Bittersweet transitions: Thomas E. Gompf Chair in Chemistry

On July 14th, I received a phone call from my department Chair, Ken Karlin. He was excited to inform me that the Board of Trustees had just approved my appointment as the inaugural holder of the Thomas E. Gompf Chair in Chemistry. Elation! An endowed professorship is a promotion, and provides discretionary funds useful in pursuing new areas of investigation. It is also another sign of support from my department, my Chair, and my Dean showing that they want me to be part of the collective vision for advancing chemistry at Hopkins. But wait… who is Thomas E. Gompf? Will I have a chance to meet him, express my gratitude, share our passion for science, and generally be a good steward of his beneficence? No. He passed away on January 6th of this year. Sadness! Thus my transition into the Chair is bittersweet because the loss of Dr. Gompf is what made the Chair possible in the first place.

According to the obituary from the Jennings, Nulton, & Mattle Funeral Home in Penfield, NY, Thomas E. Gompf passed away at 90: "Predeceased by his loving wife of 63 years Elaine. He is survived by his son Robert E. (Leslie R.); 2 grandchildren, William "Liam"& Peter; sister, Betty Nordwall; special friend and caregiver Sarah Callahan and family. He retired from Eastman Kodak with over 10 patents to his name.”  The titles and subjects of his patents suggest that he was an organic or formulations chemist having developed innovations to make better photographs. Not surprising as he worked at Eastman Kodak.

That is all I know. But that is enough to know that I have big shoes to fill. The fact that the professorship he endowed is not restricted to his area of chemistry and open to theoretical and computational chemists such as myself speaks to the broadness of his thinking. I look forward to learning more about him, and hopefully also about his connection to Johns Hopkins. I also look forward to hearing about what he did #OutsideTheLab! (Feel free to e-mail me or post anecdotes or information if you have them!)

Credit: The picture is taken from the obituary.

Inclusive excellence symposium coming up at ACS San Francisco

Two qualifiers, successful and diverse, for the research enterprise are inseparable concepts. And yet, some members in the scientific community have often treated them as orthogonal if not outright destructively interfering. (Please forgive my geek speak here!) I think that the only part that is destructive is the failure to be inclusive. Indeed, as we are broadening participation in the chemical research enterprise, we are drawing more and better talent from all over the world and this should include that which is within our borders. Unfortunately, we aren't quite there yet as is visible through the existing imbalance in the demographics between the US population and the chemical workforce. Achieving parity requires us to be actively engaged.

To this end, I just published a Comment in C&EN to advertise the upcoming symposium on "Advancing the Chemical Sciences Through Diversity in Participation." (Earlier, I wrote on this blog about why I publish there and here. You can also check out the ChemDiversity Blog post advertising the symposium.) If you happen to be in San Francisco in mid August, feel free to join us at the Hilton near Union Square. You'll learn a few tips for advancing inclusive excellence and you'll be in the middle of San Francisco. Hard to beat that pairing!

Check out the Comment on page 45 of the July 14, 2014 C&EN at this link. (Apologies if it's closed to ACS members and subscribers only.)

Old-World Publishing in the New Age

Through the web, we can self-publish pretty much anything at any time. This doesn't guarantee, however, that anyone will read it. Actually no venue can guarantee that. Old world platforms such as newspapers, trade publications and journals do have a circulation among their audiences that effectively guarantee a certain number of page views. On the other hand, all-electronic open access journals can serve as such amplifiers as well. Some blogs have become so popular that their number of page views exhibit viral-like growth. So why should anyone publish on the old-world platforms?

