Dr Anna Ploszajski

Dr Anna Ploszajski is an award-winning materials scientist, writer, presenter, podcaster, performer, trainer and storyteller based in London. She is a materials generalist, equally fascinated by merino wool as stainless steel, through all the wonderful metals, plastics, ceramics, glasses and natural substances that make up our material world.

From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials. However, most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass. Handmade is the story of materials through making and doing. Author and materials scientist Anna Ploszajski journeys into the domain of makers and craftspeople to comprehend how the most popular materials really work. With knowledge accumulated over generations through hands-on trial and error, these experimenters and tinkerers understand the materiality of objects far better than any scientist with a textbook.

Anna has the fresh perspective of someone at the forefront of the field. Each chapter centres around an everyday material and features Anna’s accounts of learning from masters of their respective crafts. Along the way, she builds a fuller picture of materials and their place in society, as well as how they have intersected with her own life experiences – from land speed racing on American salt flats to swimming the English Channel. She visits a blacksmith artist to see, hear, smell and strike steel herself, explores how working with one of the most primal of materials, clay, has brought about some of the most advanced technologies, and delves down to the atomic scale of glass to find out what makes it ‘glassy’. Handmade affords us a new understanding of the materials we encounter every day, and an appreciation for the skills needed to fashion them into objects that are perfectly formed for the jobs they do.

Anna channels this passion by storytelling with materials on the screen, radio, stage and page; her first book, Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning Through Making, is out now. Her podcast, Handmade, features weekly chats with artists, makers, movers and shakers all with a love of materials. Having developed her own unique blend of autobiographical and technical science communication, Anna trains professional scientists and engineers and school students in the art of scientific storytelling. In her spare time, she plays the trumpet in a funk and soul covers band called Don’t Freak Out and is an ultra-endurance open water swimmer; she swam the English Channel in July 2018. Oh, and it’s pronounced “Por-shy-ski”.