79. CUREs with Dr. Mitch Anstey

[Music] What? Baconcake Nation and welcome back to the Chemistry Cake Online Podcast where chatting about chemistry has never been sweeter. Chemistry Cake is online and today airs our third episode in our Chemical Education season. In our prior episodes we got to chat with Dr. Lisa Eidl and Robin DeClerk about teaching chemistry to young minds. Today we will be chatting with a friend of mine who was previously on the show to talk about how to make better molecules for better batteries. Folks, if you would help me in giving a warm welcome back to my friend Dr. Mitch Anstey, Mitch thank you so much for joining me again today. How have you been doing since we last spoke? Hey, you're good to see you or hear you or talk with you. I've been doing pretty well. Things are not too bad. Vaccinated and ready to go. Oh, we love you. We still love that. That's so great to hear. And I'm glad that things are going pretty okay, yeah. How are you? I am also vaccinated. Very excited about that. Things are also going pretty okay on this end. And yeah, I'm very excited to chat with you today. Getting ready for summertime. That means summertime research too. Hopefully for most folks out there. Yes, I'm so excited for summertime research. I'm really excited about the research and what direction it's going to be going into. There have been some bumps in the road, but I'm sure we can navigate them. Yeah. That's the goal for every program. Yeah, that's so true. All right, well, let's dive right into it. So last time we spoke, we were talking about making better molecules for better batteries. And we also kind of nodded at how your lab is comprised solely of undergraduate students. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. So tell me more about how you run your lab. Because this is really interesting having a lab solely of undergrads. Yeah, it's interesting. Let's see. Why do you say it's interesting? It's interesting, primarily because it's something that I don't really hear much about. And so I think it's really, I think it's really cool to see undergrads in a research setting. And this is not something that you hear a lot about, right? Like most undergrads are mentored by a postdoc or a grad student. And so it's really not, it's not just undergrads. I asked that question because I had the same experience when I was a graduate student. And then as a staff scientist at a national lab of San D in national labs out in California. I don't think I understood the number of institutions that had solely an undergraduate population or institutions that operated with a majority of an undergraduate population in a research setting. Now that I'm kind of behind the curtain a little bit, I'm at Davidson College. We are a 2000 person school and no graduate program, but we still attempt to do high level research and bring that experience to students for all the reasons you can think about, which I'm sure we're going to talk about in a second. But I was just not aware because my whole experience as an undergraduate student and then as a graduate student was working in one of those real deal PhD program labs coming to Davidson College. There was there was both a learning curve for me as a mentor. There was also just sort of understanding that now I can ask questions, but being a mentor, I want the folks who work with me to be asking questions too. So maybe to finally get to your question, how do I run my laboratory? I try to give students the experience of being an independent scientist. And of course, as we say independent scientists, we don't really mean you're working alone that you're trying to ask and answer scientific questions. And that involves both understanding literature as well as understanding the limits of what your chemistry can provide, what experimental designs are possible. So at the end of it, I hope that my students really feel like they contributed to their own project. They moved their own project under their own weight and with guidance from me, but ultimately the fruits were in their own labor. That's so cool. So tell me what are some of the things that your undergraduates do? Like what is the research focus? I feel free of plug for the last and organic battery science discussion we had where we talked about just I'm a synthetic and organic lab. But we are focused on battery science. We're looking at electrochemistry, redox activity of small molecules. And that can be in all sorts of different types of media. But we are really looking at redox flow batteries as one of the test cases for this molecular redox activity. When a student comes into my lab, they pretty much have access to everything that any graduate student in a synthetic and organic lab would have. We've got glove boxes, we've got potentiostats, we've got shling lines, we've got rotovaps, you know, everything in between. And that is paid for mostly by the institution and then by the grants that I bring in, I can and do compete for large grants with our one institutions. But there are certain pots of money for undergraduate focused institutions as well. That's so cool. So how many undergrads are in your lab currently? Currently, I only have two. I'm actually on sabbatical right now and I really tried to be nice to myself and let me