pH14 Episode 2: Professor Andrea Carlini

The transcription is a conversation between Nathan, Ben, and Professor Carlini. They talk about various topics, including Professor Carlini's sword on the wall, their research group, and the use of piezoelectric materials. Professor Carlini explains that their research focuses on creating devices that can sense biological conditions and respond accordingly. They discuss the use of piezoelectric materials in energy harvesting, haptics, and soft robotics. They also mention the challenges of improving the performance of flexible piezoelectric systems compared to ceramic-based ones. The conversation highlights the interdisciplinary nature of their research and the importance of finding biocompatible and flexible materials for implantable technologies. successful people can be ignoring those conventions just being as loud as possible and not really caring about you know how what what they're supposed to be doing yeah I honestly the prison I can't wait to see what book he writes behind bars obviously but behind bars the books gonna be great I've always I've always wanted to do one of those podcasts or it's like it starts kind of like in medias like halfway through a conversation well now that you said that now it's not going to start in me well fuck it we're not going to use any of this stuff we're just having the random shit I just want to make sure the audio is good and the energy hot already yeah 40 minutes hundred foot start all right I can do the intro I did the intro last time I think I got the hang of it hi welcome back to another episode of ph-14 a very basic podcast I am Nathan I'm Ben and today we have with us professor Carlini how are you professor Carlini doing well happy Labor Day okay this episode is a little more special for Ben and I because professor Carlini is effectively our boss we work in her love so you gotta be very very very careful for at least the first you know two minutes before we don't really care anymore yeah absolutely yeah before the coffee kicks in exactly yeah so professor we have to ask you our first question is the sword on your wall what is the story behind the sword of a wall that actually came from my PhD advisors lab so when I defended my PhD I was presented with a sword that matched my personality and in the Geneski lab where I graduated with my PhD they present you with the sword as a joke on as a play on the Finnish tradition where he presented with a ceremonial top hat and a ceremonial sword and eventually evolved to a sword that was specific to the individual so some people get these Jon Snow broad swords interesting daggers rapiers fencing swords katanas and my friends pulled together to surprise me with a batless so I'm a big Star Trek fan and I have this really nice batless Klingon battle sword hanging it up right next to my degree so to me that's my PhD kind of intimidating for anybody who just walks in your office yeah okay it needs to be sharpened in theory you know I mean well I guess what they put up a picture of it you know for the audio listeners but in theory how would that even be like used like I don't even see Oh poorly I mean that's that's the whole stick behind Star Trek I mean all these battle scenes are not really well done at least in the original series and you know next generation the real shows for it for it became a lot of action it was more cerebral but the the action scenes were just hysterical and you know maybe there's some people who can wield a Klingon battle sword very well but I don't think they were paying attention to you know how how do you feel it would be how effective it would be in a real battle and you just get to watch these slow motion scenes but it looks like an intimidating sword and I love it it says a lot about you know everything that motivated me throughout grad school you didn't use it you don't you don't like practice with it you didn't like sit there in the mirror just oh yeah I've done it I've used it for a few Halloween costume you know it's fun but no I think I learned early on it's not going to ever be something I've mastered well I can honestly say from personal experience that I definitely set the tone for how I expected this lab experience to go and speaking of the lab let's just I say we hop right into it let's talk about the Kerlini group just a little intro of the research what we do here how everything got started but first and foremost you know what is the Kerlini group to you? The Kerlini group to me is a very interdisciplinary research organization or research effort in this way we explore a lot of either structurally dynamic biomaterials or flexible devices and the ultimate goal is to be able to have in an autonomous control loop device that can sense a biological condition with the embedded chemistry and then respond accordingly that could be through a change in the mechanics change in the shape actuation with delivery of drugs and some of my drug delivery devices are ratio metric in that for every one molecule of related to inflammation such as a reactive oxygen species you can have a release of one molecule of therapeutic or say an inflammatory and so you have a sense response and then ultimately feedback and I really want my feedback to be a digital feedback that you can have on your phone which would be something that a user would be able to identify or monitor over time even if it was an implanted device and we've got a lot of research that predates anything I've done in each areas of this and my lab though wants to bring a lot of it together and for the most part I want to use engineering but more synthetic chemistry as a way to introduce this modulation and code the response behavior because my opinion you can make very very selective chemistry to various different redox agents enzymes you know nearly defined acid responsive sensors or mechanical sensors so piezoelectrics are an interesting system that I'm working on right now. So when you say piezoelectric like what what does that kind of mean to our listeners who don't fully understand how a piezoelectric works? Listeners or people in the room perhaps. Okay the simplest explanation I can think of is a material that can reversibly convert mechanical energy into electrical energy so if you take a piezoelectric material the property of this material say it's a film of PBDF polyvinyl polyfluorovinylidene sorry polyvinylidene difluoride which is piezoelectric you can compress it or strain it in some way simply by pushing it bending it and this mechanical deformation causes a rearrangement of dipole bonds and polarization of charge right so the chemistry or the physics explanation is that you have this this charge separation now across the surfaces of it and then that can generate electrical potential so if you push on it it will generate electricity essentially and then in inversely you could apply a current to it and then you could have a mechanical deformation so maybe you can have the material expand in size or contract in size in response so they're very useful I mean they're used all over in haptics and we were talking about that earlier right haptics are found in your cell phones most commonly with you know any kind of vibrational feedback whenever you push a button so that you can know you've actually pushed that button on your flat screen they're used in your game controllers as a rumble pack and they're used in soft robotics for prosthetic limbs also to provide tactile sensation to people who are paraplegic or quadriplegic to allow them to understand to know touch and feel sensation and kind of map that back into their brain but PFOs are used also in energy harvesting one of the coolest ideas that a friend of mine had kind of brainstormed a long time ago early on in grad school was this kind of a walkway you know where a bunch of people in a crowded city street could walk across this sidewalk which was just filled with these giant piezoelectric tiles and then you would essentially be able to power the lights you know and anything else around it well they've actually done that and I can't remember where in the world they've done that but I've read an article this past year where it's been done so I like the idea of miniaturizing and making it for implantable systems that could power themselves as biological sensors or dose regulators so the nature of piezoelectrics also just sounds interdisciplinary because you have synthetic chemistry just like the synthesis of it you also have this kind of like the specific standpoint of kind of like finding the optimal like molecule arrangement that would give you the most electrical output and then you also seem to have kind of like kind of like this engineering standpoint how much electricity can you actually get out of this kind of thing so just the nature of the project already sounds like you need like a variety of students and their expertise. The nature usually is to go from the beginning to the end and one thing that's unique about what we're trying to do is that we're trying to approach the chemistries of flexible piezo. The field is quite advanced when it comes to the inorganic ceramic based piezoelectrics that we use everywhere in normal technology but the flexible systems always just pale in comparison to their performance and a lot of strategies that are I guess geared towards improving piezoelectric response of polymer based systems focus more on repackaging techniques you know how can we take this existing polymer and spin coat it or electro spin it or pull it to allow the bonds to rotate such that you have increased dipole moments along each of those but at the end of the day it's kind of like throwing spaghetti at a wall and