Diversity in the Marketplace of Ideas

During my Phi Beta Kappa visit to University of Oklahoma back in late March of this year, my host Ron Halterman added a somewhat unusual meeting to my visit. Namely, he arranged for me to go to a recording studio at the local NPR station, KGOU. While there, I had a conversation with Paige Willett Lough and Merleyn Bell on the work that I’ve been doing to promote diversity equity in chemistry through OXIDE. In much less than an hour, they recorded enough material to produce a 30-minute show as part of their Race Matters series. At first, it wasn’t clear to me who was more nervous, Merleyn or me. I’m pretty sure that it was me, and Merleyn pretended to be so just to make me adjust to the fact that I was staring at a very large microphone. In any event, it was fun to have a conversation about diversity equity and science advocacy, and I thank Ron, Merleyn and Paige for making that happen!

A 30-minute conversation includes a very long narrative that is too long to reproduce here, but I can highlight a few of the points to hopefully peak your interest. (Or you can just use this as your “cliff notes” so as to avoid going further!) The notion that we as scientists are competing in a marketplace, not of physical products, but of ideas is one that intrigues me. We develop and disseminate ideas but it’s hard to own or sell them. Yet it costs money to produce and maintain them. That money comes from the federal government or student tuition, for example. It leads to solutions and products that we all use and pay for. So it’s definitely a marketplace which has real value. For us to remain competitive in this marketplace of ideas, we need to have a diverse cohort of scientists, and this notion frames several of the segments of my discussion. Indeed, it is the need for us to remain competitive in science that drives OXIDE in its work to diversity the faculties in chemistry departments across the US. As a community, we have made significant advances in changing our policies and procedures to advance our climate, and I provided several specific examples. Meanwhile, Merleyn also asked me about how I encourage young people to be scientists. I hope that I do this by example, and by actively engaging and mentoring students when I visit colleges and universities. But scientists need help from the media to amplify our message. To this end, I mentioned that the theme in the “The Martian” —in which science was used frequently as the key to solve his challenges— is a great example of the media promoting science, and not just innovation. 

Please check out the show by listening to the recording or reading the transcript here.

Q&A on balancing activities in research and #OutsideTheLab

I was recently interviewed by Dr. Antara Dutta from Georgia State University for an on-line story by the ACS Georgia Local Section as part of their series to promote volunteer leaders in the American Chemical Society. The questions and answers are more about how I do what I do, and may be of use to you if you are thinking about balancing your professional and volunteer tasks...

1. What do you like most about your job? What are the most challenging parts of your job?
What I like most about my job is that I can learn something new every day, and that I also can make an impact on the lives of students, colleagues, and beyond. In this sense, the day is never done as there is always something more that I could have done. Thus the challenging part is knowing when to stop.

2. What characteristic do you associate with a good chemist?
Recalling that “chance favors the prepared mind,” it is clear that a good chemist must be both diligent and careful in their preparation, but imaginative in the construction and interpretation of everything they do.

3. How have you grown professionally through your career? How did you choose your professional career growth path?
I have been fortunate to meet great chemists who mentored me and guided me not just on my chemistry, but  also on how to manage my chemistry.  For example, Bob Lichter has been an amazing mentor helping me to integrate my broadening participation efforts with my scientific program.

4. How do you face and overcome your professional challenges?
I ask for help and I work harder.

5. What are your habits have you adopted to ensure professional success? For example, do you have a daily routine or practice that helps you to be successful?
I exercise every day to ensure that my mind and body stay healthy. I also reserve Monday’s and Wednesday’s for after school pickup of my son from his school and rarely schedule something else over them, unless I’m travelling. This ensures that I have quality time with my son.

6. How do you handle failures, either major or min, both professionally and in research?
As an academic, failure is inevitable because noone wins every grant competition. So I look at such failures as an opportunity to grow. That is, I learn from the rejections (by leveraging the written comments from reviewers and discussions with program managers), and I try again.

7. Who has inspired you professionally or personally and why?
My friends, Peter Stang and Dick Zare, are remarkable in their ability to balance their research programs and their activities to advance our profession.  They are living existence proofs that you can both serve others and pursue research, and it helps me to not give up hope that I can do both as well.

