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ICHEME Fellow and Council member Martyn Poliakoff has been awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s (RSC’s) Nyholm Prize for Education and elected a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The Nyholm prize is awarded in memory of Ronald Nyholm, a former president of the RSC who campaigned for the improvement of science education, and recognises a major research or innovation contribution to chemical science education. Poliakoff, a professor of chemistry at the University of Nottingham, UK, was given the award for his “enthusiastic leadership in taking chemistry to the widest possible audience”, including through his Periodic Table of Videos on YouTube. The award citation calls him a “true champion for chemistry”.

The Periodic Table of Videos was launched in 2008 and includes a YouTube video for each of the 118 elements in the periodic table. Since then, the videos have been viewed over 20m times.

“I was really happy to be awarded the Nyholm Prize, which I regard as a prize for the whole of the Periodic Table of Videos team. It is particularly gratifying as Sir Ronald Nyholm, in whose honour this prize is named, was a hugely important figure in both chemical research and chemical education,” says Poliakoff.

The Russian Academy of Sciences has elected Poliakoff a foreign member. His father was Russian, and Poliakoff is himself an honorary professor at Moscow State University.

“I am thrilled and delighted to receive such an honour, something which I never imagined when delivering my first lecture in Moscow during the early 1970s. I feel that my father would have been immensely proud,” he says.

In June 2011 Poliakoff was made foreign secretary of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, and in October, a strand of his hair entered the Guinness Book of World Records after Nottingham researchers engraved the world’s smallest periodic table onto it.