Chemists on social media

Last July, US comedian Emo Philips commented on a Chemistry World tweet about a complex containing a triplet benzene dianon, joking to his followers, ‘this really hit home’. Pointing out the impenetrability of chemistry to the wider world may be low-hanging comedic fruit, but this represented one of the rare occasions when chemistry broke out of its Twitter silo. There is a large and flourishing community of chemists on Twitter and while many researchers still see social media as a waste of time, those who regularly engage say it provides both personal and career benefits.

‘Chemistry Twitter has evolved a lot over the last eight years,’ says atmospheric chemist Nadine Borduas-Dedekind (@nadineborduas). Now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada, she joined Twitter as a student in 2014, when she says most chemists on Twitter quickly got to know each other. ‘I would say [its] a little less of a tight knit community now … a lot more people have come on board.’