8. What are your thoughts on your growth especially in this digital age? What transformation do you see in the field of chemistry from the way you have learned the subject and it is today in this digital age? 
The promise of computers in chemistry is multi-fold. On the one hand, it provides the ability to amass a lot of data for which analytics tools can find unexpected correlations and solutions. On the other hand, it provides a platform on which we can code ever more accurate models of complex chemistry for which calculations and simulations can reveal chemistries that we had not anticipated earlier. Across this range, the power of computers thus offers us an opportunity to do chemistry differently just as, for example, combinatorial chemistry tools have already transformed discovery.

9. What hobbies or activities do you participate in outside of your professional life?
I have been running with my wife since just after I received tenure. In addition, since my son was four years-old, we have been training in Tae Kwon do together, taking all of our belt tests together, and we earned our Kukkiwon-certified 3rd degree black belts together. Running and Tae Kwon Do have been important for my health, but equally importantly they continue to provide me quality time with my family.

10. Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share?
Much of what I have related involves the importance of interacting with people, both to help them and be helped by them. I have found many of my friends and colleagues through the American Chemical Society, and the value of my membership comes primarily from the fact that we are a society of like-minded chemical scientists and engineers. I encourage you to engage with other members at our local section meetings, our regional meetings, our national meetings, and on various on-line platforms. I am sure that you and I will both benefit from your greater engagement!

May the ducks quack for you (A Tip for Conference Organizers)

Every two years since 2001, I have been co-organizing a workshop in Telluride on “Chemical Dynamics in Complex Environments” (Chem-DiCE). It's a great venue that attracts scientists (and their families) to attend and return. In our particular workshop, we focus on challenges to address molecular behavior (such as reactions) occurring in solvents that are heterogeneous and far from equilibrium. It turns out that this problem is common to many different chemical phenomenon. We therefore invite researchers that are are facing this challenge in different milieu, such as colloidal dispersions, renewable energy generation, proteins, and confined liquids.  We also aim to split the participants equally across theory/computing and experiment. For many of our participants, this meeting is the only time they see each other, let alone be exposed deeply to the research in their respective fields. The net effect is that our workshop gives rise to a cross-pollination of ideas and solutions across broad areas of research. I'd like to think that this is the main reason for the success of our workshop.

However, perhaps the real reason for our success is the organization structure:  Everyone who speaks gets an hour. That is, exactly an hour. At that point the ducks quack (on our timer), and the speaker is finished. It’s not uncommon for speakers to go through only one-quarter to one-third of the material they prepared. That’s because the audience is so interactive that many questions come to the surface, allowing us all to probe the material that is covered much more deeply. It also allows for consideration of questions or issues that someone from outside of a field might naively ask but which, in running counter to the established dogma, requires a profound new direction or solution to address. No speaker ever gets to the end, and they are invariably unhappy that they were unable to do so. But everyone is happy that all the other speakers are stopped at exactly an hour. In the eight workshops that we have run so far, only once was someone allowed to speak beyond that hour. In that case, the speaker wanted to answer a question that had been raised as the ducks were quacking. He pleaded to continue, and I concurred only after the entire group voted unanimously in favor. Thus the structure of talks is very egalitarian, and provides an opportunity for all to learn something new. That’s why I think that my colleagues keep coming back!

Monthly Status Reports (A random walk through how I run my lab, Item 4)

In the business world, or in "Office Space," everyone has seemingly heard of the TPS that must be submitted to your boss at arbitrary (but far too often) frequency. More annoyingly, the TPS often appears to remain unread serving only to occupy one's time with busy work. So it is with ironic amusement that I rediscovered this tool so as to improve the efficiency of my lab. After all, theorists are out-of-the-box thinkers who don't want to be constrained by the mundane, right? And yet this monthly task is exactly the extra structure my students needed to maximize their progress, liberating them to not even see the "box."

