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0:08
I am pleased to be able to welcome one of the newest members of the Alumni Engagement and Development staff members. That is going to be Diontre Earl, who is serving as this evening's discussion moderator. Diontre joins us from Penn State, where he was the Director of Major Gifts at the College of Engineering. He's been here since October, so he's brand spanking new. I think this is actually his first event for Duke. So Diontre, welcome. Welcome to Duke.
0:34
And thank you so much for joining us this evening. And I will turn it over to you. - Thank you. Thank you, Jenn. Thank you, everyone, for allowing me to be a part of this evening with my new family, Duke alumni. It has been maybe four months on the job, and it's been wonderful. I've watched Duke from afar and admired Duke from afar and appreciate the quality of the institution and just so thrilled to be here, for me and my family, and so thrilled to be a part of this evening's event.
1:10
As Jenn mentioned, I'm the Director of Development for Duke sciences. I focus specifically on the Duke Science and Technology Initiative, which is the university's signature effort to elevate science excellence at Duke. Simply put, we are going to raise the standard for Duke science, education, and research. And a key component of that effort is materials science, thus the program this evening. Over the next few months, as Jenn mentioned, the Forever Learning Institute will rollout opportunities
1:49
for folks to learn about areas of research in materials science, and tonight is, again, an introduction to the subject matter. I have joining me, two experts in the field, and I'm thrilled to converse with. First, Dr. Cate Brinson. Cate is the Sharon and Harold Yoh Distinguished Professor of Engineering and the Donald Alstadt Chair for the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the Pratt School of Engineering. And next, we have Dr. Stephen Craig. Duke class of 1991.
2:26
Whoop whoop! He is the William Miller Professor of Chemistry at Trinity College and the director of the Center for Chemistry and Molecular Optimized Networks, or MONET. So we'll get into questions that we have, and then, ultimately, we'll move over to questions in chat. Before we start with our questions, I'd like to allow Cate and Stephen to share a little bit more about their Duke background, and then we'll get started with our questions. Let's start with Cate first, then we'll go to Stephen,
2:54
and then we'll start our questions. - Great, thank you. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. So my name is Cate Brinson. I am relatively new to Duke, but not quite as new as Diontre. I came about four years ago, and I am a faculty member, and I'm the chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science here at Duke, which is very appropriate for the subject matter today. Before then, I was at Northwestern University for about 25 years before I moved to Duke.
3:25
And I love it here. I love the people. I love my colleagues. I love the environment. I love North Carolina. It's a wonderful place. My research area is process between materials and the mechanics of materials, meaning, how do they respond to mechanical loading? And I do a lot of work on polymers and their composites. I've done some work on shape-memory alloys, which are kind of crazy materials. And we do both experimental work as well as modeling.
3:53
And then, we've gotten recently into data and AI, which is a session that'll be coming up in a month or so that's really exciting new area to explore in materials. So, thank you. I'm looking forward to talking to you this evening. - Thank you, Cate. Stephen? - Yeah, so thanks, Diontre. As you mentioned, I was an undergrad here. Graduated from Trinity in '91, and I returned to the faculty here in 2000. So I've been at Duke for quite a while. I guess I'm the vet on the panel.
4:24
I love the same things about Duke as a faculty member that I loved as a student. It was that the combination of intellectual ambition, but with a real sense of community and family on campus as well as a very sincere dedication to social causes and social obligation, and I love that mix. I'm delighted to be here this evening and look forward to the conversation. - Thank you. Thank you, Stephen and Cate. Again, appreciate both of you taking time out of your evening to discuss materials science.
4:58
So I'm going to start at the very beginning. For those of us who are new to the subject matter, just what is materials science? So let's start with Cate and then we'll go to Stephen. - Great, thank you. So I like to think of materials as stuff, right? Anything that you're touching, that you're sitting on, that's in your world, that you can feel, it is made of stuff, and that stuff we call a material. And the study of materials science, which we often call materials science and engineering
5:33
because there's the science part, but there's also an engineering component to it. We are concerned with, what is the material made of? So the composition. What atoms or molecules go into this thing? The processing or the synthesis, how do you make it? What are the properties of this material? Like, how strong is it? Does it conduct current? Different things like that. How do you measure those properties for characterization? And then, the performance. How can it perform in an application?
