🌟 We Got the INK: 3D Nano printing with Lisa McElwee-White: Episode 199 of Under the Microscope 🔬

What to Expect:

In this episode, Lisa McElwee-White delves into her innovative research on 3D nanoprinting. Lisa shares her journey from studying chemistry to leading pioneering research at the University of Florida. She discusses her work on developing new methods for 3D printing at the nanoscale and their potential applications.

About the Guest:

🌟 Key Takeaways from This Episode:

• 3D Nanoprinting: Developing new methods for 3D printing at the nanoscale.
• Career Journey: From studying chemistry to pioneering nanotechnology research.
• Favorite Experiment: Creating complex nanostructures using innovative printing techniques.

🔬 In This Episode, We Cover:

Lisa’s Research :

Lisa’s research focuses on developing new methods for 3D nanoprinting. By creating complex nanostructures using innovative printing techniques, she aims to unlock new possibilities in various fields, including electronics, medicine, and materials science.

Lisa’s Career Journey :

Lisa’s academic journey began with a Bachelor’s in Chemistry. She pursued her passion for nanotechnology, leading her to conduct pioneering research at the University of Florida. Her diverse experiences have enriched her research perspectives and expertise.

Lisa’s Favourite Research Experiment :

Lisa’s favorite experiment involves creating complex nanostructures using 3D nanoprinting techniques. By developing new methods for printing at the nanoscale, she aims to explore the potential applications of these structures in various industries.

Life as a Scientist- Beyond the Lab :

Lisa values the collaborative nature of scientific research and enjoys engaging with the global scientific community. She is passionate about teaching and mentoring the next generation of scientists and values the opportunity to work in a cutting-edge field.

Lisa’s 3 Wishes

1. Increased funding for research: Lisa wishes for more financial support to advance innovative research projects.
2. Greater collaboration between researchers: She advocates for stronger partnerships to enhance knowledge sharing and collaborative efforts in research.
3. Improved public understanding of scientific research: Lisa emphasizes the importance of public awareness and support for scientific advancements.

Lisa’s Time on @RealSci_Nano :

Lisa will be taking over the RealSci_Nano Twitter account to share her research on 3D nanoprinting. Followers can expect to learn about the innovative techniques and materials her work focuses on, as well as insights into the future of nanotechnology.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. My name is Pranoti and I’m the host of Under the Microscope. And today we have with us Lisa McColvey White, who is a Crow professor and chair, department chair at the University of Florida in the US. And I’m totally going to ask her, where does the Crow professor come from? So Lisa, welcome to Under the Microscope.

Lovely to have you. How are you? I’m great, thanks. And the Crow professorship is an endowed professorship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida. And this came from a gift from one of our alumni, Colonel Alan Crow, who left the department a rather sizable bequest in his will, and so when he passed away, the money came to the department and we put it in an endowment, and the income from the endowment funds two professorships in chemistry, along with some undergraduate and graduate fellowships as well.

Wow, that’s really cool, and what is, why did he, [00:01:00] thank you, Colonel Crow, of course, um, but why, like, did he have, like, why? I mean, I mean, honestly, we don’t know. Usually money that’s left to the department is subject to a grift, a gift agreement through the university of Florida foundation. But this was not this merely popped up in his will.

And when he passed away, the money came to the department with some instructions, uh, but no real strings attached to it. And this is what we did with the money. Oh, that is so cool. I hope more and more people do that. Yeah. Yes. Interestingly enough, the other Crow professor is Charles Martin, who works in the area of nanotechnology as well.

Nice. Okay, we need to get Charles as well. Another Crow professor on the podcast. For sure. Excellent. Excellent. So Lisa, um, tell me about your research. Tell me, tell me, tell me about your research. So what do you do? First of all, your research is funded by the National Science [00:02:00] Foundation and by the Semiconductor Research Corporation.

Yes. Yes. Okay. Um, so my group has a really strange expertise. We make precursors for the deposition of Well, either 3D deposition nanostructures or thin films of materials and as synthetic chemists, we have a strange, uh, portfolio, right? So we arrange the chemistry that is involved in all these techniques.

And so because People who do depositions, especially the 3D nanoprinting, have a different skill set, right? They’re usually engineers or applied physicists or material scientists. The ability to synthesize chemical precursors across a variety of techniques is almost unique to my group. There are a lot of people who do a single technique [00:03:00] and that’s what they do.

But Since our expertise is really mechanistic chemistry and precursor development, we collaborate with people who do a lot of different techniques, either regular chemical vapor deposition, which is a thermal process, right? So the chemistry is run by heat. Right. We collaborate with people who do photo assisted deposition, so the energy for running the chemistry is now light.