looking at the orientation of the polymers and saying yeah I think these are more aligned and there are good strategies there are synthetic strategies where they've completely changed up the chemistry and use different polymers you know some that use gelatin or silk nylon a lot of biodegradable or biocompatible systems but those usually have far worse piezoelectric properties than fluorinated polyfluorinated polymers so again we're kind of at the stage where it's reproducibility scalability and you know synthetic difficulty can get in the way of making these robust systems that can compete with these ceramics right and the question is well why do we care to compete with ceramics well the answer is that they are made of many of them are made of toxic materials they're pretty brittle and rigid so they may not be pretty good for implantable technologies where you need flexibility bendability or biocompatibility and so that's kind of where the interdisciplinary nature comes into it so that full circle right to your question was yes it does need to be highly interdisciplinary when you approach it from a polymer standpoint because now we're going to completely not just redefine what chemistry we use but their architecture their organization such that we can have molecular alignment at hopefully the angstrom level scale that you see with the inorganics that completely outcompete those polymer systems so you have to know polymer chemistry obviously synthesis of the starting macromonomers or the individual molecules that you're using you need to use engineering for device fabrication and any kind of data acquisition you need to use material chemistry to understand the properties of it and then you know physics you can use physics for modeling the behavior of these piezoelectric so that we can actually predict what types of architectures structures that we can predict that we can design that would enhance these piezoelectric properties so what what got you into this field of research originally was it an undergrad thing something you found in grad school just sort of ideas you got like bouncing off from talking with friends or like how did you kind of get into this the piezoelectric project or most of my work in general most of your work is just generally your work yeah I I see my first I see myself as a person you know chasing after that shiny red ball I I love seeing something that's new and interesting and difficult for me to understand in the beginning you know a little overwhelming and I hate not understanding why something works so then I'll kind of pursue it and I'll try to tackle it from a new angle that hasn't been addressed to solve problems that are still persistent but I mean how did I and if you do you want me to explain kind of how I got there when it came to starting with undergrad research well I mean what we studied in grad school is very different than what you study now correct yes and what I did in my postdoc and what I did in my undergrad right why did I do that I kept getting excited about new endeavors that I had no idea of and I treat a lot of it as a continuing education the more I learned on different topics the more I felt that I could communicate within different fields you obviously run the risk of limiting how much of an expert you can be in one field but you expand your horizons and your ability to conceptualize solutions and so each time I went to a different stage in my life or my education I focused on something you know wildly different with the expectations that I would incorporate that into my future or what is now my current lab so I you know incorporate some modeling but a lot of polymer chemistry device flexible device design into what we're trying to achieve here so circling back like what did you study in grad school in your postdoc and even in your undergrad and how is it trying to like start something new every single time starting fresh I'll start with the starting something fresh there's a feeling every time I start something fresh and commit to it that or I have this thought of oh god what did I do why did I do this again this is terrible why can't I just kind of coast or enjoy my existing level of expertise and knowledge and you know improve upon that why can't I just become really really good at this and have it be easy to print out papers why did I have to go into something entirely different and I feel like I could have gone I could have gone either way but I just I took on a harder challenge in my opinion I took on a challenge that I knew I'd never get bored of but it's overwhelming sometimes it's overwhelming because you're essentially starting over a PhD every time you switch fields and you have to be the one to understand it you have to be you have to read literature from an entirely different field of experts so you have to know who they are what their labs do you have to understand where the state of the research is and that's just starting over your PhD again and then doing entirely different either fabrication or synthetic you know needing a whole new set of skills that your last set of skills may not have helped you with so that is stressful and overwhelming because you only have a limited amount of time really to learn it all and then apply it and then not just apply it but show the world that you've done something worthwhile now if we go back in undergrad I got involved in I was at Virginia Tech and I got involved in a project that was purely computational modeling so I built this genetic algorithm to study stochastic chaos and it was all in computers so for those of us in the room we don't know what stochastic chaos is. So chaos can be described mathematically and I would butcher it if I were trying to describe it in absolutely proper terms right now but for the for the listeners right now I would say that it's essentially the ability to follow a trajectory you know that may be part at least in deterministic chaos you can follow some form of trajectory in phase space or sorry and you know however many dimensions that are set up and it's usually part of an attractor in that it kind of circles around the similar you know similar values I guess if you if you change some of your variables and then over time though never and never completely reproduces itself you know that you're not going to have a periodic orbit or anything like that you'll essentially be cycling around a similar trajectory over you know as time proceeds indefinitely but you'll be infinitesimally further apart from where you are or you could achieve infinitesimally with close agreement or repeatability in the exact value you achieve but it's never the same and so that's kind of where you see chaos and I could tell you about fighting around trees and period doubling but stochastic chaos is now how does this semi repeatability yet never achieving the same thing again hold up to noise in the system you know random variability or how do you challenge it if you input noise system and how stable is it to it and so that was this whole genetic algorithm calculating the off and off exponents with a very very simple mathematical model for chaos this autocatalytic which has just three major variables and you use nonlinear dynamics to model it and then seeing where what variables for these equations so this nonlinear equation set of equations actually causes the highest robustness to noise in the system and it was pretty much a model of a biological cell and protein expression or gene expression but at the end of the day this was all on a computer so I learned coding I you know I learned I used my basic understanding of biology but it was a lot more mathematical and even though I was only a math major I was just really excited about I thought it was just really cool I went to grad school and I actually intended to continue doing computational modeling of computational biology but ultimately that didn't work out the advisor that had wanted to join actually ended up leaving and they were the only one really there on campus at UCSD that I had really explored it and wanted to join labs but then I just thought well let's see what else is there and like a kid with a shiny red ball I you know chasing after it I found this lab involved with polymers and you know making these crazy nanoparticle systems that could change shape and response to disease was really interesting right they would essentially flocculate together as these aggregate scaffolds and you know at sites of cancer and my advisor who I was rotating with at the time had pitched this idea well what if we can do this with heart attack models so I have a system that scaffolds that accumulate at the site of heart attack and then potentially slowly elute therapeutic drugs afterwards but if it's challenging right then I had to go into a lab that was synthetic I had to understand polymers I had to do tissue engineering I ultimately when I you know completely committed to it I was doing animal studies as well peptide synthesis modeling of peptide sequences that would initiate really good hydrogelation doing a lot of material characterization and mechanical analysis all that together you know in in a very you know condensed PhD was difficult to do right and you know yeah so then then my post but then I really wanted to learn about electronics partway through my PhD and I told myself I wanted to learn from John Rutter's group who you know does amazing amazing work with flexible devices and so I joined his lab right after pretty much the day after I finished my PhD work and I went into his lab and just started an entirely different project that was all mostly making electronic thermal devices and sensing blood flow changes in response to