6:06
And so the study of materials science and engineering encompasses all of these things, from the very smallest, like what atoms are into it, to how do you make it as part of the space shuttle for its next mission? So, Steve, you can now elaborate. - No, I think that's exactly right. And one of the things maybe I'll just add to that is to point out that, because it's the stuff, and it's the things that we interact with and interact with each other through,
6:33
often, there's a very humanistic component that's I think increasingly a part of the way we do materials design and materials science and research. So we think about things like sustainability. We think about things like the way a person would actually interact with that material in a device and the way that a material might influence actually the way that we, as people, behave and the choices that we make. - Right. If I could add one more thing - Sure, sure. Please.
7:03
- Just to build on what Steve said is the concept of design, so making new materials. So materials exist, like wood. You know you can cut down a tree and there's wood, and if you saw it just right, you can make a table out of it. It's pre-existing material for you. But we can also discover how to make new materials, how to make new alloys of metals, or how to make new polymers that don't exist already that can fulfill certain needs and have extraordinary properties that other materials
7:33
that we may have known in the past don't have. So that's also part of materials science is this design and discovery of new materials in addition to understanding what already existed. - Thank you. Steve, I'll start with you on this question. Could you help us understand the pillars or classifications of materials? - Yeah, and I think, historically, there are three classical sets of materials. And Cate just alluded to at least a couple of those. So first is metals, which all familiar with,
8:13
iron, steel, tin, aluminum, that kind of thing. Polymers, so these are things that you would normally think of as plastics, ranging from the credit card in your wallet and including rubbery materials, like the tires on your car, and increasingly structural materials, like the bodies of cars, for example. And then, the third are ceramics, which, again, historically would involve things like pottery, stuff made out of clay, bricks and building materials.
8:47
But Cate, I think there are so many materials now that kind of extend out of these classical categories. And I know you work on a lot of these types of new material classes yourself. - Yeah, thanks, Steve. Yeah, he's absolutely right. The traditional buckets are metals, ceramics, and polymers. And in fact, many departments of materials science used to be called departments of metallurgy. That was the original name of these departments that have transitioned over the decades
9:17
to now becoming materials science to really encompass all these materials beyond metals. But beyond metal, ceramics, and polymers, those sort of traditional materials, there are many other materials. A wonderful one is composites. And composites can be really anything. A composite means that you've put more than one thing together. And a classical composite might be the fiberglass that a boat might be made of or your carbon fiber skis or tennis rackets.
9:47
That has fibers of one material, carbon, in it together with a plastic, an epoxy maybe of a polymer, and it makes something that is better performing than either one of those materials by itself. So composites are extraordinarily interesting materials. But in addition to that, there's semiconductors, all types of electronic materials that allow communication technologies to progress as well as biomaterials and natural materials that are incredibly complex and extraordinarily interesting.
10:20
So all of these classes of materials are also studied within materials science and engineering departments, where we learn about existing materials as well as develop new materials of these types. - Thank you. Cate, can I stay with you here on this one? Now, you've already alluded, I think, to some examples here, but I'd be curious to know if you could offer some real-world examples of where past, present, future of materials that we use in our everyday lives.
10:52
- Right, so let me stick with the polymers classification, since that's an area that, actually, both Steve and I know well. The first polymers that people used and used for ages were natural polymers, such as silk or wood, cotton, which is made of cellulose. These are natural polymers that are naturally occurring. But then, in the 1800s at some point, people discovered how to take cellulose and modify it and made something called nitrocellulose.
11:29
And they were able to replace, for example, billiard balls that used to be made out of the ivory of elephant tusks. They could replace those with a solid, super hard material that looked and sounded, that was important, sounded just like a billiard ball but was made from this modified material. And then, actually, after that time, the more understanding came about polymers into what they are. Originally, it was thought they were little colloids
11:58
of little molecules that associated with each other, but only in the 1920s was it discovered that they're long chain molecules that are extremely long and connected in really interesting ways. And then, the first synthetic polymer was called Bakelite, which opened this door into making molded compounds out of plastic. And these were insulating materials. They were used as varnishes and lacquers, appliance housings, and it just exploded from there.