For nearly two years, I have asked my students to submit a Monthly Status Report (MSR). It includes only four components: accomplishments, accountability, goals, and pain-points. The goals include not just what is to be done in the next month, but also their overarching plans. In accountability, they summarize what was performed with regards to the previous month's goals. If they succeeded with all of their goals, then that serves to calibrate a more ambitious plan for the following month! The pain-points provide a quick summary of which items I might need to help them with or which I am overdue on. (Yes, I also need help keeping all the balls in the air!) The MSR needs to include items regarding their educational plan, and not just their research projects. To this end, I ask them to include a running clock of the time spent as a graduate student or postdoc. The clock increments by one month each time, of course. The total number, though, reminds us to track professional development activities appropriate to the student's educational timeline. The key to insuring that this is not a totally pointless exercise is that the MSR is followed by a 1:1 thirty-minute meeting discussing progress and charting out meetings and tasks for both student and me to follow up on. I've found that this "meta" meeting is critical to ensuring that both the student AND her or his projects succeed. When I had a smaller group, the MSR wasn't necessary, but now it's critical. I have found it to be more effective than the annual Individual Development Plan (IDP), if the latter is done exclusively, because the IDP is yearly and that feedback isn't often enough. Indeed, the MSR makes the IDP easy for students to complete and increases the effectiveness of the IDP.

Again, the MSR is a simple tool from business school 101, but don't scoff it if you want to help your students increase their productivity and maximize what they learn in graduate school. The key is to use it as a vehicle to hold a frequent and periodic conversation between you and every one of your students!

Advice to high school students ...

Through high school, you are mostly taught the facts. As an undergraduate, you are taught to teach yourself the facts and how to construct answers to questions. In graduate or professional school, you are taught how to ask the right questions. The irony in this construction lies in the common misconception that Ph.D.s know all the answers, when in fact they mostly know the gaps in knowledge. That is, Socrates was not being so humble with his oft quoted saying, "the more I learn, the more I learn how little I know."

At the recent Herty Medal Award Dinner hosted by the Georgia Local Section of the ACS, I was pleased that nearly an entire table was filled by AP Chemistry students from Luella High School in Henry County. One of them asked our medalist, Luigi Marzilli, for advice on her way to college. I took the liberty of conveying the stages I described above. My point is that the mode of learning undergoes a paradigm shift in going from high school to college. My advice to students is thus to be aware of this change and be deliberate in changing their study habits. Indeed students often struggle as they approach the cliff on the edge of what they know coming from high school and the large body of new material that they are now expected to know in a college class. They often respond by trying to memorize every new fact and figure, but the shear magnitude of data makes such a path difficult to follow. Instead, they need to learn the material conceptually so that they can readily process the problems they face on exams and beyond. This requires practicing the problems and making the connections between the concepts steadily through the term, not in a single cramming session the night before the exam!

Lost in Projection

Life is full of cycles. For the American Chemical Society (ACS), there’s a National Meeting held every 6 months. With that as my time constant, it feels as if it was just the other day that I gave the Keynote Lecture at the ACS Committee on Minority Affairs Luncheon at the last National Meeting in Dallas. Last March, I framed my remarks through the title of this post. I knew that it was a good title because my wife liked it. But she also wondered what in the world I would talk about under such a title. This seemed fortuitous. It meant that I could say nearly anything without disappointing the audience. After all, they couldn't possibly have any expectations. In truth, the title wasn’t advertised as evidence by the large turnout.

What is lost in the projection of how others frame you? That is, there is a potential disconnect between what others expect of you and the person who you believe yourself. To what extent are you bound by what others expect of you? Such expectations may arise from how others have seen you in the past or perhaps by who they see on first impression. I came to the United States as a child, a Cuban immigrant who spoke no English but proud to be able to count from one to ten without too much of an accent. Children grow and learn so surely I cannot be bound by that early frame. As adults, we may not grow physically, but we also learn. And yet, we have a tendency to hold others to the frames that we first see of them. Even more dangerous to each of us is the fact that the frame is often projected onto us by others, and not always correctly. There were several young scientists in the room. During the question and answer period, they echoed the angst of having felt bound by such projections in the past. I hope that I succeeded in encouraging them to find their way in breaking those projections and choosing their own frame.

The cycle continues this weekend with the start of the ACS meeting in San Francisco. If you are here, I encourage you to go to Monday’s CMA Luncheon where Madeleine Jacobs will be speaking. The issue of implicit bias and the effects that has on academic careers will also be a large piece of the Symposium on Advancing the Chemical Sciences Through Diversity to be held at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel all-day on Tuesday. I hope to see you there!

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.

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.