We also collaborate with people who do electron beam and ion beam deposition. But we’re the chemists in the room. Oh, wow. Okay, okay. Wait, wait, wait. Okay. So it’s 3D printing. Or printing or deposition. Right. Nanoscale or atomic scale? Well, let’s call it molecular or nanoscale and Yeah, sure. You would be the go-to group if I want.

Uh, not the ink, but Yeah. Kind of like the ink for the 3D. Yeah. Ink works. Yeah. So, okay, so this ink, Ooh. So it can be any kind of ink, it can be like metal or. Is there like the only polymer or like, okay, now tell me. It can be done with, with anything [00:04:00] that you can volatilize into the gas phase. So the trick is always be able to get the compound evaporated and moved into where you’re doing the deposition.

Right. And so if you tell me I want to deposit, say, ruthenium, right? So what we can do is come up with ruthenium compounds that are volatile to transport, but also, at least in theory, do the right chemistry to give you ruthenium under your reaction conditions. So do you have light? Do you have ions? Do you have heat?

So we can work with that and we understand the mechanisms by which our chemical compounds decompose under all those conditions. And we can give you something that is at least say mostly ruthenium if ruthenium is what you want. Oh, that is so cool. Oh my God. Cause back in the day when I was an active researcher, I also did a chemical weapon deposition of graphene, but I also did a lot of like [00:05:00] Sputtering and, uh, all these kinds of, you know, physical vapor deposition, not the chemical vapor deposition.

But I guess you, you focus on the, the, the, the chemical vapor deposition. So, um, iron based. So magneton sputtering is. Not the one that your group is not for what we’re we’re trying to do. So for example, if you want to make you want to 3D print a small metal structure, right? And you want to do that with an electron beam, you’re not going to want to sputter because if you sputter, the material goes everywhere.

It’s wonderful. Things coding substrates, for example, right? But if you want to 3D print, you need to spatially control where the chemistry occurs. And so one of the ways in which this is done is to use a scanning electron microscope. And so the electron beam is tightly focused. for imaging, right? You’re imaging small areas, right?

And if you think about it, as you, uh, image with a focused electron beam, you’re sweeping, say, you’re sweeping a pattern left or right, up and down, right? But if what you have is chemistry that [00:06:00] works when it interacts with the electron beam, then if you imagine your electron beam is sweeping out a pattern, it’s rastering, you turn the beam on and off.

While the chemistry is in place, right? Your molecules are in place. It’s either going to deposit or not. Oh my God. And think about how a 3D printer works with polymers, right? You’re putting plastic, either put it down or not, as you sweep a pattern with the printhead. Right. We’re doing exactly the same thing with gas phase precursor and an electron beam.

And since the electron beam is focused to nanometer size, You’re basically printing as the electron beam goes on and off, but printing on the nanoscale. Oh my god, that is so cool. That’s magic. Oh my god. It is magic, right? And so I have a slide. Oh, wow. I have a slide in my presentations that shows, for example, a buckyball.

Uh huh. Right. Printed out of purple plastic with a printhead and polymer. Right. And compared to a nanoscale buckyball of platinum, that’s been [00:07:00] printed on the nanometer scale with an electron beam and a microscope. Oh my God. Oh my God. That is so now this is a podcast, which is only, only sound, right? Miss my slide.

I’ll send it to you. Please send it to me because, uh, podcast is also available on YouTube. So I can plug the, uh, picture. I can show the picture there. Oh my God. That is so cool. That is so cool. That is so cool. That is so cool. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. So, okay. Okay. So you can make a buckyball. So I’m assuming you can make like, what is the toughest structure to make a 3d print at a nanoscale with a scanning electron microscope.

From your perspective. Okay, so here I’m speaking to my collaborators because we’re the chemistry end and they’re the printing end. But if you think of something that’s shaped where there’s a vertical piece and then a horizontal piece comes off. Uh huh. So shape, angle, or a letter gamma in the Greek alphabet.

Right. That’s really hard. To get the [00:08:00] horizontal piece without it sagging or going off at the wrong angle. So I hear from my collaborators. Right, yeah, of course. You have, you have, you’re, you’re experienced. You’re a chemist. Precursor, and they are the ones who are. Oh, that is so cool. Oh my God. That is so cool.

I’m so glad we have you on the podcast. So, um, tell me about, tell me about how did, how did this happen? How did Lisa become the crow professor and department chair at the University of Florida? How did that happen in this like 3d?