12:29
And so that's sort of the past history of plastics. And if I want to fast-forward to today, something you might think about in your everyday life, when you go to the dentist, and you get a filling in your teeth, it used to be, at least, when I was young, they used to be silver fillings. They were made out of this metal amalgam, right? And so, when you had more fillings and you would smile, you could see these silver things in your mouth. But now, as most of you know, they make it with a polymer.
13:01
And in fact, it's a polymer composite with little silica particles in it. And that gets packed into your teeth, and it's the same color as your existing teeth. So that's a very modern and current application of polymers. And the future is incredible. We're doing 3D printing of polymers. You can make all types of customized structures. One of the amazing new places for polymers is in 3D-printed implant materials that might be used for biomedical implant devices
13:35
that can be customized to your personal physique and bone and tissue structure. That's where things are going. - Stephen, anything you want to add to that? - Yeah, I was just going to say, one of the things I like about this field is that you can do things like Cate did and kind of take this fun cross-section down a class of materials. But, because they're so much a part of our lives, you can also do that same kind of cross-section in like a part of our lives in society.
14:04
So we could look at past, present, and future of healthcare, of structural materials, of transportation of clothing. And maybe I'll give an example just in terms of information storage. If you think about the impact of developing paper processing on the way, centuries ago, that, all of a sudden, societies were able to record large amounts of information and to group it in ways that were different when you were restricted to, say, a large sheet of parchment, for example,
14:39
to, more recently in contemporary times, similar revolutions came with the advent of the semiconductor and chips that we could put in computers to store and recall information. And then, looking ahead, now, there's this whole class of quantum materials, where we're learning how to organize atoms in ways to control and address little spins of electrons in subatomic particles so that we can store and process information with even higher efficiency and lower energetic cost.
15:15
And I think you could do that same exercise, as I said, with any of a number of things that are just a part of what we do as we go about our daily lives. - Thank you. Thank you. It's not an accident that, Cate, you're representing Pratt and, Stephen, you're representing Trinity. Could you help the alumni group understand where the work is taking place in this field on campus and then maybe even touch on a little bit of the relationship between the two schools
15:51
and how that partnership helps us become, hopefully, what we believe to be a leading institution in this space? - I think the short answer for where the work is taking place is almost everywhere, right? Certainly, in a number of departments here in Trinity, not just in my home department of chemistry, but in physics. Applied mathematicians looking at problems. We've got biologists who think about important problems in biology through a materials-like lens. And we could go on from there.
16:21
People thinking about sustainability and the economics of materials. School of the Environment, Sustainability. Think every department in Pratt. And we'd be remiss not to mention the medical school as well. - Yes, absolutely. - There's a very strong biomaterials effort here at Duke, and I know folks in the audience will have a chance to hear more about that in events that are upcoming. But a lot of incredible materials challenges related to human health that are also being addressed on campus.
16:55
- Yeah, that's right. I represent the Pratt side, so engineering side, and I'm the head of the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department, and so, obviously, materials sciences is at least half of our faculty that are working in this space of materials science. But in fact, it's faculty and many departments in Pratt. So in electrical engineering, there are people that are working with quantum materials, as Steve just said, and different types of electronic and energy materials
17:25
span both into the Electrical Department as well as to the Mechanical and Materials Science Department. And the same is true in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. There are very many incredible applications of materials too that are of interest to sustainability, filters, membranes, things like this, that are incredibly important inside of the environmental space. That's kind of key to the civil environmental. And of course, the Biomedical Engineering Department
17:56
is just awash with people that are really concerned about creating implant materials or understanding interactions of nanoparticle drug delivery systems with cells, and all of these, at their root, they have materials challenges to them in addition to the biological or the biomedical engineering aspect of it. And so we have a lot of faculty that are jointly appointed or secondarily appointed across lots of departments inside Pratt and into Trinity and into the medical school
18:32
that deal with these really fascinating problems and opportunities in the space of materials science to impact human health and to impact society and the environment. - Yeah, and you can understand, I think, why it's so important to have that activity across campus. Like, as Cate said earlier, we're interested in the synthesis and controlling structure down at the atomic and molecular level. That's an important part, both understanding what's there and then coming up with new designs
19:07
and ways to synthesize it. So that's where people in my department, in my research lab are often very interested is in that kind of manipulation at the molecular scale, but then, also, the engineering component of, how do you process that material and how does that influence ultimately its properties and performances? And then, again, there's, how is that material going to relate to the person that is actually interacting with it? Whether it's inside someone's body
19:39
or the way that it's being used to get information from them, like the touch screen on your smartphone. So you've got to have that design and human interactive element to the process as well. And that makes it a very, very interdisciplinary field. - Right, and there's a loop between doing the synthesis, and then doing characterization, and then doing design of the next material that will actually achieve the target properties that you would like to have.