these so when you say that you were chasing the shiny red ball did you do you think that you kind of like got through the red ball in each one of these scenarios I did I did I did what I wanted to do I wanted to do some computational modeling I wanted to do polymer chemistry and tissue engineering and then ultimately I wanted to learn just enough about circuits electronics and devices more importantly devices for translation aspects because a lot of really nice chemistries may not be reproducible or scalable or in general just translatable to to technology and biomedicine and you know these fields of implantable flexible devices with these biocompatible encapsulants like PDHF using electronics that flexible electronics that are embedded those end up being having a lower barrier in my opinion to translation so if you can incorporate both of them you could have this beautiful marriage so what degree would you say you're like emotional connection with the subjects affects like your desire to work on them so I know obviously with something like biomedical devices right it's in theory you know you were like had some sort of emotional connection to that it would probably make you want to do it even more that's a huge part of it having believing in your work and continuing with it is what motivates you I don't think I've ever lost interest in what I was doing that's kind of not why I've chased the shiny red ball right I just wanted to add that to the list of to-do tasks and now I think I'm pretty done chasing the shiny red ball of major areas to explore and you know and exercise my interest in myself right now I'll let my love explore itself but I think now we have to reign in the expertise to the knowledge and circle around these subfields I but yeah no never never got bored of what I was doing and I feel like I could have always kept expanding and I never felt limited I just think I worried that I would feel limited when I was in a faculty position where I could no longer devote significant amounts of time just in the lab to exploring you know new chemistries new engineering techniques to see if I could do it right it's very different experience knowing how to do it in the lab versus having other people do it for you and I really wanted to make sure that by the time I got a job I was well enough first to be able to help my students and my postdocs out. I think it's an interesting thing to bring up especially considering the I would call a rather unique you know personnel list for your lab and by that I mean the extremely high concentration of undergraduate students. How many undergrads are in your lab currently? It could be about 15 right now. We had about five graduate recently but we were I think at max we were about 20. Yeah is there is there some sort of specific reason that you wanted to have a lab like that? Did it just sort of happen? How did that kind of come about? I think it was mostly strategic and unplanned. My goal is to have undergraduates always. I think undergraduates are very valuable and I think it's very valuable for undergraduates to have research experience before they go into grad school or into the job market because your lab classes can only teach you so much and you've already got your other classes that you're so focused on that you treat these lab classes unintentionally treat them like just another thing to figure out how to get an A with and not really absorb the material and that happened with me as well. When you go into research where you don't know the answer and you don't know if there's an you know an appropriate answer you have to approach the problem from many different angles and you have to think independently on how to solve a problem and that's a whole other ballpark than what you're generally taught in the classes even if there are some really nice classes that teach you about research just getting into the research is important. So I've always wanted undergraduates. I think I always wanted about five. Five at any one point, right? And I would take a nice disperse array, right? Some that want to be really good at one instrument technique and the super user the super runner of certain experiments that may be useful for industry. Others who want to do research and team up either in groups of two to three with undergraduates on a project or with senior grad students. The reason why I ended up with so many though is because of the unique situation. I was trying to build a lab rapidly and to do that with new graduate students and but then you end up having to spend a whole year building a lab and that's a year of their PhD and there's only a limited number of grad students I could pay for you know or bring in at once such that you know I give them a meaningful work. For an undergrad it's very useful to set up a lab and see how it works for you know say one quarter before they even start research. So I started I started bringing in tons of undergrads and they got to learn the ropes, they got to learn how to you know fix an instrument that we would inherit or set up a safety section or inventory chemicals that we've inherited or order new equipment and understand why you know it's useful and then do preliminary reactions you know start synthesizing some of our small monomers. They're tangible projects that are really useful to the undergrads but may not be extremely useful for a sole focus of grad students. So I brought in a lot to get the lab going quickly and I also wanted to build in a really nice social you know environment you know a positive learning environment which wasn't this quiet high-intensity and miserable experience of a lab where there's fewer people to brainstorm or bounce ideas off each other. So undergraduates were a very nice way to go to lab quickly and now what I'm working on is you know once I've mentored them all individually I'm not taking new undergraduates and I'm graduating them you know and as you two are already involved you've been involved for a while on different projects and you've already published one and co-authored and then you guys are working on that next paper for your subgroup. But as we continue I want to narrow it down to five undergrads so I can continue mentoring but I can also have now my upcoming rising graduate students who are getting more experience be able to take over mentorship skills. So you know when you when you have all these undergrads usually when like a grad student comes into a lab they kind of have this research experience under their belts maybe from their undergrad like a year or two. What's it like mentoring a bunch of like little kiddos that don't know like shit from Shino Lab? You know what's funny is I think the pandemic pretty much made it such that many of the graduate students are coming in are also in the same boat as the undergraduate self. I mean many of them may have had a technical understanding of how to do research. The ones who ended up doing the most research probably did modeling experiments or things that you could do on a computer. Some did isolated experiments but it was not the way that I remember a lab being run. Which involves just being in the lab trying things all day long reading papers and just getting your experiments set up the night before and running them first thing in the morning. So you know you say coming a new undergrads coming in with no experience. Sometimes I see that with grad students and you know it's an interesting experience for me. I've definitely mentored undergraduates. I've mentored high school students and graduate students throughout my education. So I think just starting people off with the basics is useful. Obviously I can't spend every waking second mentoring my students and that's where you know I closely mentored my first subset with the expectation that they can help build SLTs make instructional videos to help out upcoming students with things that do not require me physically being present to say you know how do you run a rotofab. You know when it's something that you can easily just look at the video and follow along. Such that by the time they come to me I could help them out with more advanced techniques. It's definitely it's been really fun. It's a lot of it's a lot of time and investment though you know bringing in students you don't know don't know enough and I'm hoping it'll be a little bit easier as we continue on. Especially with the existing expertise that's built in the lab these students who are more senior can now help train the students who are more junior. Yeah I mean we I mean I know me and Ben are for sure grateful for the opportunity but can you talk more about what it was like kind of starting a lab because you just finished your first year at UCSB. So like what was it like starting a lab? What was your first year like and like what do you think you learned the most from the experience of being a professor for a year? Okay so I say I started with a lab that I inherited quite a bit of material supplies, equipment. We'll definitely put up some pictures for future Ben editing this. I know exactly where the photos are. So I mean this is a lab that you know is world famous, has produced an insurmountable amount of work and has just you know been a powerhouse and it's really an honor to take over you know a lot of the space and a lot of the instrumentation that you know and continue work using what they have built. You know it comes with its own caveats right? Much of the equipment was in states of disrepair and a lot of the chemicals were either expired or in bottles that would just disintegrate in your hands. You know having to go through such a large inventory was one of the motivations for bringing in new students. Obviously