That's a loaded question, and truly one that has many possible good arguments to support it. I'll rest on providing one answer by example.  I recently published a Comment in C&EN. The piece was quite a bit longer than my usual blog post. As such, it would have been appropriate for my EveryWhereChem blog only if I broke it up into about three posts. There is one more key difference. I was able to work with an editor who helped me to focus the piece while allowing me to retain my "voice." My prose was probably a bit too breezy, but she embraced it and made it better. Trouble is that editors need to be paid and one might argue that authors do too! While this and other quality control mechanisms are not exclusive features of the old-world publishing model, they are certainly a large part of the service that authors and readers enjoy from them. They also serve as curators of the pieces that they publish. And this means that a good editor can exert a meta-level quality control that adds value to the readership. There's also a role for blogging as otherwise I wouldn't be writing this too. My postmodern view of the so-called traditional publishing venues is that they remain valuable even if we aren't sure how to monetize it as readily as we once did.

My C&EN Comment focused on Mentoring and the key role if fills in advancing young scientists into their careers. Most new faculty learn the job on the job. As the demands and the tenure decision pressure have grown, it is nearly impossible to figure out the job without help. This is where mentoring can play a big role.  The New Faculty Workshop is one attempt to institutionalize mentoring across all of the chemistry research- active departments. I wrote about my experience at last year's New Faculty Workshop in two earlier posts on July 6 and July 16. The next workshop being held on July 31-August 2, and I'm looking forward to meeting the newest cohort of young faculty.

Check out my my March 24th Comment in C&EN on “Mentoring New Faculty—It Really Works!” and John Schwab’s letter to the editor on May 19th reiterating the “Importance of Mentoring” in response to my Comment.

The Academic Juggle: Hallows or Horcruxes

Every day, entering the office, I face the question of whether to write papers or grant proposals amidst the flood of other tasks. Yes, we all have to deal with managing time lines. But the question is akin to the one that Harry Potter faced when trying to decide between chasing after horcruxes or hallows. The horcruxes represent the immediate problem. The hallows offer the possibility of solving this and any other problem. In the fictional case, the hallows are also the temptation to become evil. Focusing on them would likely be done at the expense of ridding the world of the latest evil, Voldemort, and would also lead Harry to become evil. This is the Faustian bargain revisited. Like Goethe before us, let's remove the unfair rule that one isn't dammed just for playing. The question then centers on how we should balance our time on the short-term versus the long-term. That is, without papers, you won't earn the next grant, but if you never write grants, then you won't have funds to do the research that you will document in your next journal article.

Some researchers love to write articles because it is part of their process to do the research, diving deeply into the details that you have to get 100% right or else the logic of the paper falls. Some researchers love to write grants because they enjoy thinking about the possibilities that have yet to be explored without having to worry about the details that might muck it up. Still others enjoy neither because they dislike the toil of writing let alone the fact that it takes you away from actually doing the research. Or perhaps you prefer to do something else entirely, like writing blog posts? Regardless, you have to choose between hallows or horcruxes, not just the one time as Harry did, but every day.  It is the daily need to make a conscious choice over the prioritization of articles, grants, and everything else that makes being an academic researcher both challenging and exciting. We're not Harry Potter. We don't have a wand. We can't make (unexplainable) magic. We don't have the glasses. O.k., maybe we do have the glasses. But we do get to choose our own adventure as we as advance the limits of our understanding.

Failure is an option

Most of the time, baseball batters strike out. Many football passes end in incompletions and sometimes interceptions. Dunks sometimes bounce out. Goals get scored past goalies. Yet the players still remain on the field. That's because without the possibility of these failures, they wouldn't be able to make great plays. The lesson is that the players on the starting squad aren't there because of their lack of failures, but rather, because they make enough outstanding plays to make up for their comparatively infrequent failures.

So why is it that we tend to expect that our research scientists (and professors) be infallible? Except for public performances (like when we are teaching or lecturing), we do have the opportunity to edit and refine our work before it is embedded in the literature thereby avoiding some failures. Nevertheless, typos, misplaced theories, erroneous results, incorrect analyses, and other such failures manage to be written by us. But this is not the worst offense. I would put forth that the biggest problem is that we don't have more magnificent and more frequent failures. After all, such bright failures can only arise if scientists launch truly ambitious programs that just went too far outside the box. But the risks are too great for most scientists to make such bold leaps. If she or he fails, then there will surely never be funding for another idea (no matter how conservative.)

