Polly Arnold

Education Arnold was educated at Notting Hill and Ealing High School and Westminster School.

Arnold was a Fulbright Program postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she worked with Christopher C. Cummins before returning to the UK to a lectureship in 1999. Her research is focused on the design and synthesis of highly reactive f-block complexes that can activate inert small molecules such as carbon oxides, dinitrogen, and hydrocarbons, and that can provide fundamental information on structure and bonding at the bottom of the periodic table.

Arnold has given lectures around the world, advised the government and industry, and appears regularly on mainstream media and social media to discuss the importance and benefits of diversity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce. This award was used to fund the creation of the documentary film A Chemical Imbalance, where she is the executive producer. and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE). In 2015, Arnold was awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Suffrage Science award.

She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to chemistry and women in STEM.

In 2018, she was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson award for her work on transuranic organometallic chemistry, and is so far, the only woman to have been awarded this award since its inception in 1999. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018 for substantial contributions to the improvement of natural knowledge.