once I was able to identify and remove any excessive hazards it's just you know comes to the territory of inheriting so much. I could have not inherited anything and then had to pay for all that with my startup and that would have just drained my startup. So I would say I'm pretty lucky in that aspect that I had you know senior faculty members pass down a lot of what they had and then but you know a lot of work. A ton of work right? Every day you come in and you think which thing do I have to do first? What would be best? Okay I've got to develop a lesson plan for the classes I'm teaching right? Especially if it's a new course I'm designing I have to figure out how to teach a course. How to you know put together a syllabus and design each module. Make sure I have the right number of assessments planned out. Then you know how do I do preliminary experiments that I can teach my students or that can test or at least begin to test some of my hypotheses of the project I did propose to do. How do I get involved with a lot of the outreach and service and departmental administration work that is just required of new faculty. Learning the ropes. Learning where do you get resources? Who has shared facilities? Who are the people to contact? You know do I get trained or can I get other people trained? Accessing, purchasing you know going through the purchasing portals and start buying equipment and materials and making sure that I'm not going to completely spend through my entire budget. And then you know thinking about grants to start raising funds right? So that I don't have to continue to tap into my start-up funding. Which is arguably some of the most flexible funding I will ever get. So I just want to raise money and then I also want to recruit new students and mentor them and reassure them that I can provide a good you know PhD for them. And a good learning experience as well as a huge number of skills that they can take into the job market. Whether or not they go into academia, industry, nonprofit, government, law, anything like that. And getting involved with service and outreach. So juggling all those things together with a lab that is completely non-functional and students who look to you for answers to big and small questions. And that's completely destroying your ability to organize your day. So I feel like it was just putting out fires of the most pressing manner. But obviously starting the research up was the most important right? Once I was able to get that to be somewhat self-sustained, I was able to focus on other aspects of the job. But yeah it was just it was chaos and it still kind of is. That being said I think that's why I love it. I love chasing the shiny red ball of some new tasks to do that I haven't done before that I intend to get really good at. And really efficient at. And that's the reason why I'm in academia over other fields. Because I just I love variety. I love the ability to control you know what how I direct my day-to-day activities. And to keep it interesting fresh because otherwise you're spending 50% of every single day for the rest of your life essentially doing some repetitive tasks for other people guided by money maybe. Did you ever find it difficult like forcing yourself to take the hands off? Oh yeah. I've been a control freak in the past. Yeah giving handing the reins over was definitely difficult. And it's not it's one of the things I anticipated but hadn't quite experienced enough to fully you know know it. You know and I knew right I would just have to let it happen. I would have to trust that my students would learn the way that I learned. Rather than hover over each one and you know critique every little thing in the in the moment and spend so much time critiquing them. And rather waiting until we had our meetings or until I kind of came in to do rapid critiquing. But directing them elsewhere and saying okay you can learn that from this person. You can learn that from this web resource. You need to just look into that. And then come to me with proposed solutions. You know read the current literature. Eventually once I felt confident that my students could do that background research I felt that it was okay to give them a little bit more control of their project. And it helps having them in groups. Right? And bringing in senior experts such as postdocs and collaborators. I mean yeah back to the critiquing thing. I think one thing that whenever we get a presentation in the group one thing that we're always we always start shaking in our boots to hear is can you go back to that slide really quickly and then we all. What did I forget to add? It's an interesting balancing game. Right? Because of course I want to nitpick everything and I want you to change all the things that you've done wrong or that I want different which may just be very subjective. I want you to you know get better and better. But at what point am I just going to overwhelm you with you know critique and criticism that you won't be able to improve. So I think I increasingly criticize my more senior students and as I go on I expect any of the small changes that I suggested to always be implemented. Right. And then I give you more challenging changes to implement and I expect more and more out of you. And balancing that you know versus having students burn out too quickly is definitely a concern. Right? I want to always push them to be the best they can but I also don't want them to just burn out and say no I don't need this I'm gone and then they miss out on really becoming a stellar scientist later on. And that's very it's very individualized. I have to individualize my mentorship to each student based on how they respond. You know because no one has the same background and each person has their own limit. I mean I think we've asked you well I've asked you this before when you were slightly more indisposed as a trivia night. But I want to ask you again that's for the listener. We kind of wanted to ask you I mean you talk about pushing your students. What do you really want your students to get the most out of you at the research experience? When they come you want a student to come to the Carlinian group maybe when they're green and then when they leave like what do you want them to have with them when they go on to their next part of their lives? I like the ability of them having a set number of skills that they can say yeah I'm really good at these three techniques but to be honest the best thing is to learn how to tackle the unknown. If a student can work independently or independently address an unknown question you know that may take a solution of you know five different you know five different things that all converge together. I want them to be able to just be addressed with a complex question and then say okay I don't know how to do it but I'm going to try to figure it out. Here are the initial clues and here are the experts I can look to. You know okay I'll go do the background research and now that I know how to read a paper and then I will you know contact these people or you know either on campus off campus and get information or at least you know I can work with my PI to direct it. So how can you direct your research ultimately? You know and obviously you have mentors who work with you but I shouldn't just be your teacher that spoon feeds you everything. Yeah. And when you leave this you know when you leave the academic environment it's expected that you are an independent individual who can do all the same things and if you can't you will know how to address it and how to approach it. So it's this independence to work and address an unknown problem without fear or stalling and expecting the rest of the world to help you out. Right. That's the most important. So since we're on the subject of undergrads I want to talk a little bit more about your own personal undergraduate experience. We understand that you triple majored in chem, biochem and bio and you had a minor in math. Are you a masochist? Do you like pain? What was sort of the motivator behind spreading yourself amongst all these different kind of sort of related but ultimately pretty disparate topics? Yeah you'd be shocked how much extra you know coursework you need or wildly different coursework there is when you compare say biochemistry versus biology versus a chemistry degree. Right. You know in say one university versus another and at Virginia Tech you know each of those had a wide array of classes and I was just really excited about learning. Right. I thought I've got only four years to take these courses because I couldn't pay for more and I had to pay for my college. I had to pay for my college with a lot of scholarships and of course a few loans as possible and so I was you know having having to direct that and not having something else give you the money for the education is a big motivator for make getting your money's worth. Right. And I didn't want to coast. I was you know I went to college right at the beginning of a recession and people were losing their jobs, getting laid off. They had all done the right thing. Right. They went to college, they got their degrees and they went into industry and they did their work, they put in their time, they learned and you know output the right amount of data and at the end of the day it wasn't enough. Right. And they were shocked. The people who were kept were the people who've gone above and beyond, who diversified themselves also and put themselves in positions of leadership or in indispensable positions where they couldn't be replaced and so I was motivated to be that person that would never lose their job because it was a very scary concept. Yeah. To you know