The trouble with highlighting examples to give this blog topic substance is precisely the fact that failures are not  reported and the victors rarely want to discuss the torturous path it took them to get there. Here lies the fundamental problem inhibiting the next generation of truly innovative research. At present, the funding models are too conservative. Review panels focus on preliminary results —read several papers already published— and proven accomplishment —read established lab with over 10 years of operation. It's hard to fault them because the risks for both the individual researcher and the individual sponsor are great. It's simply too risky to include failure within the realm of possible outcomes even when the potential is high. The true loser of this game is society because the growth of science is partly stunted. The solution has to be for institutions and funding agencies to provide a safety net for researchers that stray far outside the box. And failure has to be an option.

A random walk through how I run my lab: Item 1 on Annual Events

Academics often scoff at business types for all the seemingly fluffy stuff they do that we don't have time for. Chief among these might be group-bonding or group-building exercises that are meant to teach people how to collaborate and be flexible in the roles that they play. Yet we academics do undertake all sorts or socializing activities, and most of them aren't geeky at all. Invariably, we celebrate annual holiday parties. (These are meant to be nondenominational and inclusive, but the timing of them in mid to late December obviously coincides better with some traditions than others.) My department arranges biannual lunch-time picnics, and attempts to schedule an annual student verses the faculty soccer friendly. (To make the latter fair, some students are recruited to the faculty side.) I hear that Virginia Tech's chemistry department has a student verses faculty cooking competition. Cookies before seminars, and larger buffets around bigger functions also serve to socialize us. Evidently food serves as an aggregating catalyst almost as good as a chemistry seminar. This may not be so surprising when you realize how varied chemistry is across any given department. Equally evident is the fact that collaboration is just as important for us as it is in industry. The difference is that we don't have mad money to go to ropes courses or off-campus retreats...

Nevertheless, most research groups have some kind of annual ritual. Mine is an all-out group bash staged in the club room of my condo from 4:00PM to past midnight. I try to schedule it around the summer so that the pool is literally in play. I also avoid the holiday season during which everyone is overly saturated with parties as it is. (As we face Thanksgiving+Hanukkah, this year's compressed holiday period seems all the more daunting.) Families are also encouraged to attend. and I supply all the food and drink. It's the least that I can do to give back to my group by insisting that they simply come as themselves bringing only what they need to wear for the pool and such. It's a low key event, and brings the group together. It's followed up by other low-key interactions such as our weekly group brown bag lunch. Together this helps create what I hope is an accommodating group culture for all my students, and one in which they can readily learn with each other and me. I like to think that this will make them better leaders and team members in whatever position their career path will take. That's a lot to expect from an annual group party... Or is it?

Happy Thanksgiving and Hag Someach!

Diversity Tax (@OxideChem)

At NDEW2013, I described the now oft told refrain about the overburdening of female and URM* faculty. In fact, this affects anyone in a department who is different in some way that adds to the faculty's strength. For example, in Georgia Tech's chemistry department, Mostafa El-Sayed is presently the only member of the National Academy of Sciences. So everyone wants him to be on their committee. But even he cannot be on every committee. Similarly, a female or URM faculty member is invariably asked to be on far too many committees. Let's call this the diversity tax as it adds an extra layer of work to such faculty. The existence of the diversity tax is not without good intentions. After all, everyone wants university and professional committees to be diverse. The trouble is that there are necessarily too few such faculty and hence they are asked to participate much more often than their colleagues. Moreover, only a few of those committees are actually useful to them at a given stage of their career.

Meanwhile the diversity tax goes further because female and URM faculty are invariably taxed in several other service roles. There's no doubt that said faculty are willing and interested to help. The trouble is that it's difficult to say no (for a number of reasons) and even the mental tax of doing so is part of the problem. Good intentions to limit the requests often fall on individuals not being invited to the tasks that are most in demand (because it's easy to fill those slots, and it apparently avoids further taxing female and URM faculty.) Thus the solution for the diversity side is too tricky to solve on the demand side. Instead, I advocate for correcting it on the supply side. Namely, if you see a faculty member being limited by the diversity tax, then give them more support—e.g., administrative assistants, teaching relief, research scientists, etc. This will put them on an equal playing field with their colleagues, and will help your department in the long run.

