Lesley Yellowlees

Last year, for the first time in its long history, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) appointed a female President, Prof Lesley Yellowlees. Today she was in Northern Ireland for our local section annual dinner.

For a few years I was the Younger Members' Representative for the RSC in Northern Ireland, which in theory meant that I represented the views and issues of every chemist in the country under the age of 35, but in reality meant that I got invited to lots of fancy dinners and organised lots of pub crawls and social events - a pretty sweet job! In that time I had the pleasure of meeting the previous two Presidents of the RSC, and they were pretty much as you'd expect - white middle aged men - lovely people but basically predictable. I have to say that Prof Yellowlees is quite different! She seems like a fun-loving lady, she certainly has a strong personality and I'm sure she has shaken things up a bit for some of the old boys back at HQ. She had a couple of not-so-well-judged statements picked up by the press in her first few months, which raised some eyebrows, but she was able to laugh about it in her speech tonight and that's always good to see. I thought this photo summed her up pretty well :)