20:15
So it's this loop between this fundamental manipulation of the atoms or the molecules up to, how do I measure what the properties of this are or the performance of it is in an application? And then, how do I make it into a macroscopic part? Not just a little tiny thing in a test tube vial. So this is a loop. It's a design loop that really does require this interdisciplinary approach and, increasingly, is including computational aspects, not just experimental aspects.
20:48
And this is where we have incredible people that are doing computational materials science and also applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence to really help with this loop and exploring what is really an infinite space of possibilities, and being able to do intelligent sampling in that space and come down to solutions that are then tractable and will solve the problem that you need. The space is too big. You can't find that on your own. But with these algorithms, you can.
21:17
- I'm having a hard time controlling the goofy smile as Cate's talking here because, I think, for so many of us, it's this iterative loop that's really the fun part, when you kind of get into that cycle, and you're learning and coming up with the next idea and testing it, learning more. So yeah. It's fun hearing you describe that. - Yep. - Thank you. Thank you both. That was great. Quick note to the audience. One, if you have questions, put them in the chat 'cause we'll get to that portion
21:45
of the program here momentarily. And then, next, you will be seeing links to relevant websites in the chat as well. So if you're interested in certain subject matter, you'll see links come up in the chat there. I'll start with Steve on this next question, if that's okay. I'd be curious to get your feeling on why Duke is uniquely positioned to be a leading institution in the materials science field. - Yeah, well, so it's a question I like to actually think about it a bit,
22:02
and it's part of what makes it such a fun place for me to be right now. Let me give you two answers. One is a very kind of dry, structural answer, which is just the proximity that we have on the campus. So I can walk out of my office door right now and in three to four minutes, I can be in the heart of Cate's department in Pratt, or I could be in the medical school, and having that proximity is fantastic. And the second is probably the more important, and it's the people.
22:35
And I'll really maybe pick out the students here. Duke attracts students who have very broad interests. They're interested in problems that make a difference, and they're really not bound by very narrow disciplinary thinking. So they really like these interdisciplinary challenges and the chance to use different parts of their brain and to interact with other folks who enjoy thinking in that same way. And having that mix of people and the availability for them to run into each other
23:08
and meet each other easily, I think, just makes it an incredibly dynamic place to be. - Yeah, those are wonderful, wonderful points. I might add that one of the other things that I think Duke really has going for it is that we also have key expertise and leadership and track record in some important challenge areas where materials is super important. And this includes environment and sustainability, where we have the Nicholas School of the Environment,
23:39
and this is an incredibly important area for materials, both on the sustainability side and on the energy side. So new batteries, new energy materials are incredibly important for that. And so we have those specialists that cover everything, policy experts as well, not just the materials science people, that can help us really make a big impact with big projects in this space. So environment is one. The medical area, so all of the things where materials are utilized in medical applications.
24:19
And that includes the things that we've been mentioning, such as implant materials and drug delivery materials, but also devices, medical devices, that are made of materials, and those materials in those devices have to have certain properties in order for them to function, right? And that we have a world-class medical school here as well as colleagues in biomedical engineering and other life science departments that really make that happen. It makes this a nexus.
24:45
And then, the third area is AI and machine learning. We have incredible expertise in this space. I know it's all in the news these days, AI and machine learning, but it's real. It's a real, enormous paradigm shift in many areas of science, and materials science is one of those. And the fact that we also have incredible experts in this area, including one faculty who just won what's called the Nobel Prize of AI in the past year, the Squirrel Prize.
