Sam Jordan

He/him

Crystal Gardner

I'm from: Southern Tasmania
Current Location: Hobart, Tasmania
Position: PhD Candidate, School of Natural Sciences (Chemistry), University of Tasmania
Field of research/work: Chemistry (Photocatlysis, Photocrystallography)
YTS Years: 2025

Sam's Notable career moments

  • Thought I wanted to be a star athlete

  • Thought I wanted to be an architect or engineer and build a skyscraper

  • Had no clue what I wanted to do 

  • Had a gap year (COVID lockdown struck)

  • Decided I wanted to do a job in chemistry

  • Growing crystals and shooting lasers

About Sam Jordan

What if I told you you’re already halfway to becoming a chemist? Don’t believe me? Well, have you ever built a LEGO set or baked a cake? If you have, then you’ve already done something a lot like chemistry! 

Think about it: when you put LEGO bricks together or mix cake ingredients, you’re taking simple things and combining them to make something more complicated. That’s basically what chemistry is, except in my version, we are making up the recipe, and sometimes my ingredients catch fire… or explode. 

But that is what makes it so exciting!
Because there are no set instructions, I get to experiment and be creative all the time. It never gets boring. Right now, I’m growing colourful crystals and shooting lasers at them to see what kinds of cool patterns they make. Which allows me to see how my crystals are changing as they react, even when it happens in just a trillionth of a second 

So why did I choose chemistry?
Let me ask you this: would you rather spend your day either carrying heavy stuff, staring at a screen, or answering phone calls? To me that sounded super boring, so instead, I decided to do chemistry, where I get to set things on fire and shoot lasers at stuff and call it work. 

Sam's Photo Gallery