focus on working on my teaching, the various different aspects of me as a classroom instructor. But there are all sorts of reasons why I just couldn't stay away from from the laboratory and have my students be a part of that experience. So both of these students are continuing on from previous years. One of them is, well, both of them are graduating seniors and I want to say, I mean, one of them started when they were a first year. And then the other started as a sophomore. And we've just kind of been working on and off together for the past many years. So this was kind of senior year senior thesis, wanted to wrap things up, see what we could get out as a publication because they're either thinking about medical school or they're thinking about professional development of the sort. So that's that's where we're at right now with those two. But yeah, on any other any other year, I'm probably in somewhere between a group of two students to a group of six students. Yeah, that's a pretty sizable group, I'd say. Are they all working on the same project or are they all working on different aspects of a similar theme? I usually, well, when I began, this was a part of my learning curve. I really, maybe I tried to double down on this idea of being an independent scientist. I had a lot of different project ideas and I doled them out to students. And they really were working on very different molecules, very different aspects of battery science, whether it was flow batteries or whether it was Redox mediation for lithium or metal air batteries. But I did find that progress was slow for anyone student and really didn't matter about ability level, but progress was slow from a time standpoint. So both the work during a semester is pretty short, maybe 10 hours per week because it's kind of a classroom situation or a class situation that they're taking research with me. Or during the summer, I really am not going to have them doing standard graduate student hours, which I maybe when I say standard, I don't mean a normal work week, I think about what I had felt that I had to do. When I asked my students to do 40 hours and it's a 10 week summer. So there's just not going to be as much as much stuff coming out. So I have since moved around the research group to be much more collaborative to have students working on maybe the same molecule, but maybe one is going to be working on the oxidation side of that molecule and the other person is going to be working on the reductive side. What can we do with those two different kinds of compounds, their complimentary, they can work together. The students can work together and results can kind of feed off of one another to help propel things. things a little bit more quickly. So I've kind of moved towards a much more team-based approach than I had been when I first began my research career here at Davidson. I love that. I do love collaborative research. I do know that, like, for example, in the lab that I'm in, the Reinhardt lab, the subgroup that I'm part of is our melanin subgroup. And so we are all researching melanin, both natural and synthetic, but we're all taking a different approach to studying the system. So I take a more magnetochemical approach. Someone else is looking at the impedance spectroscopy. Another person is making films. I believe actually two of those two members are making films, and I'm making nanoagrogates. So very interesting stuff. I also love the collaboration amongst us. We can really jump ideas around because we're all familiar with the system. So it does propel things forward, like you said. Yeah, absolutely. You know the thing I wrote down that I really wanted to make sure I highlight. So it was greatly brought that up. It's-- there are feelings of camaraderie that I think can be strengthened in a research environment that don't necessarily happen in a classroom environment. In most cases, individual successes in the research laboratory are still group successes. The things that you learn about magnetochemistry could potentially be useful to somebody else, either right now in the present or in the future. And so there really isn't individual success anymore. It's group success. However, I think in a classroom situation, a great test performance for one person often remains an individual success. It doesn't necessarily propel the group forward. And I think that's one of the biggest changes in motivation for doing research versus classroom education. There's this group-net motivation that really helps to keep things going. That's so cool. Wow. I'm just sitting here and thinking-- I'm digesting everything that was just said. Because one, I agree with you. I do agree that the success of the group really does drive science forward. And I do love the idea of-- I actually just love collaborative science. It's one of my favorite things, I think, because it takes a village, right? It takes a village to get science to where we want it to be. And someone else's ideas could help propel your project forward. And some of your ideas can help propel someone else's project forward. And it's just this edification-- an intellectual edification of one another that I really appreciate. So this is so cool. Yeah, you know, I think you probably had a similar undergraduate experience to