University of Amsterdam Ilse Denekamp, a PhD student working under the supervision of Prof. Gadi Rothenberg at the University of Amsterdam’s Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences, has ‘translated’ her PhD research in a short film. The one-minute animation highlights the advantages of novel tailor-made single-site catalytic materials for heterogeneous catalysis. Ilse Denekamp will defend her PhD thesis on 7 April. Using a combination of computer-animation techniques, Denekamp produced an ‘instruction manual’ explaining her research in the language of Lego. In her PhD thesis she describes a building-block approach for making covalently-bonded polymers with tailored catalytic properties. These polymers are stable up to 400 °C, combining the specific metal sites of organometallic complexes with the stability and ease of separation of solid catalysts. While developing these materials, Denekamp and co-workers used Lego bricks as models. This gave her the idea of presenting the catalyst synthesis protocol as a Lego-animated instruction manual. From there, it was a short step to installing software, trying out different configurations and adding music and voice-overs.