Keep your outline to yourself! (A random walk through how I run my lab, Item 3)

The best talks (presentations) are the ones that look completely unrehearsed, but for which the speaker's extemporaneous talent somehow causes them to hit every high and low dead on. That can only be achieved with tremendous preparation. To that end, I encourage my students to practice their presentations often. I ask them to present at least once, often twice, in one of our research group weekly meetings, to present it in front of my research group (without me present) at least once more, and to send me the slides several times for feedback. Depending on the importance of the venue, I also ask them to practice it in my office. In that setting, I often video record them. This ensures that they are not as relaxed as they would be in a one-on-one setting. It also gives them a recording that they can use to self-analyze their performance. Repetition alone is not enough because inherent mistakes will persist unless they are checked. As such, it is important that every practice presentation be followed by a lengthy critique.

Here follows a necessarily incomplete set of suggestions on how to deliver a better science presentation:

1. Lead with an example that is cool and illustrative of the problem that you are solving in your work. (Make sure to tell the audience the problem that you are trying to solve!)
2. Tell the audience your solution of the problem early on. This is not a detective story.
3. An outline slide should consist of phrases unique to your presentation. There is no need to have a bullet called "introduction" because you are evidently already doing this. There is no need to have a bullet called "conclusion" because everyone in the room knows that you will eventually stop talking. Don't have a bullet called "method"; instead write the name or names of the unique methods that you are using. 
4. Don't wear anything that will distract the audience.
5. Don't wear anything that will distract you. 
6. Your presentation is an opportunity for you to teach the audience about the work that you have done. It doesn't matter if there are one or more Nobel Prize winners in the room. You are the only expert about your work in the room.
7. Busy slides are worse than no slides at all.
8. Each slide requires at least one minute of air time, if not more.
9. Colored text should be used sparingly and intentionally to highlight or associate text.
10. Animations should be used sparingly and intentionally to highlight or associate concepts or transitions in your presentation.
11. Text should be used as cues to you and the audience in an abbreviated form, and not in long narratives to be read. (Occasionally important quotes may be necessary.)
12. Text and figures should be large enough to be visible in the back of the room.
13. Each slide (particularly those showing data, a figure, or some other kind of result) should be shown for a reason. Make sure to include prompts or bullets for each such reason.
14. Appropriate literature citations should be included within each slide, not at the end. 
15. All images and movies not created by you should be appropriately credited with references. This includes the ones that you "borrowed" from Wikipedia.
16. Do not speak in a monotone; a little enthusiasm goes a long way.
17. Look at your audience. If they appear to be inattentive, then throw in some relevant metaphor to bring them back in at the next pre-planned point in your presentation. (That means that you should have such examples at the ready to be dropped in at various places in your presentation.)
18. Detailed equations, algorithms, methods and/or lab set-ups are cool and you worked really hard to make them. But nearly no one wants to see them in a brief presentation. Try to have at most one such slide so that you may indicate how it was done without losing your audience in a quagmire of details. Have extra slides at the ready in case someone asks for such detail during Q and A.
19. It's hard to keep anyone's attention longer than 5 minutes or so. This means that you need to stop once in a while to remind the audience where you are in the story you are teaching them.
20. Good lecturing is good teaching. Think about using techniques from research-based education research (DBER) in your presentation. (For example, active learning!)
21. Feel free to violate any rule above if it makes your presentation better as long as it is not intellectually dishonest to do so.

I welcome more tips to be added to this list through your comments!

(This is the third post in a series of items on how I run my lab. Check out the list here.)

If chemists don't dream of sushi, then what do they dream of?

If you've got $300 and 15 minutes to spare, then there may be no better place to use both up at the same time than Jiro Ono's restaurant in downtown Tokyo. It's omakase, which means chef's choice and is roughly equivalent to prix fixe. Sukiyabashi Jiro is known for ultra-high-quality ingredients and perfect execution of sushi. Jiro's plating is also fast. (The 10 seats at the bar are said to turn over every 15 minutes though I haven't had a chance to confirm it. The twenty "courses" definitely come lightning quick.) The movie, "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," didn't quite emphasize such cold precision in romanticizing his artistry and drive for excellence. Nevertheless, I see all such traits in most successful chemists. Sadly, I have not been to Sukiyabashi Jiro. But I do know quite a few awesome chemists, and have had a chance to see them practice their craft with similar creative precision. 