I have the standard academic pedigree, right? You know, BS from the University of Kansas, PhD from Caltech, postdoc at Stanford, became a Stanford faculty member, moved to the University of Florida, but that’s not the real story. You can read that off my CV, right? We want the real stuff. So the real stuff is I actually went to the University of Kansas to become a [00:09:00] pre med, a medical doctor.

And my academic advisor said, Oh, you should start doing research in chemistry, right? If you’re going to be a chemistry major. And I got into the lab. I did my first undergraduate research in the labs of Kristen Bowman James, who was a rare woman faculty member. in a chemistry department in 1975. And I fell in love with chemical research and never looked back.

I never even took the biology courses that would have led to a pre medical track into medical school. Just no. Um, and so I switched over later on to work in a different lab doing organic chemistry. I love mechanisms, and Kristen Bowman James is more of a structural person. So I started looking at, of all things, peroxide decomposition, went to graduate school, did mechanisting work, organic chemistry, right, no metals at all, and As a postdoc, I started to look at [00:10:00] organometallic mechanisms because in, oh, should I confess the year?

Yes, 1983, almost nothing was known about organometallic mechanisms, but I still think about things as a physical organic chemist, right? What happens in the reaction? I think about bond strengths, you know, what are the weakest bonds? How does the reaction go? And I started to do that as an independent academic, I was looking at organometallic photochemistry, and just kept looking at mechanisms until one day I was talking to someone after a seminar, uh, it was a seminar about chemical vapor deposition with tungsten hexacarbonyl depositing tungsten, right?

I thought about some compounds we were making for totally other reasons. which had metal nitrogen multiple bonds. I thought, you know, if you did the same thing, maybe you could make tungsten nitride out of this. So I called a friend in chemical engineering [00:11:00] and asked him, is tungsten nitride good for anything?

And there was this long pause and an expletive at the other end of the phone, which I won’t repeat for your podcast. And he said, do you know how to deposit tungsten nitride? I said, maybe. And it turns out that that was the exact moment when chip manufacturers were moving from Aluminum metallization to copper.

So metallization is the wiring in a computer chip. Uh huh. And it turns out that copper migrates all over everywhere, uh, if you don’t confine it in what’s, with what’s called a diffusion barrier in your chip. Mm hmm. And copper is a mess where aluminum is not. Mm hmm. And so tungsten nitride is one of the candidate materials for barrier materials for chip manufacturing.

And I had no clue. Mm hmm. Right, that this could actually be something valuable. This is why you talk to other. And he and I started a collaboration which lasted I don’t know for 20 [00:12:00] years and probably 50 or 60 papers on chemical vapor deposition of metal nitride films. Oh, wow. And this technique eventually moved to my lab.

When he retired, we stole all of his equipment out of chemical engineering with permission. We moved it all up the hill. We do this in my own lab, uh, regular CVD at this point. Okay. So then we started looking at precursors for CVD because we knew how to do mechanism based stuff. And then other people started talking to me like, Can you do electron beam precursors?

And my response was pretty much like the, like the nitrides, like there’s electron beam deposition, what? And, but we got drawn into it. Uh, same thing. with photochemical deposition, although we did know something about photochemistry, we didn’t know you could do deposition with it. And so all of my friends have drawn me into these other areas collaboratively.

And then all of a sudden we became the go to people for any technique you wanted, right? Because [00:13:00] we were willing to try these things that we thought they were weird, but they sounded interesting. And, and that’s where all the electron beam deposition and ion beam deposition works similarly except with ions instead of electrons.

Right. And now we have this whole portfolio of precursors and here we are. Wow, that is, oh my god. So, how did, okay, wow, wow, wow. That’s quite a journey. So you wanted to be a medical doctor, or? Yes, uh, yeah, decades ago. Decades ago. But I’m so happy you did not become the medical doctor, and you are rather I am too.

You know, I have died of COVID, right? So as a medical doctor, my age. Um, so yeah, so it’s really been a kind of a random walk through science, but the dots all connect, right? From one place to another. Yeah. But I ended up in a very different scientific space than the one I expected to be in. Yeah, I can imagine.

I mean, I did not know that [00:14:00] there is, I mean, of course there is like, I’ve, I’d heard about the nano, uh, 3d printing with, uh, with, with, uh, with electron microscopes, but I didn’t think that, of course you need a precursor. And of course, of course. And so what was that? and before people like me got involved in this, is that people who wanted to do electron beam deposition bought chemical vapor deposition precursors.

Right? So there’s a wonderful story about platinum, all these platinum objects where, um, if you’re, your chemistry buff right the go to precursor for chemical vapor deposition of platinum is methyl cyclopentadienyl platinum trimethyl, but that’s nine carbons for every platinum atom. But you can buy that commercially available, it’s volatile, because people use it for CBD, and They do, they use it for electron beam deposition, but the CVD always has an additional reactant.