25:18
This is amazing to have access to these colleagues and have them integrating into the projects that we're working on right now. And you'll hear more about some of that in one of the future sessions in a couple of months. So the fact that we have the environment, medical areas, and AI, such expertise concentrated here at Duke, and there's such important challenges there, that coupled with materials makes this a really exciting place to be. - I get excited when you go through that
25:47
because that was one of the questions I knew the answer to before I asked. And it was also largely why I decided to come to Duke when the opportunity was presented. Cate, you alluded to this earlier, but I wanted to go back to it and see if you have any additional thoughts on the future of materials science, not only at Duke, but for the greater science community. - Yeah, so, there's just incredible applications for materials to enable progress in the future that we can only imagine today,
26:30
and some we can't even imagine today. So we have things that we utilize today in our everyday lives that didn't exist 50 years ago, and people couldn't imagine they would exist. And that's going to be true in the future as well. And I mentioned, I think, one of these areas, such as creating personalized implants, which can be done with polymers or with metals, either. You can create, using modern technology, imaging technology, you can get the exact structure of what implant should go
27:04
to match perfectly with your body, and also, I think, in the future, to match the mechanical impedance, so the properties of the surrounding tissue that's unique to you, and then you'll be able to create on the fly an implant that's going to be perfect for you. This doesn't quite exist yet, but it will exist. And it will revolutionize and make these things incredibly more, I think, sustainable for the person, and the recovery times will improve. All of these things will get better
27:43
because of this thing that we can't quite do yet, but it will happen. Another thing that's really exciting, and we'll see this later, again, in one of the other sessions, is metamaterials. There are both photonic and phononic metamaterials. And this is a fascinating place for materials science. You'll hear more about that at that time. But if you can think of things like invisibility cloaks, this is the area that seems like science fiction, but we can already control the matter
28:11
by manipulating certain things about it in order to create things that are the first approximation of invisibility cloaks, both for light, like you're thinking of, but also for sound, or for acoustic waves and for elastic waves. This is really phenomenal and will revolutionize what we are able to do in applications. - Wonderful. Steve, any thoughts there? - Yeah, I think we could go on and on talking about our favorite research topics. I would add, I think Cate mentioned sustainability
28:48
and environmental impact as a part of this. And I think I might've even seen some questions in the chat, so maybe we can talk more about it in the open Q&A. But this is certainly an area that I and others on campus are very interested in and very mindful of and really thinking about designing that into the research questions that we're targeting early on. And so, again, maybe we can talk a little bit more about that in the Q&A if people are interested in any of these things. - Sure.
29:22
Well, I'll get to a couple of questions in the chat as they're coming up. I'll start with Nick Raju. Appears to be class of 2013. Shout out to Nick, class of 2013. Question that he has is, I'll read it here. "With the design of new materials that do not biodegrade "as well as many of the current materials, "such as polymers, "are there reuse and recycling materials being considered "in the, "in the design." Let me see here. Having a tough night.
29:54
Okay, "In the design process of current and new materials?" - Yeah, that's very much true. Absolutely. It's an incredible area. And this is an issue, especially in polymers. There are several classes of polymers, one of which is called thermosets. Those are the things that are the epoxies, and they are notoriously difficult to recycle. So some polymers are easily recyclable. You can melt them and form them again. But these thermoset polymers,
30:22
which is one of the major classes, do not do that easily. But people are working right now very actively on new ways to undo some of those chemical bonds to make them recyclable on command. And this is an area of incredible research right now here at Duke and around the world because it's incredibly important to do this. And Steve, I'm sure you have more comments on this as well. - Yeah, I was going to say, so Diontre mentioned in the introduction that I lead a national research center
30:55
for the chemistry of molecularly optimized networks. And so Duke's the lead institution of a nine institution team. And this is one of sort of the sub-thrusts of our center's intellectual agenda, this question, as Cate brought up, of how do I take a thermoset and improve its end-of-life value and its lifetime? So, can I simultaneously improve properties so that materials wear out less slowly than they would normally? Can I make those design principles in a way
31:34
that they can be applied to building blocks that come from naturally renewable sources? And then, the third is, can I develop the chemistry that allows me essentially to tear apart and rebuild those materials with full recovery of their initial properties in a way that can minimize their environmental impact? And I think it's such a huge challenge. The scale of the problem is enormous because the utility of these kinds of materials is enormous, and so they pop up everywhere.