I wonder what other chemists dream about if not Jiro's sushi? The shape of a nano crystal, the reorganization of atoms through synthetic steps, the dance of symbols in mathematical equations, teasing out the composition of an unknown object, or something else entirely. I dream about how each part of a molecule or a material makes the whole while still remaining a part. Each element is a building block and yet its action is modified by the atoms it is attached to. Putting many molecules together gives rise to so-called emergent behavior in which the collection of molecules together acts entirely differently than any one molecule within. The problem is predicting how it will act (its function.) Their motion and the equations that orchestrate them is what I dream about. 

But I also dream about eating perfectly selected and constructed sushi. Perhaps, I'll have a chance to eat at Sushi Nakayama in NYC? Its eponymous chef was Jiro's apprentice. At the very least he can make tamago as good as what you get at Jiro's. Trouble is that Nakayama's 10 bar seats are about as hard to get as Jiro's. So I'll have to stick to hanging out with chemists.  

Item 2: On Celebrating Oral Exams (A random walk through how I run my lab)

Doctoral programs around the country tend to have varying requirements. Invariably, they have some kind of oral exam (early in the program) to establish the candidate's proficiency to continue on to write her or his dissertation. Later, the doctoral candidate completes her or his research and thesis. Whether or not she or he "defends" it with yet another oral presentation, it marks the second major and final stage before earning the doctorate. These two critical transitions can be treated as weed-out mechanisms or as teachable moments. I prefer the latter perspective, and I therefore devote a lot of time to help my students flesh out their ideas and practice their presentations. In the end, it's still them being tested so I have no qualms with helping them be better prepared. It's a training program after all!

As with all rituals, I, like most of my colleagues, find a way to include food and drink to mark these successful transitions. Mine has a twist. After successful completions of each, I bring a bottle of bubbly. I offer a domestic sparkling wine for the candidacy exam, and real champagne after the Ph.D. defense. That is, the real bubbles are reserved for the authentic confirmation of the degree… And I'm happy to report that we celebrated my 10th such doctorate just a few weeks ago!

This continues my random walk through how I run my lab. Look for other such posts using the "RandomWalks" tab. The previous item on a different set of rituals (annual lab outings) can be found here.

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!

@SloanFoundation helping to increase Minority PhD's in STEM Areas

I'm in New York today serving on the Advisory Committee for the Sloan Foundation's Minority Ph.D. STEM grant program. It's an exciting time to be working with their office. They are in the process of re-imagining their investments to address the dearth of Minority Ph.D.'s being produced by the leading research active STEM departments. They have introduced two new funding models: The smaller Program in Exemplary Mentoring (PEM) aimed at promoting accommodating climate in individual departments, and the larger University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEMs) encompassing several departments and including graduate student fellowships.

It should be obvious from the names of these programs, but I'll hit you with a two by four… The common theme is the emphasis on mentoring. Anecdotal and research-based data both suggest that mentoring is one of the most effective actions for lowering the barriers faced by minority students in pursuing a Ph.D. and beyond. However, not all mentoring is equally good. It also involves people (and increased contact time), and that's expensive. Put this all together and it turns out that it's not so easy to construct sustainable and effective mentoring programs. This is where the funding from the Sloan Foundation plays such a crucial role. It provides both motivation for universities to compete to do it well, and funds that can be leveraged by diversity champions on their campuses.

ACS National Meetings… Large is the new small... @AmerChemSociety @ACSNatlMtg #ACSIndy

In my previous post, I implied that the reason for going to ACS meetings is that they are so very large. Trouble is that such size is precisely the reason why many chemists avoid them and advise others to do likewise. So here's my advice on how you can eat your cake and have it too at national meetings (and this isn't restricted to ACS meetings!)...

First and foremost, you have to make choices about where you need to be when. You should just give up, without regret, on those things you just can't do or fail to reach because you stopped for something else along the way. As a beginning graduate student, I would focus only on the technical session closest to my research area, but later I started to hop between sessions to get a better sense of the field. In either case, I was completely oblivious to the rest of the meeting, thereby keeping it manageable. I know of other chemists at that early stage in their careers, who made completely different and equally satisfying choices. For example, they may have jumped in nearly exclusively into the career development training sessions or into the chemical education offerings. Others used their time at the national meeting to jump into technical or professional sessions outside of their core doctoral research area. Regardless, we never failed to present our posters or talks so as to share our work and hear feedback from others.

