MONDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 2024
As I spend my days running from bench to bench, pipetting colourful liquids and looking at puzzling graphs on monitors, I sometimes idly stare at the stream of water falling on the glassware I am supposed to clean and recall how dedicated and tense I was cleaning those same pieces of glass in my early days in a laboratory. I recall the curiosity and hunger for every possible field of knowledge that unveils how nature works. Now, as I dive into my PhD, trying to find my spot in the research community, I ask myself whether there is still space for that unfussy enthusiasm. To answer that, I sit together with Daniel Leong, a student in Chemistry in his final year of undergraduate studies here in Cambridge, who is still fresh from an interdisciplinary education. Daniel is a brilliant student. He was among the top 50 in the United States Chemistry Olympiads for two consecutive years and was awarded the Top of Tripos Prize in his Part IB at Trinity College. Despite his deep love for Chemistry, Daniel has never forgotten the value of other sciences. As we start chatting about our first year of undergrad, a difference immediately emerges.Daniel, when I enrolled in my university, I had to choose a specific curriculum. It was not just between Physics, Math, or Engineering, but even between Theoretical and Applied Physics, or Industrial or Materials Chemistry. Basically, our path was chosen from the very first moment we entered higher education. That was not the case for you, right?
That’s right. In Cambridge, to study any fundamental science you must enrol on the Natural Sciences course, you cannot just do Chemistry or Physics from day one. That means everybody here starts with a very broad foundation, which I think is one of the strengths of this University, and it is also one of the main reasons why I applied. At the time of the application, I was indeed very interested in Chemistry, but there were a lot of Physics and Maths topics that piqued my interest as well. For me, the point of going to university was to discover what exactly I wanted to dive deeper into. It also turned out to be a way to learn something I had never seen before. For example, in my first year, I studied Material Science, which is not taught in most high schools. I think this is a shame, because it is a field that intertwines heavily with Chemistry in terms of molecular structures and Physics in terms of bulk properties.
I think I perfectly know what you mean. As a chemist by training, I often see the world around me as a vast sea of molecules floating around, but then when I am asked to consider the applications of my research, I have to open my mind to higher dimensions, from the nanoscale to items we can perceive with our hands. And sometimes I find it hard to activate both mindsets. It’s like I have to pull a lever to switch between the two, which ends up in a delay in my reasoning. How is that for you? Do you also experience this dichotomy or is it easier now for you to combine these worlds?
Well, there’s a compromise I would say, and it’s a quite beautiful compromise in some sense! In one way, having many perspectives at hand gives a very elegant description of how nature works. An example I can think of is elastomers.
Elastomers? Like rubber bands?
Yeah. There was one of my supervision questions which went like “Why does a baseball in sunny Arizona travel farther than a baseball in rainy Washington?” And the reason is simply that at the molecular level, the introduction of water would disrupt the hydrogen bonding within the fibres, which reduces their ability to retain energy and reflect it back when hit by the baseball bat. Things like that are really cool to me. I was like “Oh, that’s a phenomenon that we see on a daily basis, and you can explain it by looking at ... well ... the invisible down there”.
And that’s also a reminder to look not only at other sciences but also at - what I would call - the “real world” around us.
Absolutely, but on the other side of the compromise, you always have to understand the limitations on how far we can probe a system. Sometimes the bulk material properties can’t be explained directly by the building blocks of matter, or by “first principles” if you want. It’s a matter of making the right assumptions. For instance, you may meticulously describe a system analytically solving a system of tens of equations, or realise that most of the terms can easily be neglected. This is valid for many scenarios, from the Navier-Stokes equations in fluid dynamics to the Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics.
Coming back to your degree course, I guess that being a student in Natural Sciences means joining a community of highly motivated students with varied interests, especially in your first year. I would imagine that many of them have taken a rather different path than yours. Do you engage in unexpected discussions with a friend of yours at the intersection of your areas of study?
A good friend of mine started a computer science degree two years after me. As we became closer friends, he wanted to know more about my research, but I pondered how I could best explain it to him. I recalled that one of my projects involved using machine learning to optimise structures for certain materials. He became so engaged in the conversation that he would ask me week after week how the “chemistry machine learning” project was going. The conversation was made possible by the fact that the project was intended to be interdisciplinary. I think computation is a perfect example of a “glueing” agent between the sciences, as it really permeates many areas of knowledge.
And today it seems that no company or research group could do without it. Anyway, it is good to hear of friendships fuelled by mutual interest like this. Sometimes I feel that, even as undergraduates, some students become so attached to their subject that they eventually forget even the fundamentals of others, or reject any opportunity to learn beyond the boundaries imposed by their university course. Have you ever encountered someone so stubbornly in love with a specific area, who eventually suffered from it?
Now that you mention it, I’m starting to realise that some of my peers, incredibly brilliant minds, know certain fields so in-depth (perhaps too in-depth) to the point that they would approach a problem and overthink it. I think we may call it overconfidence. They would say “Oh, I know this area very well, I should try this advanced approach”, instead of stepping back to the fundamentals and asking “Which approach is the most effective?”. It’s about thinking more horizontally than vertically if you know what I mean.
I got your point. This reminds me of one of my peers who worked heavily on nanotechnologies and wanted to determine the composition of a new material they made. Their group was so much in electron microscopy, that they would prefer that technique over a much faster and cheaper emission spectroscopy, which would be instead the first choice of any average material scientist or chemist.
Yeah, people tend to reason within sealed compartments. I guess that nowadays nobody wants to be the “jack of all trades”, everybody wants to be the “master of one”, which many people see in a positive way. “Find your niche” is what they say. But I think narrowing down too much can be risky.
Especially because, after university, you will not be assessed based on a problem sheet, but rather on your ingenuity. For instance, now that you are in your final year, you are submitting applications for job or PhD positions. Most of them require you to come up with your own project proposal. How do you think interdisciplinary knowledge plays a role in that?
For me, originality comes from bringing ideas from fields that don’t seem to connect and making them connect in a way that leads to new applications. I can think of an example from a paper I recently read on quantum dots. Quantum dots are tiny particles which aroused the interest of material scientists for their photoluminescence properties and of physicists for them being a beautiful demonstration of how quantum theory can explain matter at very small scales. But in this recent finding, people figured out that quantum dots may have an actual real world application because they generate heat when you shine light on them. In this work, this was harnessed to degrade plastic.
So, looking at the future, do you think science will continue on this line of overspecialisation or is there hope for a sort of great unification, or at least a higher degree of collaboration between the fields?
I think that at the undergraduate level, there will be more interdisciplinary courses that emerge. I think we are seeing this transformation already. For instance, I have recently heard of a programme such as “Energy and Environmental Science”. Where do you think it belongs? You can’t really categorise it, right? In the academic scene, however, I think people will continue to look to find their niche, but finding their niche as plural. Now that I am becoming more aware of how academia works, I am noticing that principal investigators have two or three areas that they are very good at. The combination of different niches has become a way to define an academic.
Article by Andrea Rogolino