to push yourself and do everything right in society and still have everything taken away and just be punished because politics or you know other people you know in finance made you know very selfish or you know completely risky decisions and so I just didn't want to be controlled by that. I definitely determined I wanted to be a professor probably graduating high school, definitely going to research and I just worked towards that. If I wanted to be the best, I wanted to get the best grades, I wanted to you know be the president of however many different organizations so that I could exercise leadership because I hated public speaking, I hated being in the spotlight and so I figured I had to force myself to do things that I hated in order to either start enjoying or get past. Here we are putting you in public speaking and the spotlight right now. At least I'm not doing the camera, right? Yeah. So yes, it seems like you just have instead of being a masochist as Ben said, that you just kind of just you have that go-getter like do anything by any means necessary kind of attitude going to any of your projects. But yeah, my dad would always say growing up you can do anything you put your mind to you know and as long as you keep using your mind you'll have more power than you know then you know what to do with and so you'll have freedom to control your life if you keep using your mind. Yeah, that's really powerful. I think that's something related to something you once said to me one time where you said if you're going to take a risk be ready to work twice as hard to make it happen. That was pretty good. But you know kind of transitioning like what with all of that to do maybe as an undergrad, as a grad student, you kind of worked super hard like what would an average like weekend for you look like? Or just any time away from everything. From being busy. Back when I was in school or now? In undergrad. Okay. It changes. It changes. I mean I can't maintain that indefinitely. I mean life changes, personal life, you know the affected family life, everything. So you know I had a lot of anxiety so I had periods, I have periods of extreme productivity and periods of very low productivity for my own sake. And you know instead of being frustrated with it and letting it take me down I now kind of reorganize my schedule such that I can set easy tasks to motivate me on days when I'm really messed, you know really really low energy whereas you know high energy days I have no problems with it. I always make sure though I don't regret you know wasting so much time because I would spend you know 72 hours in a math emporium or in a library you know just with changes of clothes and my backpack and you know maybe some face wash and deodorant you know to kind of have a semblance of a miniature bath without having to go home when I needed to crank out a lot. But when I had better schedules, which I'm now much better at, I make sure to do at least one day of really fun you know stuff or just to be lazy and you know watch TV or you know maybe I'll paint a picture or I'll go out on a hike or you know just try something brand new maybe some social event. But in college it was I don't think I I don't think I had mastered that. I had a weird series of schedules that was just entirely defined around homework deadlines, exam deadlines, and you know anything related to the outreach that I did. So I would say I mostly just worked. Mostly worked and studied. I had this futon that I spent most of my time on and I just I had a semicircle of textbooks that have opened around me and I would just work on each assignment or each whatever in each class and keep going and just keep turning you know the circle. And but when I did when I did enjoy myself I would make sure that it kind of multitasked in the way that you know if I wanted to go on a big hike, I was chemistry present, I would you know organize the chemistry hike. And so we'd have to go out with a bunch of our friends and just you know enjoy hiking down the Appalachian Mountain. Or you know if I really wanted to go to do something social right I would try to get myself to a conference. I would apply for a travel award, go to a conference, talk to people about my work, learn about their work, but also just enjoy. It was good to explore a new area, get on a plane somewhere. Yeah, I mean of course partying. I mean work hard, play hard. I definitely blew off a lot of steam whenever I needed to. Yeah, that's good. Would you say you've had a harder time mastering having fun than you have mastering any other like real disciplines? No, not really. I'm pretty good at entertaining myself. You know, growing up I lived in a very wooded area that was surrounded by nature, but not by a lot of other people. So I didn't really hang out with a lot of people. And some people would just consider that boring and be miserable. I loved, I loved whatever I set my mind to. So I would go wander the woods, pick blackberries or raise insects in these terrariums and watch you know how they underwent metamorphosis. And then I picked up painting or I would tinker with things that I'd find in the garage. I'm very self-sufficient and so I've never had a problem having fun. And you know, I'll go do something random that I've never done before and that's just fun for me. So I don't think I've ever had that problem. I think that people who feel they don't are, they expect. I think they expect a certain level of fun or whatever to feel, you know, happy or they feel like they've reset and recharged themselves. They need some threshold that needs to be surpassed. Yeah, maybe they have to go out and hang out with friends at a bar and they can't have fun unless they do that. But you know, I can do that and enjoy it, but I don't have to do that every time whenever I'm feeling like I've neglected my personal fun. So I really just enjoy exploring anything as a new task, even if it's just building something new. I love what you said about the bugs in the jar. That's like a classic like, you know, ask any like Nobel laureate how they got into science and it's like, oh, I looked at bugs in my yard or I looked at flowers and I feel like it's always how it starts. Don't compare me to a Nobel laureate. You get the idea. They say on the website, and it's funny that I've never noticed this before, that there's a quote at the bottom of your like personal page that says nature is your endless inspiration, which I think is really powerful. Can you speak a little bit more on that? Like what do you mean by that exactly? I mean, I obviously believe in evolution and natural selection and I mean, I read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and I think that that has a profound impact on how I see the world. And I think that no matter how amazing the new chemistries and new knowledge we learn from mimicking nature at the end of the day, we're mimicking nature because it has produced so much that's so complex. I mean, a lot of biodiversity with regards to plants, various living organisms, how do plate tectonics, you know, work in forming new mountain ranges and, you know, how we view what the fossil record is because maybe a lot of the oldest fossils just kind of been buried now under the sea. But I've just been excited about the unknown and just at this point we can't, we cannot do enough to even compare to the complexity and power that nature has just because we don't know enough yet, right? We may surpass nature's ability to increase complexity but until then that, you know, that's tangible. It's something I can collect immediately or I can observe immediately because it's all around me. Usually when I'm walking around just looking up at trees, you know, and the sky beyond it or looking down at, you know, an individual fern leaf, looking at how many variegation, you know, there are in the leaves and then asking myself why was that selected for in this environment? Yeah. Or why did that not get selected against? And, you know, or I look at ginkgo leaves and I think, you know, this is one of the few living organisms that came back after the bombing of Hiroshima and so, you know, the atomic bomb sets off and there's radiation poisoning everywhere and yet this organism can withstand radiation poisoning and it's genetically been conserved for hundreds of millions of years, right? We see ginkgo leaves in, you know, in the fossil record, you know, hundreds of millions of years old just unaltered because obviously it's been able to survive, you know, all over the planet, different climates, different times and just still has not been wiped out. So how do you create something so robust? I think my personal favorite example of that, of like natural selection, what you were talking about where you look at these things and you think, you know, why was that selected for? Why is that the thing that ultimately defined this species is the quaking aspens where their root structures are all connected. Oh yeah. So instead of being like one singular tree, it'll be a whole, a whole field of them will be one singular organism to the point where if you shake one tree, it'll, the vibration will follow the root structure to, not just, well maybe not to all the other trees, but other trees in this grove will shake in response to you shaking the one that you're like touching. And it's like some nice field of network. Exactly, yeah. In Last of Us, right? The, you know, the zombie show that just came out, that's based on the video game. Oh, I haven't, I haven't watched that. That's really funny that you said my favorite network and you didn't say that, and you didn't think about the zombie movie. It's all this like interconnected sort of like