*URM stands for under-represented minority

Little boy blue and the man on the moon...

Work-life balance. If you're thinking about it, like me, you've likely already tipped the scales. For me, the old Cats Steven song,* Cat's in the Cradle, serves as a clarion call reminding me that my actions today will be rewarded or penalized later. It's seemingly easy to ignore any one request to play with my son today. After all what could it hurt? But there's a tipping point beyond which I would essentially never play with him, never teach him anything, and thus not have him around in the long term. One could argue that science is another such a child in my life, and it too requires my attention so as to remain on the productive side of its tipping point. This is yet another nonlinear dynamics problem for which I seek a partitioning of time that gives rise to a global fixed point. The trivial solutions would result in the loss of grants or detrimental effects on my relationships. The good news is that there are existence proofs that nontrivial healthy solutions exist! (And hopefully I'm maintaining one of them.)

A similar question arises when you run a research group. Each of my students requires just the right balance of training and freedom to venture into our joint research problems. She or he has little choice—once in the group—but to trust in my approach and in our group culture. That is, unless there is a catastrophic event that results in them leaving before achieving their degree. Like the little boy in the song, though, once graduated my students have the choice to remember their experience positively or negatively. If the former, this gives rise to an alumni network of students who continue to interact with each other and me. Thus the seeds of collaboration and interaction planted during their training continues to give back substantially to the other members of my group and me. But it's my choice to make those investments, and sadly not everyone makes this choice. So one of the pieces of advice to the students at the Future Faculty Workshop was simply: invest your time in mentoring the kind of group you want now and later. The former is your choice, but you will reap the latter accordingly.

*The lyrics of Cat's in the Cradle were written by Sandy & Harry Chapin, though I have mostly heard them on the Cats Steven soundtrack.

Chemists are unique but are very much like each other

It's a curious thing about chemists that most of us like to think of ourselves as rational thinkers making individual decisions that are unlike those made by anyone else. Just like the Apple commercial (and most of us appear to own more than one Apple product) told us to do long ago, we follow the credo "Think Different." The thing is that in our rational choice making, we tend to arrive at the same conclusions, and hence to an outside observer, we appear to all be alike. Many of us walk tangents (exhibiting that we understand geometry better than everyone else.) We buy Apple products because they are sleek, easy to use, and set us apart from corporate types who have to buy the company's choice of PCs. When we travel, we spend our time optimizing how to deal with airplane/airport headaches, and invariably arrive at similar strategies. In short, we are a marketing segment of the population that is as classifiable as any other. In this respect, we probably aren't very distinct from other scientists.

So how do we impart such non-uniqueness onto our students? At first order, we train them to think just like ourselves. Students need to learn how to solve chemical problems of the type that we have become experts at solving. So, of course, we teach them to approach the problems in the same way that we approach them. After a few years working together, our students even start mimicking some of our mannerisms. But what if our students aren't like us to begin with and they simply can't see us in themselves at the beginning (let alone the end) of their research journey? I suppose that they could find a different research advisor. Perhaps a better answer is to look for ways in which we can teach them the tools while letting them personalize them to their own way of thinking? That requires the faculty mentor to bend as well, growing in the process. If successful, we would then be truly imparting a uniqueness onto our students that match their own. In so doing, we can also open up the profession to a more diverse cohort of students. Sadly, the next generation of such scientists would likely still be an easily classifiable marketing segment...

