Human impact on our planet is everywhere. Global warming, climate change or pollution are all making our earth less liveable. To turn this around, we have to find sustainable solutions for the future and enzymes can help. Enzymes are like nature's tiny workers. They help us digest food, plants grow, and scientists also use them to make new substances in the laboratory. However, there's a challenge. For many important industrial processes, nature has not yet provided us with the right enzymes to do the job. That's where my research comes in. I specialise in designing enzymes for reactions that do not occur in nature. Traditional enzymes are built out of this set of 22 building blocks, called amino acids. I prepare unnatural amino acids with unique properties and use them to craft enzymes with entirely new capabilities. So, then we can use them to do new amazing things, such as new medicines, capturing of CO2, or even degrading plastics.