network. It's like a hive mind, basically. Yeah, I thought the aspens considered the oldest, technically the oldest living trees because the root systems connected. Yeah, yeah. They also produce the heaviest and largest singular organisms on the planet. It'll be these whole groves of trees. Yeah, yeah. It'll be one singular organism. Yeah. Billions and billions of pounds of just like root. Just root. Well, yeah, mycelial network, that was just like, I think we think about that from fungi actually. Yeah. Yeah, so it's different than plants, but yeah. Sorry, no, I haven't watched the TV show, but we know about mycelial networks through biology. So you, you've taught a class on synthesis of biomolecules, right? Synthesis of biological molecules. So those are molecules that are found in nature that you are synthesizing in the lab or modifying in the lab. Yeah, specifically polymers, you know, biopolymers like DNA, RNA, polysaccharides, peptides, proteins. What nature produces in the aspect of, in, you know, with multiple repeats of kind of, you know, building blocks. So kind of clipped together like those. Because those polymers are, have way more complex behavior than small molecules in most cases. And that's kind of why DNA is part of our genetic encoding. So we'd like to start a segment we like to call Blue Book. We have one of your old test questions here, and we'd like to ask you this test question and see if you can get it right. Probably won't. This is great content. Brandon Green got it wrong when we asked him one of his old test questions. So the question is, define the key differences between the grafting to, grafting from, and grafting through strategies. When you say, you ask for three to five sentences, but we're not going to make you say three to five sentences here. We're a little bit easier graders than you are. Okay. For one point. For one point, yeah. Okay, grafting to, you can essentially have a pre-made polymer and you can conjugate that to either another polymer or surface. Grafting from could mean that you're polymerizing off of a substrate or off of another polymer. And then grafting through may actually mean creating a macromonomer and polymerizing any number of small monomers and as well as large macromonomers, which may in themselves be a polymer, but with a reactive head group and a warhead that you can polymerize. And all of these are advantageous for creating complex polymer architectures, but some of them, you may need different strategies depending on the conditions, right? And if you have a protein you want to polymerize or add a polymer to, you really don't want to subject that protein, which can misfold to really tough synthetic environment, which, so you may actually want to use kind of quick chemistry to append a new polymer to it, or maybe it's sterically hindered so you can't do that. Then you may actually have to polymerize off of it using a polymerization strategy in water that doesn't promote degradation. So, long-winded answer. Well, you got it right. You got a point. Point me, green zero. So, for extra credit, you were a math minor in your undergraduate, correct? Yes. So, we have an integral for you to solve. Oh, this is rigging me. Okay. Remember, it's like over 10 years since I've had to use any... Oh, you can use the back of my question paper, a scratch paper. It's the integral of x times sine x. Here, you can use this scratch paper. Oh, that's so easy back in the day. And remember, this is an audio podcast. Yeah, thank you. No, I can't remember. I feel like it would have been cosine x plus something or whatever. Plus c. Oh, plus c. Yeah, constant. But I, no, I would just tell you right now, I have to look back at my cheat sheet to use integrals. And that's kind of something that I have to do soon. It's weird. My dad explained this to me. He said, some things that you learn, you'll never forget. But other things, you have to continuously practice it or else you lose it. And he said, math was the number one thing that you'll just completely forget. You can get back to it, but you need practice. And even when it comes to skills, I've painted and played the violin for long periods of time. And painting, I could pick that up 10 years without even trying and be pretty good at it. Playing the violin, I'm absolute garbage at now. I was never absolutely amazing, but I got fairly good with regards to my level of expectation. And now, I'm happy to do some scales and redo some of it in middle school. That was a cat walking by. Yeah, Tara loves doing things like that. The podcast. Just kidding. Just kidding. We'll post pictures of Tara now. She's adorable. For anybody listening at home, yes, you do not need to know the integral of x sine x to be a professor. Remind me the answer? Negative x cosine x plus sine x plus c. You have to integrate by parts, and then you'll get the answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I'm remembering that. Nope, I wouldn't have gotten that. Okay, good thing that was an answer to your question. Extremely loud, incorrect buzzer added here. I like that you brought up constantly having to relearn things. Like you do it, and you kind of get it in your head, and then it goes away. I feel like as somebody studying chemistry, or just studying science in general, there are so many things obviously that come up repeatedly in different classes, different concepts, and I always feel like every time I start a new class, even if I was just in it the quarter before, I have to go back again. And I feel like that's always, to a certain degree, can be kind of dissatisfying. Like, I learned this. Why won't it just stay? Why can't it just stay in my head? I know I can't be the only one that feels that way. So I appreciate that you have the same sort of sentiment. For me at least, this is gonna sound stupid, for some reason in my head I can never pin down acid-base chemistry in my head for more than like five seconds. I'll know it, and then it'll just go away. I tried every trick in the book, every acronym, and this and that, and like stupid learning trick that they tell you, and it will not stay in my brain for more than like 30 seconds. Yeah, sometimes it's about the way you learned it. If you're a visual learner like me, you have to see it. If you conceptualize it, maybe that was the best way to go. Other times it's hard to do it without an example, right? You try and cure memorization without applying it, so you can't understand the moving parts. Right. So if you end up doing research in it for a while, it actually helps you remember it, and not just remember it, but understand it. Because you talk so much in your class, it's just a brute memorize everything. Yeah, definitely. And maybe if you change one number, you still plug it into that equation you have on your cheat sheet, but you don't understand how the equation was made. And that could go back to just reading that section in the textbook that most people skip, you know, where they talk about the sciences, tinkering around in their own room, you know, trying to understand, okay, why does gas expand if you heat it? You know, is the portion saying, what is the major question? And then how do they derive the equation? And if you can't derive an equation, you're just focusing purely on memorization. It's not going to serve you very well. So it's definitely annoying that you've forgotten the things you learn, and then you have to continue applying the things you've forgotten to your future. And that's kind of where you have to just build in really good notes that is that you just review quickly over and over again with repetition and with use. You know, if you know something, you're just going to forget, you know, go with it. I mean, now once you leave academia, right, you're not going to actually have everything memorized. If you want a refresher to use something that you haven't used in five years, you can go to the internet, quickly look it up, and then be like, okay, now I remember that. Okay. And then it helps you with your ongoing problem. But what you learned was what was the technique, or what was the equation, or what class you even learned it in to address that problem. And that's, in my opinion, a little more important than being able to derive the base equation. Very important. Yeah. So you're a Henderson-Hawthorne blacksmith. Yeah, she is. Some of us have great memories. Some of us have terrible memories. So just find whatever works for you. You'll find something that works best for you that won't work well for another person. I find that's one of the reasons why I really like chemistry, specifically more than biology, at least from like an undergrad learning perspective, is that I feel like so much of biology is just like flashcards. Question, answer, question, answer, question, answer, and it's so hard to feel that there's some sort of connection between them. And that's why I like chemistry, is that at the end of the day, even if what you're looking at feels wildly complicated, it ultimately falls back to these just super common sense principles, at least common sense once you've sort of seen them in action, that you can always go back and then build forward to. Whereas with biology, or history, or any other sort of thing like that, it's like you either know it or you just don't. You know what I mean? There's no like fundamental theories of basic science you can fall back to to remember like what year something happened. You know what I mean? Well, you can use tricks, right? If you know, you know, if you're trying to figure out what year some small war occurred, but you know what the outfits look like, or if you know what weaponry they used, you could say, okay, they