Science News

This interview was conducted by Shawn Wei ’26 and Juliette Moore ’27.

What inspired you to pursue a career in chemistry?

There’s a long answer to that one and a short one. I’ve always been interested in the sciences since before I can remember. But I got the chance to start working in a lab at a college near where I grew up. The summer after I finished eighth grade, I enjoyed working in the lab there. Really enjoyed the complexities of chemistry and kept on with it since. So, working in a lab, essentially.

Do you still remember what you were working in a lab?

I was working on synthesizing monomers for organometallic polymers. So, the idea was to take metals to try and increase the conductivity of carbon-based central plastic substitutes. So, trying to create a carbon-based plastic that was always conductive. The goal of that was to ideally create conductive plastics that you can use as flexible wiring or for flexible electronic applications. Some of the stuff going on now, like folding phones, is an example of people looking at how we can make flexible conductive materials. So, we were looking at that back and forth. A long time ago. But not the ones that are currently in folding phones.

That’s really cool. Did you do anything between graduating from college and coming to teach?

Yeah, I went to chemistry grad school. So, after undergrad, I went to California for grad school. I did research for about a year and a half, just part of that, and then got my first teaching job after this.

Could you please elaborate on what led you to become a teacher?

Yeah, so that was really interesting. In grad school, we did a mix of research, classwork, and TA work. I was thinking about both. A lot of my friends went to work in pharmaceuticals. That’s really what my degree was more oriented towards. It was chemical applications and chemistry research. But I realized when I was there that I was pretty much excited every day about going into TA. I was excited most of the time going into research, but I was enjoying the teaching side more than the research side at that point. So, when I got offers from both pharmaceutical companies and the school, I picked the school.

What are some real-world applications of chemistry that you find most exciting?

I think that’s interesting. It’s changed over time for me. So, the area of chemistry that I studied, in particular, is really focused on the synthesis of complex molecules. So, that’s really targeted at drugs and therapies to help people. But you can also use it to better understand proteins and biological systems. The thing that I think I found more interesting since then is trying to find interesting ways to tie the more fundamental chemistry at the high school level to applications. So, thinking about how heat transfers show up in everyday life? Just talked about thermochemistry in class earlier. However, creating problems that feel more applied and thinking about where we have become is more interesting in some ways. Because that’s more relevant to my everyday life, but it shows everywhere.

What do you think about chemistry as a field?

Chemistry as a field? Could you narrow the question a little bit? That’s a super broad question.

Yes, I’ll give an example. How about computational chemistry?

I think computational chemistry is great. I mean, right, if you think about where chemistry was 40 or 50 years ago, where to understand a molecule, people have to make it every single time. That takes an incredible amount of work and a critical amount of material. There’s a lot of waste that goes along with producing things, especially in the initial processes where you haven’t optimized the route. So it’s pretty environmentally damaging at times. And then you think about it: instead of doing that, you have a computer that’s getting more and more accurate as we learn more. Being able to model that in a couple of hours instead of having to spend weeks building that molecule. That’s huge in terms of time and environmental savings. It’s really fantastic what’s going on with being able to model chemicals more accurately.

In terms of where chemistry is going, I think there will be more and more computational aspects. More machine learning, using algorithms that are using chemical understanding to better understand how systems are going to act. Yeah, I think it’s generally those kinds of simulations that are really for the good. It’ll be interesting to see what happens and how chemists’ roles shift. Because if you don’t have to spend weeks building a molecule and you can instead predict what’s going on with it, do you shift more towards a computer science realm, or are those chemists being reassigned to only build the best candidates? Which is what I think is going on now. And yeah, it’s heading in cool directions. Also, something really cool is biochem. Now, biologists are working with chemists to make greener chemistry methods. It’s a really cool area that’s emerged in the last decade or so.

What are some career paths for students who are interested in chemistry?

It’s pretty broad. So you can go down a peer research path. But anything related to food, right? Some chemists go work at companies that produce various foods, or they assess what’s in a food. There are chemists working to produce everything that’s plastic in synthetic material around you. You need chemists who are working to produce metals effectively, right? If you need efficiency, you’ll need chemists and engineers understand the processes. You also need chemists, obviously, for drugs and pharmaceuticals. That’s one of the big ones that I mentioned because that’s sort of the subfield that I was headed toward for a long time. You also can go towards medicine yourself. If you’re a nurse in chemistry and you find that sort of thinking of patterns and systems and working with a complicated system to figure out what’s going on inside it, making medicines a good fit. There are a ton more of them. You can go in a lot of directions again.

I have a friend who has worked at a shampoo company for a long time. For five years and six years, he was doing quality control, making sure the formulation was right, and shifting the formulation just a little bit to make a more effective cleaning product or something like that. Then we can go into that. There’s a lot of little fields that people don’t think of. Another friend of mine went to work for a TV company. They are working on creating a more effective and efficient screen using quantum dot technology or OLEDs. That’s all based on newly accountable methods. Yeah, there are a lot of areas in chemistry that kind of pop up the room and expect it necessary.