Mentoring New Faculty in the Chemical Sciences, Part II (#ResearchCorp #ACS)

The funny thing about the mentoring of faculty is that it wasn't nearly so much on the radar screen in the recent past. It certainly wasn't formalized like it is today with senior faculty routinely being assigned to mentor junior faculty. The rationale behind this change involves several threads, but all of them have in common the fact that mentoring plays a huge role in increasing success. Given that the costs of starting a new chemistry professor are really high, we simply can't afford to leave things to chance. Meanwhile, assistant professors—and indeed all professors—these days have to do many jobs beyond the science that they were trained to do. This is where mentoring helps. For example, in the long list of tasks that I listed in Part I, you may have noticed that the teaching role was barely mentioned. It's a critical component of our job, but it tends to be given little attention in the struggle to attain tenure. But whether you teach badly or well, the mount it takes is about the same. So why not teach well?

The New Faculty Workshop being held this week focuses on all of the threads confronting starting Assistant Professors. We expose the junior faculty to the use of evidence-based educational techniques in the classroom. That is, we make it easy for starting faculty to use techniques that have been seen to be effective at engaging students in learning. We also go over many of the issues that they are confronting on the research side so as to increase their chances of success. Ultimately it's about integrating their research and education activities. Indeed, we deliver the content—such as how to run a research lab—using active learning techniques rather than through sage-at-the-stage lectures. A new faculty member may be have been lucky so far, but through this fabulous mentoring workshop we're trying to leave chance behind!

Mentoring New Faculty in the Chemical Sciences, Part I (#ResearchCorp #ACS)

So far this summer, I have played a role  in events mentoring graduate students and postdocs planning to enter the professional ranks, training faculty at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions planning to incorporate computational tools in their classrooms, speaking to the public abut the importance of supporting science, supporting science in Santo Domingo, affirming the value of education among my Cottrell Scholar peers, and mentoring my own students. So who else is left to mentor?

How about the lucky few who are just starting faculty positions in chemistry this Fall or last August? Good news is that they have a job. The bad news is that the pressure is truly on them. They have five years to create a research group (that is world-class) from scratch, publish many papers (in high-impact journals), deliver presentations (at the important meetings and several universities), be awarded prizes, obtains small and large grants, and generally be recognized as an expert in something. Meanwhile they must teach their courses, serve on committees in their universities, serve on panels, review articles and grants, organize conferences and workshops, etc. All the while, they should avoid annoying anyone who might sink their case. It might therefore not be surprising that new faculty —no matter how good— need some help in navigating their tenure run. This  is why they need mentoring and the $20,000 question is where do they get it from?

One possible answer for new faculty in the chemical sciences lies in the New Faculty Workshop being held in DC this week for just the second time. I'll say more about it in Part II!

What makes a university?

Students and faculty. Simple answer. It's not the administration, though they can affect students and faculty significantly, for the better and the worse. (So you should hire good staff, deans, presidents and such. Just not too many of the latter.) It's not the physical plant, though you do need good facilities. A beautiful location—like one that is next to a beach, a mountain, a fabulous airport, or great restaurants—doesn't hurt. But you can build relatively good facilities given a reasonable amount of money almost anywhere. It's not just having a large endowment though that doesn't hurt. Meanwhile, I'm not forgetting alumni of former faculty. They were once current faculty and students and thereby remain critical to the definition of their university.

So why do I favor students and faculty? It may seem both self-serving and forgetful of the three most important factors in choosing a home: "location, location and location." But the thing is that universities teach students. Students are attracted by the quality of the faculty AND their fellow students. Meanwhile faculty are attracted by the quality of the students AND their fellow faculty. These two groups therefore come and go hand-in-hand. If you lose one, you'll lose the other. The fact that they are people and not bricks-and-mortar doesn't change the equation. Good faculty and students attract the next round of good faculty and students. That is, the individual faces change from year to year, but the nature of the university remains through the continuously refreshed set. This, of course, relies on universities continuing to invest in maintaining the quality of their students and faculty. AND they need to empower the faculty to make good decisions through enlightened self-interest and thereby trust them to refresh themselves well. So why do universities sometimes forget to fill positions as faculty retire rather than maintain or grow their numbers? They are, or course, driven to that direction because doing so appears to save money, at least in the short run. But they are leveraging their future as the degradation of their student and faculty quality redefines their universities. Sadly, often not for the better. When the economy is tough, I would suggest that's the time to invest even more money (because it's less expensive to do it then.) So far Georgia Tech has done this right as we have grown for the past 15 years or so at a dramatic pace while the economy was topsy-turvy. Hopefully, this trend will continue!