As a working professional, I now distribute all of these strategies into my meeting days, adding governance and outreach activities too. But my overall algorithm is essentially the same. I look at the meeting as a physical realization of the web. There's no way that I can visit every site. Instead, I surf sites to learn, teach and share chemistry with others. The difference is that at the ACS meeting, I can actually see and interact face-to-face with people. Which is to say that I act as if I'm attending a small meeting filled with all the people that I want to see. Indeed, being at the national ACS meeting with so very many people insures that the cross-cut I see is invariably filled with the ones I was looking for! I do miss some, though, and that's why I come back for the next one.

The power of awards in science (@AmerChemSociety #ACSIndy #ACSAward)

Awards of any kind certainly reward the recipient directly and indirectly. The direct part is obvious in so far as there is some kind of remunerative component. The indirect part is perhaps equally obvious in that it helps the individual to advance their career and sets them to be in a better position for the next award. The Nobel Prize presents a kind of absurd example. It is an extreme in remuneration. It is perhaps an end in so far as there are few prizes in science that exceed it in prestige. It's also an extreme example of the power (and sometimes failure) of awards to impact society well beyond the individual awardee. Namely, awards provide a focus on the scientific work advanced by said individual, and thereby accelerate its adoption and dissemination broadly. For example, the recent Physics Nobel Prize recognizing graphene has clearly accelerated the interest in commercializing the technology as can be seen through the dramatic rise in graphene patents in the last year. It's interesting here that the acceleration of the impact of the work may or may not include a literal boost of the scientific effort of the awardee herself or himself. As such, awards given to individuals, no matter what stage in their careers, can also have very positive impact on advancing and disseminating the science or broader activities for which they are selected.

I am thus very grateful for the recognition that the ACS Award—sponsored by the Dreyfus Foundation—for Encouraging Disadvantaged Students into Careers in the Chemical Sciences (EDSCCS) has just provided. But I am most excited by the fact that it provides visibility to our efforts mentoring students broadly, and in particular on our OXIDE (http://oxide.gatech.edu) activity. As I've posted before, mentoring works, and we should practice it often! Through our OXIDE program, we are working with chemistry departments to change the culture to be more open to everyone. The truth is that such inclusive excellence helps everyone, and makes our chemistry programs better. But the community needs help (from, for example, social scientists) to move in this direction. I'm excited by the fact that the visibility of the award will help us reach more faculty. Such awareness should also highlight our role as a resource for adapting their programs and policies. How else could we leverage the award for EDSCCS to advance diversity in the chemical science? I've got some ideas, but your suggestions are welcome and encouraged!

I'm very grateful to the financial support of the National Science Foundation for the individual research grants that have funded my research projects for both its intellectual and broader impacts (most recently #CHE 1112067). Equally important, I'm grateful to the National Science Foundation Division of Chemistry; the Pharmacology, Physiology, and Biological Chemistry Division at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and the Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) in the Department of Energy (DOE) for support of our OXIDE work (#CHE-1048939).

"Have fun, fail often, don't die." — Mentoring Researchers in the Lab

The title paraphrases the bits of advice that Andrew Ellington gives to his undergraduates upon entering his research laboratory. I altered them slightly in my recent words of advice to a cohort of freshmen at the start of their college careers. The punch line (that is the one that gets the laugh) is "don't die" and that one I definitely kept. It's funny because it echoes the fear many of us have in entering a laboratory. There's real danger there because solutions can spill, equipment can break and chemical reactions can go awry in all sorts of ways. There's also psychic danger because there's the possibility that old dogmas will be shattered by your findings. Both of these require a bit of safety training and a prepared mind.

Students can't allow themselves to be paralyzed by the fear of making some mistake, small or large in a laboratory. In order to motivate my students to move forward, I encourage them to summarize ALL their findings during our meetings, not just the ones that "worked." After all, the ones that didn't work may be just as instructive. If nothing else, a listing of all the failed (numerical) experiments shows me that they were busy doing something useful. The important thing is to understand a given experiment didn't work, at least in hindsight. If you can't explain it based on known theory, then there's the possibility that something new has come about. Doing this level of analysis, not included in the title's advice, is what makes the exploration done in the lab a science.