32:10
And there's not going to be a single, here's the one solution for every application and every single thermoset, but I think we've got, not just we, but others as well, have some insights and are definitely thinking about this problem, so thanks a lot for that question. - Have another one from the chat from Sharon Roark. She says, "Our planet is being overrun "with discarded single-use plastic. "What do you see as a possible solution?" - Yeah, so I think it largely, I think one of the main,
32:46
there a couple of opportunities for this. One is, can you make materials that are still useful but then rapidly degrade in the environment to environmentally-friendly byproducts? And then the other is, can I take that material and come up with the, I think, largely chemical, but there's also going to be an engineering aspect to this, methods to break it down into materials that can be reused for other purposes and reused easily? So to move from just recycling,
33:24
because there are a lot of barriers to that, to what's called upcycling. Kind of breaking that down into raw components that can be used to rebuild from the small component on up, kind of from the molecule on up. Again, a great question. And I'm not surprised that people are passionate about this. I think we all are. - I don't think the next question will surprise you either, which is, "Lumber pricing has been in the news lately." Speaking from a person who's building a house,
33:58
which is a whole nother conversation. "Any progress on an alternative "with the requisite structural properties?" - Well, I don't know the most modern updates on that, I don't think, but certainly over the years, there's been a lot of innovation. Even simple things like plywood, of course, that we all know and love, it's a designed material, and it stays more flat than if you have a solid piece of wood that size. And then, microlam beams and things like this. But these are still made from wood.
34:33
So if you're talking about a purely artificial solution, there are other things, such as the pultruded plastics that are meant to mimic wood. They're usually composites with other fillers in them, and they have many of the desirable characteristics plus some others. They're often more durable in the environment, but then they don't always have the same look and feel as the wood that they're replacing. So I think this is an area of continued innovation, but it's a hard one.
35:10
I don't know that it's going to impact someone building a house today. - Right. - I think that's right. And Cate, I don't know how you feel about this, but I look at problems like this, and you were talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence, and I think that questions like this are emblematic of why those approaches might be so powerful in the future because there's so many design criteria that you would like to meet, and experimental iterations are the loop that we all love
35:49
for design, test, redesign isn't always as fast as you need it to be when there are so many variables and properties. And so, I think, as we get increasingly adept at developing and applying big data methods to these kinds of problems, that's going to be important for not just the new wood, but for other similar problems as well. - Wonderful. How about this? "Cement is a very hard-to-abate material, "but it is a critical material for developing countries. "Is there research into alternatives,
36:35
"and is it possible to make cement a carbon sink?" - So I'm not aware of work at Duke on this problem, but there is work at carbon-sequestering cement. The amount of carbon off-putting from cement globally is astounding, and there are people that are doing a lot of really, really creative work, as I understand it, with kind of smart cement, self-healing cements that last longer and have greatly improved lifetimes. Cate, I don't know if you have thoughts to share on this.
37:17
- Yes, but similar, I'm aware of the really interesting work on the self-healing cements and also on people that are looking at methodologies to utilize the vast amount of cement as a carbon sink. Yes, so that's ongoing. I do not know anyone at Duke that's working on that though. - All right, another one here, which is, "Is there any investigation or progress "toward manufactured alternatives to rare-earth elements?" - Well, one thing I know is that there are people
37:51
actively working on separation technologies, and this might be, again, more in the chemistry side of things, but there are people also in the materials science side that utilize the separation methodologies, and I think it has also part to do with recycling and sustainability that you can take waste products, and then you can separate them into these original component parts, and from that, you can pick out some of these expensive and hard-to-get elements and then re-utilize them.
38:28
And so this is a really interesting area that people are working on, and some people at Duke included. It's really important for the energy area for making new energy sources. You need these rare-earth elements for battery storage, et cetera. And so, in addition to looking at new ways to make batteries better, they're also looking at how do you recover these elements? - And there are, it depends a little bit on, again, it's one of these cases where I think there's not a one-to-one substitute
39:03
for rare-earth elements, but in some applications, like the conductive coating that we talked about on your touch screens. This historically has been primarily indium tin oxide. And that indium component is a very rare metal. And so there are people who have, and are continuing to look at replacement materials, either organic based or composites, like with little, very, very teeny silver nanowire types of based materials that are also conductive and can be made pressure sensitive.