me. You took a lecture course that had a companion laboratory course, right? Yeah. And that companion laboratory course was meant to be the exercising of experimental design, getting your hands dirty in the laboratory, really seeing how the science played out. But often, the key motivation for doing laboratory science was missing. And that was exploration and answering unknown questions. And one of the, I guess, current strategies to try to regain that idea in a classroom kind of environment are something called cures. It's a course-based undergraduate research experience. Have you been in one or worked within a cure before? I have not worked within a cure, or I have had experience with them, but I do know what they are. And I learned a lot about them. Yeah. I think it's a great way to turn a class into a collaborative research experience. So yeah, so if any of the listeners are out there who like this idea, check it out, acronym, Cure, C-U-R-E. But another good resource that I might want to point out for folks is the Council for Undergraduate Research, which has almost a very similar acronym, C-U-R. But it's a professional organization devoted to getting undergraduate students involved with research, whether it's funding, whether it's the day-to-day work. That's-- it's been a great resource for me, for sure. And I'm grateful for the folks that pointed out to me. That's so cool. So I have one last question with regards to this. So why did you want to start a lab of this fashion? Because we talked about how most undergraduate research is being mentored under a postdoc or a graduate student. And so to be able to be your own mentor or mentor other undergrads, as an undergraduate, is a bit different. Is it different and perhaps less common? Why did I want to do it? I mean, I think-- I think it's the same exact reason that I left my old job as a staff scientist, and it became a faculty member here at a place like Davidson. I certainly have really, really fun memories of my undergraduate experience as a chemistry major. I loved my research group. I loved the group. But I also really enjoyed the mentorship I received from both the students over there, but ultimately the faculty member, Dean Harman, at University of Virginia. It was a profound experience that in many ways steered me ultimately back to this. And maybe in a way, this is me repaying all that wonderful good will that I received. And to be able to provide this laboratory experience and see the students connect things like their vapor diffusion crystallizations to Raoul's law. I mean, that's pretty cool from a professor standpoint. You really feel like you did something in Gen Chem Way back when. But then they see suddenly, wow, I didn't ever think I would need Raoul's law as an inorganic synthetic chemist. And suddenly there it is. And that's the light bulb that research can illuminate, the connection between reality and the concepts. And it's hard to do that even in a companion laboratory. And it's definitely very hard to do in the short few moments you have in front of the class. But when you get that long time together in a laboratory, that's when all the magic can really happen. Oh, I love that. That's so sweet. What a sweet chat, sweet friend. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Unfortunately, though, it does look like we are nearing the end of our chat. And I know I've already asked you this before. But for the new listeners at home who are just tuning in, I do have one last question. The essential question for this discussion. Are you ready for it again? I'm ready. Again. So remind me, what is your favorite cake flavor and why? Ice cream cake. Ice cream cake. 100% no doubt. Yeah, I remember this. And I remember the one year that you were like a chocolate cake. What? No. It has to be ice cream cake. Yeah, I remember that. I remember. I remember for the folks at home who wanted to know what Dr. Mitch Anstey's favorite cake flavor was and haven't had the chance to listen to his previous episode, which 100% you should go listen to, which you want to learn more about what his students do in the lab is ice cream cake. And you know what? It may not have a sponge component, but we're saying that ice cream cake is indeed a cake. So sweet friend, this was truly a phenomenal and very learn full discussion. And I really enjoyed our chat. I definitely learned so much. Yeah, thank you very much. It was really a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for joining me today. And to the listeners at home, thank you for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed the time as much as we did. If you would like to follow the many adventures of Dr. Mitch Anstey, you can follow him on Twitter @theyneedacrain, which will be in the description. And you can also visit Mitch's website, MitchAnstey.org, which will also be linked in the description. Of course, if you would like to have a board of the hype train, chew, chew, you are welcome to follow me on Twitter. at chemistry cake. And folks, that's all we've got for you today. This is your friendly reminder to stay hydrated, to keep the hype alive, and to edify our village. Remember to be kind to others and to yourselves. Thanks for tuning in, Cake Nation. This is chemistry cake, sending off. [Music]