Tennis, Football, Chess, or Science?

I know.  Chess isn't quite on the list of professions you intend to encourage your kids to take up. (But it's fun and can get her a college scholarship at a few schools!) Many of us do encourage our kids to play tennis, baseball, soccer or other sports. Nothing wrong with encouraging them to be fit. There's also an outside shot that they might be good enough to get a college scholarship. Trouble is that far too many kids are counting not just on that but also on the possibility of getting mad money in the pros. What's the trouble with that? The chances are low. After all, only a few thousand get there. So why not play a game with better odds? I'm not suggesting that they follow the advice of the Music Man and play in a band because sadly the odds aren't great there either.


Instead, on this Labor Day (just like on any other day) I'd suggest a career in science. (Shocking, I know.) The trouble is that it just doesn't seem to be in the same conversation among teens as tennis or football. Clearly science does not have the theatre of the other activities, and thus much less allure. But, a career in science (if you can at least make it to a bachelor's degree) offers a pretty good return no matter how you slice it, and a much higher yield. The question is how to bridge the gap and encourage teens to direct their energy to dreaming about being pros in science and not sports? It's hard to convince teens who see all the money and facilities being invested by cities (that build ever more lavish stadiums) and colleges (that build ever more lavish stadiums) in sports. Truth is that investments are going into science and technology, but teens don't see them because they don't get much press. Or is it that we don't generate enough press? Perhaps this is the place for us scientists to make progress on this windmill?

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.

Mentoring freshmen and incoming transfer students at #GeorgiaTech #FASET

The Fall semester is starting this Monday at Georgia Tech. That means a whole new batch of undergraduate students is streaming in. To smoothen their transition to our university and increase the chance of their success and retention, Georgia Tech has created FASET. This funnily named acronym (Familiarization and Adaptation to the Surroundings and Environs of Tech) stands for a program that (in tandem with a few other support programs during the year) has increased first-year retention rate above 95%. It was a real privilege to be invited to serve on a faculty panel at FASET this year. Given the large size of our student body and the self-imposed space limitations of our auditoriums, Georgia Tech stages five such programs, each serving approximately 500 students and their parents. Typically, a faculty member participates in only one. Not knowing when to stop, I managed to serve in three of them. Sadly, the forum didn't give me a chance to hear their voices directly, but I did have a chance to see the excitement, enthusiasm and apprehension in their faces as I looked around the auditorium.

What was my advice?

1. First and foremost, students should recognize the power of the network of their peers. Both as students and alumni, they will have a common bond through their time at Tech. While in college, they can certainly help each other learn faster and more efficiently through study groups. After graduation, they can help each other accelerate their careers through continued collaboration. 
2. The single most important thing they can do to succeed is to GO TO CLASS. Most college lectures do not include an attendance component. However, student performance tends to correlate well with attendance. 
3. Students should interact with faculty, tutors, teaching assistants and other instructors as much as they can. We all post office hours, so go to them, don't be shy and ask for help on whatever you don't understand. If you wish to meet your instructor beyond posted office hours, then pay attention to whichever mode she or he suggests you use. Some instructors will be happy to receive texts on the classroom bulletin board system, others will prefer drop-in visits at their office and others will prefer e-mail, but few will prefer all of these. 
4. As you ponder the choice of your major, remember that this decision is primarily going to affect your time in college and your first job or post-graduate program. After that, through the typical 3-4 career changes that most people undergo, you will likely be working in jobs very different from your major. So DON'T PANIC. You need only figure out what you will enjoy doing for the next 4-5 years. You might as well choose something that you like doing, and that you can do well.
5. Finally, my parting bits of advice were: "Be prepared, be engaged, stay the course, challenge your intellect, try new things, have fun, ... don't die."

Of course, these are simply a summary of the main points that I made. My actual presentation involved the type of discourse (with an audience in the several hundreds) that I learned from my use of active learning modalities. I had them raise their hands, talk to each other, repeat after me, and even laugh (sometimes). If nothing else, they might remember that they can listen to a group of professors for nearly an hour without falling asleep.