Question: What made you want to do astrochemistry?

Martin McCoustra answered on 5 Mar 2018:

I was working with colleagues on aspects of the role of icy surfaces in the formation of the Antarctic Ozone hole in the early 1990s, when I read an article in Chemistry in Britain by Professor David A. Williams (then at UMIST but soon to be the Perren Professor of Astronomy at UCL). The article was about the role played by chemistry in space and the key scientific challenges that existed at the time. Amongst those challenges was the role played by surfaces in aiding the formation of small molecules and hence icy solids, the role of radiation in generating complex organic species from simple ices, and issue of how such molecules might be returned to the gas phase to be observed and contributed to the organic soup on planets from which life might arise. These were big questions and I was enthused by the idea of participating in a discipline which addressed such big questions.

I went up to Manchester from Norwich, as I was a UEA at the time, and spent a day discussing the possible directions this might take. In that time, David and I basically mapped out the next 20 years of the new sub-discipline of solid state and surface astrochemistry. It was exciting to be at the birth of the a new area of science and still remains so today!