39:44
So there are times where you can find alternative materials and others where, at least, for the foreseeable future, the emphasis is going to be on reclaiming and recycling, as Cate said. - Steve, this one's for you. "Who would be a good contact person in the faculty "for a Duke student, a chemistry major, "interested in the subject matter?" - I'm right here. I'm right here, yeah. Please send me your email. Contact me by email, and let me know what you're interested in. And if nothing else,
40:23
I can help connect you to the right person if I'm not the right person. - Cate, what advice would you give someone seeking a career in materials science? - Oh, that's interesting. Well, it starts with education, right? - Right, sure. - But you don't have to pick a given department, so you can kind of follow your other interests. Most people have multiple interests, right? So if you're very interested in chemistry, you could go a chemistry route. If you're interested in mechanical engineering,
40:59
you could go a mechanical route. If you're interested in electrical stuff, you could go an electrical engineering route. There's many different ways to get there. And then, within that department, you can start learning about materials that are relevant to that other interest of yours. And once you have education, then you just start looking for the job that you would like. Because there's many different jobs in the materials science field at all types of companies, small and large,
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startup companies, giant companies. Some of my graduates have gone off to Apple and Google to work on their devices, healthcare industry jobs, consulting jobs, you name it. So the world is your oyster with this discipline, so it's like you have to figure out where, you have to narrow it down. Besides materials science writ large, now which piece of this, which slice of this do you want to work on? - Yeah, I think that's such great advice, Cate. I can't top that. - That's great.
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For both of you here, where are undergraduates involved in materials science research? - Everywhere. - I think all over the place. So I think every department that we've talked about, and there must've been at least 10 or 12 mentioned, have undergrads that are working on this, both as researchers in the lab, and then the other thing I would say is that, here at Duke, there are no shortage of outreach activities. And I think the materials community here has been very active in that as well.
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And so a lot of our undergrads are engaged in the materials enterprise, either in addition to or maybe for the time being that's their primary mechanism through outreach as well as through primary research activities. - Right, I agree with that. And another thing that people often do in the engineering school is that there are senior projects, senior design projects. Every student in every department has to do a senior design project. And many of these can be materials science related.
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It depends on the customer for that given project. Those are fascinating ways that students are involved in research-ish projects during their senior year that can be related to materials science that's beyond what they would do in a research lab. And there's also summer opportunities. So there are a lot of summer undergraduate research opportunities here at Duke and also beyond in the materials science realm. - Thank you. We only have time for maybe one or two more questions here
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before we get down to wrapping this up, but I wanted to ask, how do you determine which problems you want to work on? - That's a tough one. I mean, that comes many, many ways, right? So sometimes you have an inspiration of something that you're passionate about. So for example, if you're really interested in sustainability, then you might, depending on which field you're in inside of materials science, you would then pursue a pathway, and you would seek out collaborators for that
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and seek funding to get those research projects funded. And then, sometimes you get drawn into things that you're not expected, that weren't on your radar, because you get asked, because you have an expertise that's needed for another project, and then you get fully involved in this new domain that you didn't anticipate. So I think both of those are really active in terms of how you pick new research projects. Steve, you have some other comments? - Yeah, I totally agree.
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I think often the trick is just getting started. Because once you get started, you almost always come up with more questions that come out of that, come out of interactions, and you start seeing connections and possibilities. But yeah, in terms of those first questions, I thought the way you described it is perfect, Cate. You know, here's this big, wouldn't it be great if I had this solution? So, does the knowledge exist for that solution right now?
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And then, you just kind of start stepping down. This requires A, B, and C, do I know how to do A, B, and C? Well, if I don't know how to do B, why don't I know how to do B? And kind of go down, then you find some key piece that's missing in order to hopefully build up the full knowledge base necessary to solve that big picture problem that you're interested in. - Yeah, yeah. So research is a really interesting space to be working in because, again, the problem space is infinite,
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but you can only work on so many things at a time, and often there's just opportunities, so it's serendipity. Something happens that enables you to pursue a specific area. And I think we've all had that happen over various courses in our life. When I finished my PhD, I went and did a post-doc somewhere, and I had always worked in the polymer space, but that place I went, they said, "We really need someone to learn about shape-memory alloys "and work on this project with us."
