David Smith

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For David Smith, a professor of chemistry at the University of York, the personal, political, and professional are inextricably interwoven. As an out gay man leading a team of student researchers, Smith knows that visibility is critical to diversity. If you can’t be authentic about who you are, you thrive less at work, he says, which is not conducive to belonging in the workplace or to good science. Smith works with self-assembling nanogels that can be used for drug delivery, tissue engineering, and environmental remediation. “We develop gels that assemble from small-molecule building blocks,” he says. Using chemistry, his team programs these gels to be dynamic, so they respond over time or change in response to stimuli. For example, his group made a gel that can pull precious metals out of electronic waste and become a conductive material. His team also shapes and patterns gels in water to direct the