chemistry has her wrapped around its little finger.

Only a teenager when they met, a third-form student at Morant Bay High School, she fell in love.

A love which, over the years, grew into a flourishing adult relationship of personal and professional fulfilment.

Dr Marvadeen Singh-Wilmot, 33, is an effervescent inorganic chemistry lecturer and crystallographer at the University of the West Indies. She exhibits her love for teaching and research in almost every word she utters, inviting you to see how instrumental her love is to your life as well.

"If I'm meeting a group of first-year students for the first time, I tell them, just try to go back from you got up this morning, every single minute you are using something that was made by a chemist. The shampoo that you used in your hair, the food that you eat, you drove here in a motorcar, your ipods are getting smaller, all because chemists are involved in making new materials every day," said Singh-Wilmot.

With a PhD and BSc in the field from the university where she has been lecturing for five years, she loves taking knowledge from her research straight to the classroom.

"You can see how both worlds come together to make my world perfect. My students must be excited about chemistry and how could they not be?" she asked.

As the university's X-ray crystallographer, she determines the three-dimensional shape of atoms using X-rays and because the shape of these atoms are integral to their function, it's important that this is known.

"Atoms make up molecules and molecules make up everything in matter; solids, liquids and gases, she explained.

"If you have a drug that's, let's say, shaped like a right hand, it gives you a different function than a drug which is made up of molecules shaped like the left hand, same thing in both. But the shape is different, one is the mirror image of the other. Do you know that they will give you different results? So the three-dimensional shape is important to the function," she said.

She examines a lot of natural products extracted from Jamaican plants which may be used as new drugs, insecticides and the list goes on.

New materials

Otherwise, her personal research involves making new materials to store hydrogen that hopefully will eventually relieve the energy crisis.

"Hydrogen presents itself as a viable alternative because when you burn the same mass of hydrogen as fossil fuel you get twice the amount of energy," a well known fact she said, and all over the world, research into the use of hydrogen as a fuel is far advanced. But the universal challenge is finding a viable way of storing it.

With a grant from the university for a year, she is motivated to further the project despite funding restrictions. So far, she has published one paper (internationally) on the subject.

As a mother and wife, she juggles these new loves with the old. However, her biggest challenge is getting students to be as enthusiastic about the possibilities she found with her first love.

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