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And I'm like, "I don't know anything about metals." But then, I was able to learn about this specific type of really interesting metallic material that goes through these phase transitions and has crazy properties. And then, I was able to make some unique contributions. And I think maybe because I'd come sideways at it from a different domain, and then that became part of my portfolio moving forward, and it just happened that that's what I ended up doing.
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And then, another time I had an undergrad come to the lab that wanted to work on 3D printing. And I was like, "I don't know anything about 3D printing, "but there's 3D printers over there. "Let's go play with them." And so, now we have some projects in 3D printing. And so it grew out of the interest of a student that came along, and then we discovered some really interesting things. - It's not materials related, but I'll share one other anecdote, which is my next door neighbor, Emily Derbyshire,
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I think she came up with her approach to solving the global malaria challenge by essentially hearing someone at a seminar speculate that this problem was unsolvable. And she said, "Oh, so no one thinks "it can be done that way, huh?" So sometimes there's just a little bit of bravado and rising to the challenge that can also be a personal motivator. - I have one more question. I think this'll wrap up the Q&A portion here. Is the progress that's been made in materials science
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largely attributed to a specific need or because of scientific curiosity? - Gosh. How about both? How about both and? The traditional improv answer, both and, right? Because it's both curiosity and a need. Like, a need is often a driving factor because there's a need, somebody asks you to help them with something, or because there's funding in a certain area that represents a need, and then, because you're doing that, then you're also curious as you're doing this research.
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Because research is inherently curiosity-driven. You go to make something and it doesn't work, and you're like, "Why doesn't it work?" And then, you end up going down some tangent, and it turns out that this thing that didn't work was actually important and it's a new discovery, right? And so this curiosity is inherently part of a research. So once you start working on something, maybe because of a need, then the curiosity part really takes over
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in terms of the discovery, and drives the next innovation. - Yeah, but there are examples the other way. Kevlar is a good example of this. So Stephanie Kwolek didn't set out to invent very high tensile strength fibers. She sort of discovered them through serendipity but then made the connection that, hey, these kinds of properties might really be useful for something. - Right. That's right. That's right. That's right, yeah. - It's always both. Like, exactly which comes first
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and might be sort of the initiation, I think, can vary. - Yeah, another classic is sticky notes, right? So sticky notes, they're great because they're actually not very sticky, and that's what makes them super useful. But this was someone at 3M that was supposed to discover a new adhesive. And so they were trying to discover a good adhesive, but it turned out to be a really horrible adhesive. But then was the aha moment that I can have a use for this really bad adhesive.
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And so that's a chicken and egg question, right? They weren't trying to discover that, but then they did discover it because of the curiosity. - I said one more, but I'm sorry, that's not a good question. Those of us that are parents will appreciate this one, if you could chime in on this one real quick. How would you suggest outgoing high school seniors get actively involved in materials science? - So someone that's a senior this year, right? - Right. - Well, there are lots of,
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take any opportunity to participate in any outreach programs that are related to materials, and those exist both at Duke and then also portable, where we go to different schools depending on where the person's at, right? And then, beyond that, I would seek out an opportunity. If you're interested, you can always ask if you could be a volunteer in a lab for a summer or for a few weeks in the summer. Could I volunteer for free just to work in your lab for a little bit this summer?
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I have certainly hired a few high school students that way in my lab that are just genuinely curious, and they just want to see, and then I put them together with one of my graduate students, and they have a good little project for some of the summer. - Yeah, and I'll add to that, that most of us have some sort of research group meeting on a regular basis. And I think, probably, for a lot of us, that might even be virtual or have a potentially virtual component as well.
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And so if you can just sit in on some research meetings and just sort of get exposed to the language, see the way people talk about things and the kinds of problems that are going on, that can be potentially another even lower barrier to entry and one that might allow you to go and hear a few different things, whether it's at Duke or somewhere else. - Right, and I would add to that also, there's lots of materials on the internet. There's an infinite array of information out there,
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and some of it's very nicely and highly curated, including I think some NOVA specials that have been done on materials and other reputable outfits, but there's also some really fun ones of people just playing around with materials and posting information and videos about this. So you can look around for that kind of information. That's really low bar to start learning that way. - Thank you, Cate, Stephen, both of you, for participating this evening, taking time out of your evening
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to share with us on materials science. It was a fun conversation. Really enjoyed it.
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