It has either an oxidant like ozone [00:15:00] or O2, oxygen, or it has a reductant, hydrogen, right? And it turns out that the chemistry of ozone and the chemistry of electron beams. are not the same at all, right? And so you take this fabulous commercially available CVD precursor and you irradiate it with an electron beam and you get material that the stoichiometry is platinum into eight carbons.

So you lose only one of the carbons. And so what you mostly make is Nanocrystalline platinum embedded in a matrix of carbon. Oh, wow. And this is what they call platinum deposits. Sorry, guys. That’s not what that is. And so I, I got involved when someone said, can you design a precursor that will have higher platinum content than, oh, you know, platinum C8.

So let’s start with not having that ring with the six. Carbons at the top. And this is how we got drawn [00:16:00] into this project. And so we had to start worrying about, well, what does an electron beam do to molecules, right? It’s not what heat does to them. It’s not what ozone does to them. And so then the mechanistic chemistry started coming into play.

Nice. Nice. Oh, wow. That is so cool. And I was actually also wondering, how, how are you, I mean, you, you, your group is like the expert in creating precursors out of thin air. Of course, I’m dramatizing. Um, but I mean, Yeah. That’s how magic is. Um, and I was wondering where does the semiconductor industry comes in?

But when you talked about your journey and this postdoc of yours and like, eh, what, so that makes sense Now, , I could tell, I could tell you what they’re paying us to do now. Yeah. But, um, in terms of the, uh, electron and iron beam chemistry. Mm-Hmm. , the ability to write metal line. on the nanoscale comes up a couple places in the semiconductor industry.

One [00:17:00] of them is in the, the repair of masks that are used for photolithography, right? So chip manufacturing involves a step where they shine light through a photo mask and develop a pattern on the chip. And of course, When these masks are defective, they will reproduce the defect on every wafer, which you don’t really want to do.

And so there’s a process called mask repair, in which the masks for photolithography are imaged by scanning electron microscopy. Errors are cut out using an ion beam etch process. And then the lines get It can be rewritten correctly using either electron or ion beam deposition of metals on the photomask.

Absolutely, yeah. So that’s one place. The other place where it turns up is in what’s called circuit edit, where you wouldn’t want to do this in manufacturing, but if you’re prototyping you want one chip instead of a million of them. If you discover that you really don’t like which [00:18:00] direction your metal lines are running, you can do the same thing.

You can etch out areas with an ion beam and then rewrite metal into the areas for, for prototyping chips. Um, what they’re interested in in our chemistry is what’s called area selective deposition, where you lay down materials in one spot but not another. It’s an alternative to lithography. And we are looking at processes where you can use light to generate reactive species from precursors and then they react with A substrate surface in one place, but not another, and you can use that to make patterns of metals, for example.

So this is a direct write process instead of write, etch, polish, etch, write, you know, all of what’s usually seen in standard chip manufacturing. Right, it’s basically printing [00:19:00] at nanoscale. It’s, it’s literally. Yes, this is skipping, saving the time, saving the material that you need, the mass, the electron beam, the iron beam, the bunch of chemicals, all of that.

Right, right. Polishing, depositing, etching, that sort of thing. So this would be a direct process to put metal patterns down. Aha. So does that mean that our electronics will get cheaper? Of course not. No, I mean, they might, right? Because manufacturing always scales. But I was thinking about anything that involves money, right?

Yeah, that is true. But yeah, that sounds, that sounds really, really cool. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Okay. So Lisa, it’s it, you have already told me. So many projects and so many stories, uh, which are so cool. But if I have to, if I have to like put you on the spot and ask you, okay, give me one, uh, research project that you’re most proud of.

And I know this is like a difficult, it’s like choosing, asking, okay, which child is your favorite? Oh, I love them all. My children as well as the projects. I think the [00:20:00] one that’s most fun to talk about. is electron and ion beam chemistry, the 3d printing on the nanoscale. Because if I give talks to chemists, most likely they’ve never heard of this and it’s the weirdest thing they’ve heard all week.

But the visuals are so stunning, right? You have all these images of little 3d nano printed things. And you can say, Oh, we developed chemistry that does this better because the people who can make these fabulous objects are not chemists. It’s, it’s not what they do, right? They buy precursors or get them from their collaborators like us.

And so it’s just, it’s really fun to talk about it because if I talk about it in a nano audience or a material science audience, they’re amazed by the chemistry. They’ve used synthetic chemistry as black magic, which it only sort of is. And if you talked about it, talk about it to chemists, they’re fascinated by the printing and the objects because that’s outside their area of expertise.