stopped using it to yourself like, oh, actually, I do know what, you know, what era they stopped using these instruments, or, you know, or food, there was a fight over a certain territory, right? You may say, okay, was that a territory? Was that a state? Was that a country at the time? Was it, you know, was the state ratified then? We're talking about American history. Yeah, and then you can kind of distill back, you know, say, oh, okay, well, they used muskets. So clearly well before World War One, maybe Civil War era or anywhere in this range. Or, you know, if you say, okay, first machine guns, you're like, oh, okay, that's definitely World War One. You and weapons. I'm interested in technology. And I would say World War One was my favorite era, just because so... World War One was your favorite era? Favorite era to study because so much technology came out at that time that was wildly innovative. Even if it's just an absolutely, you know, horrible, you know, time in our past. What you learn from it was interesting, right? You learn to camp, and this is all defense, and I'm not necessarily a big proponent of, you know, of military and defense efforts, you know, ongoing, but it's interesting to see that huge boost in technology came about in times of crisis. Yeah, especially like biochemically at that time. Yeah, and that's not necessarily limited to war, right? It's just, it defined an era where we kind of went to research and development, and that could have also stemmed from an agricultural revolution or an industrial revolution, where it's completely marred by terrible outcomes in this management, but you still can't discount the fact that a lot of progress was made in human development. And, you know, I think about how often society has just developed and then completely forgotten everything, you know, through the fall of, you know, a fall of an empire, potentially in the past, and that we've had to relearn everything ourselves and say that it was first discovered, you know, at this point, because we've lost everything in history, and we kind of just retake credit for probably many things that were partially or potentially well understood in the past. And those could be select examples, but yeah, I'm interested in major pushes, you know, in the world, where it was needed to adapt. Yeah, you talked about how, like, in times of crisis and in times of kind of uncertainty, science has really developed, so can I have a stupid question prepared for you? Nothing stupid, I'm not stupid, right? Yeah, I mean, we'll see after we have three questions. So, going based off, you know, science kind of developed at this time of uncertainty, if one of your students came to you and said they had superpowers, how would you use your biomedical research knowledge to kind of assess them, test them, and would you publish? If a student came to me and said that they have superpowers, I would drop everything, maybe get a coffee, and then just sit them down and ask them, what are your superpowers? Can you please demonstrate them for me, you know, and convince me, because I would love to see a student fly or, you know, teleport or whatever, or if they're going to show me an interesting little magic trick, but that would be fun. Maybe I would record it, if they were okay with that. I would be humored, mostly, and I would, you know, okay, so I would, you know, follow my pride if I was wrong. Would you be? But I mean, how, why would I publish on something, you know, like, unless it's a real superpower, I'm just, I mean, what superpower are we envisioning, because I feel like you'd jump the gun there, you know, oh, well, I make so many news announcements, and I put my students to the test, I mean, chances are, if anything got out, it would be way out of my hands by then. It's a meal can fly, that's what it is. Yeah, a meal can fly. A meal can now fly. Would you make them a super suit? I could. I mean, are you thinking about these shows where there's this one person who can develop the cure, the vaccine, in an hour, and they say, oh, I can't do it, you know, I need at least, like, 100 people to help me in three months, and then someone else just says, well, it's just you, get it done in two hours, and somehow at the end of the episode, they get it done, and that's what society views science as, you know, and they'll just say, but this person's a genius. No. No. No. I couldn't even begin to address that, you know, and how would I even take credit for someone else's powers, you know? It would just be out of my hands. There would be some large organization, government organization, whatever that takes over. So you're not Tony Stark? Yeah, no. No. No one is Tony Stark, and if anyone's really Tony Stark, it's definitely not the people we hear about. Yeah, that's true. It's their scientists that, you know, that work in the dark, and it's teams of people. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, how, I mean, it's super collaborative, everything that everybody does, like even most of your papers, you collaborate, you ask professors from different departments, their expertise. Yeah, and I ask for help. We do a lot of background research, but I mean, if there's someone like that, I think society would get together, and there would be a big push for technology and innovation, and fortunately, though, there'd probably be more politics involved, because money is more interesting to people than science and technology, which people just expect. They expect to, you know, to have come out with a perfect vaccine. They expect, you know, every development to have cured cancer, and then get angry when it wasn't perfect, right? Even though the ones that, the people that have really done the best with their research, were probably just beat chronologically, you know, when it comes to this new and exciting drug or treatment, because we give all of our excitement to the person that promises, you know, anything, even if they have nothing to show for it, or they use shoddy work to essentially push their medicine or whatever out the door with a fun new name, led by a marketing team of 30, you know, people who focus on branding it. So I think that, despite my best efforts, I mean, I could bring in a lot of people, I just don't know how much I'd have ownership over studying that. Also, God, it's a student of mine, you know, just the ethics of, you know, subjecting them to testing like that. It's a big question that I'm not sure I would even be prepared to answer. There was a person that asked me that. Yeah, yeah, I thought it'd be a good question to ask. It'd be like a flash, where he does the big slaps in the city, and he's like, I need you to help me out. Yeah, um, yeah, but like what you're saying about, you know, the kind of culture around, like, society and science, like, how would you kind of, if you could, how could you maybe, like, bridge the two, or maybe kind of make it mesh a little bit better together? Because, I mean, there are scientists who kind of get, like, ostracized in the media. Like, I think there was like a MD-PhD who was working with the Pfizer vaccine for COVID, and he left Pfizer because he wasn't, like, agreeing with their, the way they were marketing the vaccine. Is there, and then he kind of got, like, ostracized by the media, and they're like, oh, he's an anti-vaxxer now, and kind of, you know, tarnishing his name. So, like, well, how would you kind of, like, bridge, I guess, the deep trust slash distrust dynamic between society and science as a whole? I'd say communication. I mean, some of our best science advocates and science communicators, you know, may not necessarily have the most exciting active research lives, but that's because they devote themselves to communicating properly what other scientists are doing. And it's not just going out there and telling the world, but it's trying to translate, you know, from the technical scientific jargon that we use and surround ourselves by into layman's terms for anyone, even in other fields of science, to understand easily. Because at the end of the day, you should be able to say what you're doing without overly complicated terms. And there's just this negative impression in general society sometimes where, I don't know, I guess maybe we think we're better than others, or it's just, you know, you have to be so smart to get it done, but in reality, it's just about drive. And, you know, if you devote yourself to this, anyone can kind of, you know, be a scientist. And I think there's this perception, there's this negative perception about things being hidden too much because you can't, maybe some people are just not good at effectively communicating their work, or if there's patents, you know, if money's involved, then it's all about hiding the details so that other competitors can't take, you know, the idea and sell the same product for less money or patent it themselves and get ownership and rights and royalties from it. And this sense of isolating from the world, the details, leads people to just wildly hypothesize or conject that we're clearly creating nanobots that will go in, inject it to your bloodstream, and completely control your mind. And I'm just like, wow, that would be great. If we had that technology, not to do that, but mostly like, wow, that would be amazing advancement of our understanding of science. But I mean, in reality, there's so many moving parts that we're just nowhere near there. And there's a lot of fear that builds up, you know, about people with amazing intense power. But in reality, I mean, it's kind of laughable how far some of us have gone versus what society sees us as doing in the dark. And, you know, if we could really