Looking inside the black box of computational chemistry

This week, I'm teaching faculty from Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs) about the underlying concepts behind molecular dynamics simulations. This seventh workshop on computational and theoretical chemistry is part of the cCWCS workshops aimed at STEM education dissemination and undergraduate research capacity building. Our first workshop was held in 2002, now more than a decade ago! I cover statistical mechanics, David Sherrill covers electronic structure, and Tricia Shepherd covers the hands-on labs. We alternate (roughly) between holding them in Atlanta and in Salt Lake City. Both have their charms. The Westminster Campus is a great venue because it's an idyllic oasis in the middle of the city. It has the open greens and architectural gems that you would expect from a private undergraduate liberal arts school. It also has the requisite high-caliber undergraduate students and facilities to do first-rate science. Holding the workshop here thus makes it easier for participants to see that the computational tools we sample can be replicated at their home institutions.

This workshop, however, is different than most such computational chemistry workshops because our emphasis is on the underlying theory in the computational codes, and not just on how to run a particular computational package. There's nothing wrong with doing the latter. However, we feel that it's useful to understand when computational chemistry calculations or simulations are meaningful or not. To that end, one needs a bit deeper knowledge of how exactly the algorithms are working within the codes. In part this means knowing the underlying equations. In equal measure, it also means understanding the underlying concepts. So the lectures in our workshop tend to focus (a lot!) on the theory. In like fashion, we also want to help participants understand how the algorithms are implemented. Although the labs are run on Apple laptops (which is known for its fancy graphical user interfaces), we guide them into the unix layer, editing files and running jobs from the command line. Thus our goal is to have participants be more comfortable with what the calculations are doing and how they are being done within software packages, whether they're computing energetics or dynamics. In knowing what's inside these black boxes, they should be in a better position to set-up computational experiments and to mentor their undergraduate students and researchers to do likewise. The fact that the workshop continues to be oversubscribed gives me hope that we are achieving at least some part of this goal.

Scientists gossip too! (With a shout out to @ChemBark)

In any given academic discipline, there simply aren't that many people in research active departments. In part, this is because there just aren't that many primarily graduate institutions (PGIs) as classified by the Carnegie Institution.  In chemistry, there are well over 100 such departments, with USNews and World Report ranking the top 140. The NSF also keeps track of chemistry departments according to research expenditures using federal research dollars. Not surprisingly, departments with larger expenditures tend to be larger. (At the very least, they need more people to use the money.) In the top 50 of these departments, there are approximately 1600 professors. That number is smaller than the number of students in the high school I attended as a teenager. It's also small enough that it gives rise to all sorts of overlapping social networks, and intrigue....

That's right. Intrigue. The questions include: Who got their first job and where. Who got tenure, and sadly who didn't. Who's moving where. How much money was so and so offered to go where, and why they did or did not take the offer. Who got which prize or honor. Put two chemistry professors in a room who've never met before. First they'll tire themselves out discussing their latest research results and how they might help the other one advance their research projects. Then, they will catch their second wind discussing other chemists that they know in common. Of course, social media has a role to play here too. A very good blog, ChemBark, tracks, among many things, the latest academic hires and poaches in chemistry. It's kept current through blog replies providing information that is used to update the main post. (In a sense the page is a moderated wiki.) As it's impossible to hide who is visiting a given department and when, this crowdsourced updating works remarkably well. That is true as long as the readers of ChemBark span all of chemistry. That's not quite the case as I noticed that several theory hires were missing!! Which isn't necessarily ChemBark's fault; it's just an indication of the breadth of chemistry spanned by his reply-writing readership or my overly sensitive perspective about my own subfield of chemistry.