Topics addressed:

0:00 What’s easier, giving talks with slides or talks with no slides?

0:51 What are some strategies for avoiding non-words, like um, like, and so?

4:00 Is it calming to hold onto an object when giving a presentation?

5:42 What’s the best way to prepare for a Q&A session?

9:00 What level of complexity should you prepare your spoken remarks?

12:15 How do you get better at giving talks?

15:06 Is it possible to be too polished in your presentation style?

16:19 Are there strategies for giving effective talks over Zoom? How does it differ from giving talks in person?

21:31 How has your experience been giving talks over Zoom for more than a year?

In this episode, I respond to questions related to scientific writing, and coming up with new ideas in scientific research.

To what extent should we minimize jargon in scientific writing?

Is it acceptable to use literary techniques like metaphor in scientific writing?

If I have a lot of data for a single figure, how do I organize it so that the figure isn’t overwhelming?

Different readers are expecting to get different things from a paper. How do you organize the content, and what do you put in each section, from the title to the methods? (Credit to George Whitesides in my description of what should be in the first introductory paragraph of a paper.)

How do you write the abstract to draw the reader in? What’s the difference between the abstract and the introduction?

How do you select a research topic that combines separate disciplines?

Should you “follow your passion” or focus on developing skills? How do you know how your own skills can help inform the selection of a research topic?

Should one expect their skills and their passion to align?

This episode is a short conversation between me and my senior PhD  student, Andrew Kleinschmidt, who had recently suffered a brain injury. As part of his rehabilitation, one of his assignments was to conduct an interview about science. We covered some pretty existential topics as  well, including the question "if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, would you have done enough?"

One of my students interviewed me for a class on leadership. I was honored he chose me for this assignment. Here are some of the topics we covered:

What were some formative experiences that influenced your career trajectory?

In this episode, I share my thoughts on a variety of topics related to  starting out in an undergraduate or graduate research lab.  Whom should you ask for a letter of recommendation?  How can you spot bad work environments? What are the red flags?  How do you identify a positive fit?  When do you know if you should drop a bad project?  When applying to grad school, should I stay in the same field or try  something different?  How can you figure out what a lab is working on when you don’t yet  “speak the language”?  How much agency do undergrads typically have in choosing a project  within a research group?  Suppose you have a good idea of what you want to work on as an  undergraduate or graduate student. How do you find the labs doing the  work you want to do?

I did this introduction and interview with Prof. Ching W. Tang as part  of the 2019 Kyoto Prize Symposium at UC San Diego, delayed until 2021  because of COVID-19. It was a real honor to chat with him about  industrial research, the invention of the OLED, science in an  international context, and advice for rising scientists.

This is the full-length interview I did for an article in Chemistry World on science podcasts.

In this episode, I sat down with Prof. Daniela (Dani) Arias-Rotondo, Dr. Madison Fletcher, and Dr. Craig Fraser (absent: Dr. Monica Gill) on their creation, JAWS: Just Another [Chemistry] Webinar Series (https://jawschem.wixsite.com/home). Dani, Madison, and Craig discuss the origin of JAWS, its name, its mission, and the need for diverse voices to be heard among up-and-coming scientists.

Nanoengineering students peppered me with questions of all types, and I  responded with my wisdom, such as it is. Identities of the questioners  have been redacted. We covered the following topics.

How did you know you wanted to be a scientist? Why chemistry in particular? How are you trying to generate an inclusive community in the classroom during Covid? What aspects of remote work would you keep once life returns to normal? Did you develop any “Covid hobbies”? Are you working from home or remote? You mentioned that you work while taking walks by dictating problem sets into your phone. How does that work? Why did you start the podcast? What are your most successful podcast episodes? What episodes do you have coming up? Do you have any particular goals for the podcast? Tell us about the book you want to write? What have you learned about being a professor that you didn’t know before you started? Is there an opportunity cost to speaking with us now? How did you know you wanted to go into academia? Why did you enroll in the COVID vaccine trial? How do you come up with proposal ideas, especially as a student when you don’t know much about the topic? How does your group come up with project ideas for graduate students? What skills should engineering students try to pick up before starting their jobs? What have you learned as a manager? How do you get good work out of a team? Is that a piano behind you? How did you become a fan of classic Star Trek?

In his second appearance on the podcast, Brandon Marin (BS, Chemical  Engineering, USC; MS/PhD Chemical Engineering & Nanoengineering,  UCSD) describes his role as an R&D engineer at Intel. I learned a  lot from this very wide ranging interview.