It’s really flexible. Do you have a favorite element or molecule?

As someone who is trained as an organic chemist, I feel like a kind of suit should say carbon. At the same time, my grad school work was often focused on rodeo and cobalt. I’m always a little torn on that. I think that the other one that I always find interesting is when you can take something and make it more efficient, more green.

I’m curious to see what happens with things around lithium and sodium in the next couple of years, looking at batteries you’re often familiar with. I see at least three lithium ion power devices in front of me. Can we switch out sodium to make it a little more sustainable? I’m being wishy-washy. I’m going to go with carbon because that is my training. But I think there’s lots of interesting stuff around swapping elements.

What is one about carbon that you think is very special and interesting?

So carbon can bond to itself into lots of other molecules very easily while having a really strong bond. And it can bond to itself, essentially, infinitely while having strong bonds. So it’s really the only molecule that we have that’s able to do that effectively. Or the only element that can assemble into molecules that way. Silicon would be the most analogous element, but its bond strength is significant in the ether. So the reason you’re both carbon-based life, I’m carbon-based life, is because of that flexibility along the strength at the same time. You can do, essentially, infinite things of carbon.

Do you have a favorite chemistry lab or experiment?

I think that depends. But I’m trying to not just give you a wishy-washy answer on this. I think one of my favorites in terms of student excitement is the ability to delve deeper. I’ll give you two.

One of them is the methane bubble fire demo slash lab where students can tie in,

and I’m just going to get thermochemistry, stoichiometry, reaction rates, kinetics, and molecular forces. You can tie in a lot of the units of the honors chem class, and also people get to hold the fireball. So it usually is like, there’s a lot of fun tie-ins, and also people get the excitement part of like, I have a fire going in my hands right now. So that usually gets at least half the class excited.

I also really like the iodine clock reaction, which we don’t do usually except maybe at the AP level. But it’s a really counterintuitive simulation where it changes colors back and forth. And so it doesn’t look like it settles out at one product. It instead looks like it’s shifting back and forth between two different products, which you don’t usually see. Usually reactions go one way, and then they stop at a certain position. So it’s really confusing and counterintuitive, but you can figure it out once you work at it for a while.

Is that an equilibrium?

It’s an equilibrium, but it’s a complex equilibrium based on kinetics where it doesn’t settle out at an equilibrium position for a long time. And instead it shifts between two different equilibrium positions as a situation of one thing builds up. It speeds up a reaction to a different thing. And so you see this shift back and forth between two different reactants before it settles out at the final product. And if you time it right spatially, you can even get it where colors radiate through like a column or a cross a surface. And that’s also cool. So as they build up in one place, they react to change color. And then as they build up in the next place, they react to change color.It’s really cool. If you don’t do an AP, you can watch some videos of it on YouTube and stuff. It’s really good.

Do you have any journal advice to students pursuing chemistry or a related field?

I think the big ones, the big couple pieces of advice that I have are to be patient with yourself as you take on tougher and tougher problems. Chemistry problems go from being very small to very big, very quickly when I often have many parts to them. Being patient as you try to chew through it, not getting frustrated and seeking out as needed can be really helpful. Because the problems can get really big and intimidating, but if you break them into little chunks, you can get there.

The other thing that I would say with it is to try and look for patterns, particularly as you switch between sort of the macro of what you’re seeing in the lab. And thinking about models and atomic structures. It’s often difficult to connect those two, but if you think about patterns of behavior, most of chemistry is really pattern based. So look for the commonalities between things and you can figure out the connections that are of yourself problems.

How do you think that AI will affect chemistry?

I was kind of going down my road a little bit before. I think there’s some cool stuff that will go on with protein folding problems or understanding of interactions between molecules and predicting them effectively. And again, helping people to be much more efficient, right? So in the past, one of the things that happened with Pharma, for example, is they would hire tons of people with bachelor’s degrees just to go run experiments that other people were going to do. And just kind of to act as labor that knew what was like the basics of working in a chemistry lab, but didn’t have expertise.

And then I think as they get better and better at modeling, they’ll shift to having chemists with more expertise going after really like, okay, our AI model has predicted that this is going to be a really good candidate for what we want to do. And, let’s go after just the really important stuff with humans. Because then you’re being both more efficient and effective and cost effective and environmentally friendly. And maybe you’re getting, if each chemist is doing more work in less time with less effort, then maybe you’re going to get a bunch of new drugs on the market.

I think that’s all the questions we have today. Thank you so much for your time today.

Editor’s Note:
Thank you so much to Mr. Burt for this wonderful interview!