Dr Effie Kartsonaki

I came to chemistry education by an unusual route. After a BSc in chemistry at the University of Crete, I found myself less interested in making new molecules than in what old ones could tell us — and took an MSc in Archaeomaterials at the University of Sheffield. That question kept me busy for the better part of a decade. I worked as an archaeological chemist in Sheffield, at the British School at Athens, and at the Institute of Electronic Structure and Lasers in Heraklion, and completed a PhD applying 2D NMR techniques to identify organic materials in archaeological and historical objects — the residues, binders, and degradation products that survive in artefacts long after the people who made them are gone. It is analytical chemistry in service of a human story, and I have never quite let it go: I still supervise projects in this space, including collaborative work on the chemical analysis of archaeological plant remains.

Moving to Australia prompted a second question — not what molecules mean, but how people come to understand them. I completed a Graduate Diploma in Education, and since 2015 I have been a teaching-focused academic in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences. My research now sits at the intersection of chemistry and education. I use education research methods to turn teaching questions into evidence. I am particularly interested in the visual language of chemistry: the curved arrows, wedges, and dashes that experts read fluently and unconsciously, but which students must learn as a symbolic system alongside the chemistry itself. I also work on curriculum questions, i.e. how we evaluate the resources we teach with, and how we make our courses more effective, inclusive, and engaging for the students who take them.