do that, then what am I doing in my lab? The stuff I'm doing in my lab would be completely rudimentary compared to making these microchips that could control people. Oh, yeah. Mr. Musk is huge on the microchips. It's just hilarious how much people have, or it's not even hilarious, it's actually kind of sad that there is this great divide. Because it shouldn't be. And I feel like it's continuing to get worse and worse. I feel like I see it the same way I see bipartisan politics. You know, you think that like 50% of everyone is just evil, you know, and you're just on the right side. And it's just this intense tribalism that's developed. And now at this point, you hear the other political name, and you just think, well, they must be wrong, before you hear what they're saying. And even if I have my own side that I believe in, I'm guilty of just instantly thinking, well, they must be wrong. And it's just this culture that grows from this tribalism. And just, you know, hatred of, say, science, or the other political side, or a religious group, that's based entirely on naivety and ignorance. And that too just ultimately stems from marketing, right? Just telling you what you want, either what you want to hear, or you don't want to hear. You know, either good or bad. And I think a lot of people love just being mad. I mean, it's ultimately like, kind of the basis of a lot of things, is people enjoy feeling anger. It makes them feel like passion, makes them feel like they actually care about what they're talking about. Even if, you know, once the dust settles, they're like, I don't care about, you know, X, Y, Z topic. But it feels good to like, you know, the blood flowing, and sweating, and you know, you sit at a desk all day, and just click-clack on Excel, and then you can get online and just scream at people. That feels pretty good. I don't do that. But that's why I think, that's why people do it, right? It's like, they just want to feel connected, ultimately. They want to feel like they have influence on what's happening. And that's, it's ultimately just like, you know, the strings get pulled at the end of the day. Yeah, maybe it's wanting to feel like you can control, you know, your life in a chaotic world, full of uncertainty, taking the reins, and trying to convince yourself that you're, you know, the mask has been lifted off of you, and you can see what the others can't see. But we also just respond to inflammatory information. I mean, we'll probably ignore any well-written articles that talks about a very interesting topic, but because it's not inflammatory, one, it didn't make it to the top of your list of news, and you know, two, you didn't really, you weren't as riled up, as you say, about it, as energized. And so, it's kind of our own fault for responding to that, and liking it, and continuing to fund sources that do that, and then continuing to direct it. I mean, it's really good editorial writing, and that's just getting washed out in favor of something that's short-lived and exciting. That's why we're only ever hearing about how many deaths happened last week, in wherever, you know, and how it is the most blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in blah, blah, blah years. And it's just, I mean, it's exhausting, and then you're just like waiting for that next plug, and the next dose of excitement, and whatever it is, and then you get angry, and then you go down these rabbit holes of reading up about these weird conspiracy theories that have, oh wow, just all of these, you know, incidental connections. It's just, it's too obvious, you know, how many connections there are. There are four. Right in front of your faces, guys. Right there. And I'm just like, man, this kind of just reminds me of things like Christian Science. I mean, it's just, it's, I mean, you know, I tend to stay away from politics. I tend to just, you know, focus on my own work, which is already 100%. It just overwhelms me already. And it also just allows me to not get overly upset about things that I'm not sure I would have much of a say or ability to change in the future. Some people want to be a communicator, an influencer, you know, and scientists who really try to evoke political change, and I really respect them. I just know I burn out too easily from that. And that's just, I wouldn't be able to have any positive impact on society in the long term basis. So, you know, I hopefully rely on people who try to help heal society. And I'll just kind of try to keep, try to keep healing the body. Yeah. Yeah, those seem definitely in the news and everything. That's kind of inflammatory. I think that's maybe what we need to do in the next episode of the podcast is just make people mad. But you can inflame them and get everyone excited about you. Make your viewer number. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Have them watch your original ones, your original podcast, which were poorly, you know, microphoned and set up and all. And then as you develop over the years, the production quality improves. Oh, yeah, absolutely. If any ads, any ad people are listening, we will sell out. I have no qualms about that. Preferably to a caffeine company. Preferably to somebody who will give me products I'll actually use. Earbugs. I will not use your shitty metal wallet. I will however drink your coffee. Yeah, but back to the kind of like the, you know, the media pushing the sexier topics. We heard about the alien thing going on in the news right now. Oh, that someone from the military has seen some UFO. Yeah. The size of a football field hovering over some Air Force base or something like that. Yeah, what do you think about that? I think that I have absolutely no information. Yeah. The rest of society doesn't. And so what are we doing? We keep hearing in the news the same story, which makes no sense. No details. And based on some useless press conference here and there, nothing that will be released because it's top secret news, whatever. And so what does the viewer do? Well, okay, or the reader. Reader and viewer have just enough information to get excited. And then where do they find their information? Well, people talking about it are probably people who are conjecturing and bringing in completely unrelated or irrelevant data. Maybe there's some relevant data, but it's all just getting thrown together in this giant soup that is this mixing pot and giant think tank of experts, non-experts, and I don't even understand, no, you know, who's doing what. And these stories build themselves. And so it's just inflammatory, unnecessarily inflammatory, you know, a ridiculous press hearing that just gave you enough to let society just blow up, you know, on the side. Could be, you know, a distraction mechanism. It could just be because it was needed. They needed to have a hearing because, you know, they agreed to it and then they were just done with it and nothing. But because we don't have enough information, why am I going to waste all day long trying to hypothesize, poorly hypothesize, based on absolutely no real evidence, what's going on? It's a waste of my time. It's a waste for society. It's a drag. And people who spend all day long trying to figure that out, they're just wasting their lives doing nothing productive, in my opinion. It could be one of your, when you said you had like a lazy day, it could be one of your projects on a lazy day. Yeah, I mean, if you're a journalist, then yeah, that'd be your job, and that's productive. But if that's, if that's not your forte, and you're just sitting at home, you know, trolling, it's kind of fun, but I don't do that. But I still enjoy sometimes trolling happens, which obviously causes itself problems. But I mean, yeah, if you just sit at home and you've got no formal training in this, and you're just riling other people up, it's really just a waste of your time and other people's time. You can just have that midlife crisis, and either have to convince yourself you've done something productive for society, or have that midlife crisis. Realize, what have I done with my life? So, Frederick Lane, we really, really appreciate your time here. We've had a great time recording. We've been recording for a lot longer than we anticipated. We really appreciate all your advice and all your time. We want to leave off one last question, just a question we ask all of our guests, you know, prior and going forward is, if you had to give any advice to undergrads in terms of getting involved with research, or, you know, setting themselves up for success, what would be like your kind of little, little blurb to give them? Don't coast. You know, you go to college, I mean, it used to be that you could go to college to get a degree, and that was enough. Obviously, now it's not enough to just get the degree. If you really want to set yourself up for success, differentiate yourself. You know, push yourself to learn as everything you can, because these institutions are not just about taking classes like you did in high school. These institutions offer quite a bit of opportunities, and this is four years that you have the ability to do whatever you want. And so, really, really focus on that. I know it's your first time that you have freedom, maybe, from your house, but also, it's the opportunity you'll regret not doing better at. So. Excellent. Excellent. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. Dr. Andrea Carlini, for the second episode of the PH14, a very basic podcast. We appreciate everybody listening. Hope you all have a wonderful day. And, yeah. Any last words from anybody? Any final remarks? Dr. Carlini? No. Thank you for having me. Of course. Absolutely. And, see you next time.