So it’s really a [00:21:00] project that when you talk about it, it has something for everybody to be amazed about. Yeah, absolutely. So 3D printing. With an iron beam or electron microscope, which either one we talked mostly about electron beam, but iron beams can do the same thing, right? And so when people who know anything about iron beams, they normally think of etching, right?

Yeah, either etching a surface or cutting out a sample for TM. Yeah, they think of it as Okay. destructive process, right? But you can actually deposit with ion beam as well. It’s a similar setup as electron beam chemistry, but now you have a gas dose or two and a focused ion beam, a fib for those people who are familiar with it.

And you can deposit things in that way, except here’s what’s interesting about ion beam deposition is you always get sputtering, etching, concomitant with the deposition. So it’s two competing [00:22:00] processes. You have deposition of material and etching of material. And if lucky, you can purify your deposit as you go, because if the impurities selectively etch or selectively sputter, the material you end up at the end with is purer than what you get with electron beam chemistry, where you don’t get really that much etching.

That, that makes sense. Yes, that makes sense. I only knew, I mean of course for fib, like in the destructive way, the ion beam, but like molecular beam epitaxy, there also they use ion beam. Molecular beam epitaxy, uh, where it’s like you pull out like the silicon crystal or I don’t know, whichever crystal. But that no, but that method is different.

I think there you start with your starting is like this one crystal and then you pull it out. Okay. No, that’s a different thing. Sorry. Yeah. There’s a whole bunch of different techniques depending on what you start with. That’s [00:23:00] a whole podcast on just explaining the differences between techniques.

Absolutely. So, okay. Let me ask you this, which beam is your favorite? like the light, uh, ion or electron. So these projects all kind of run in different ways. I think at the moment I’m kind of interested in the ion beam chemistry because it’s newer to my group. We started with electron beam precursors and then now we’ve gotten into comparing electrons and ions with the same precursor.

Ah, that’s Kind of an interesting project to me, because that gets into the real mechanism of what’s going on. And so you can look at things like, for example, electrons come in with a lot of energy, but basically not much momentum because there’s no mass to them, right? But ions come in with this big, huge ion bombarding your, your molecules.

And so you can look at things like does the mass of the ion [00:24:00] matter? Yes, it does. Does the energy of the incoming ion matter? Yes, it does. Yes. Can you compare what’s going on with electrons? Yes, you can. And so you get a lot of really interesting mechanistic information out of comparing the two techniques.

Right. So bringing in the ion. This has been very interesting for me. Ah, okay. That’s that. Okay. Fair enough. That makes sense. And now I’m interested in iron beam more as well. Thank you, Lisa. Great. I had my answer that it’s the electron beam, but great. Now I’m interested in the iron beam as well. You biased my opinion, but I mean, um, in my experience with the electron beams, uh, there is a lot of, uh, let’s say.

A deposition when I remember back in the day when we were doing SEM TM or, uh, any other sort of, uh, as soon as like, the longer you stay, the higher the energy of your electron beam is the stronger the electron beam is the more deposition of carbon from this vacuum environment you will get. Yes. Yes. Uh, you’ve just [00:25:00] discovered FIBID, focused electron beam induced deposition, accidentally, which was the way it was discovered, really.

It was discovered during imaging experiments that people were getting carbon crud on their sample, which is from the background hydrocarbons in the chamber. Exactly. Exactly. That’s, that’s it right there. But then, but how do you then use the electron beam? Like you must really have to do the magic to the precursor that you have, because in my head, if it is a chemical precursor, then it will just be, my God, there would be a lot of hydrocarbon, wouldn’t it, wouldn’t there?

There will, there will. And so one of the interesting things that we do is, We, this is the royal we with our collaborators. Compare what happens to a precursor in a working microscope with a gas doser where you’re at high vacuum and not ultra high vacuum. [00:26:00] What happens to the same precursors with electrons on a surface in ultra high vacuum, which is much cleaner.

Exactly. Yeah. And the answer is absolutely. Always that the carbon content will be higher in a real microscope because of the chamber background. And you know that you’re getting chamber background because you can make a precursor that has no nitrogen in the precursor. And if you do the deposition in an SEM, you’ll see nitrogen in the deposit because there’s nitrogen in the chamber background.

Yes. Yes, absolutely. So when somebody says, can you make a perfect precursor to make perfect metal deposits, right? 100 percent metal. My answer is always no, especially not if you’re going to use it in your dirty microscope chamber. That is not my carbon. Well, some of it is my carbon, but some of it is not my carbon.

And we’ve looked at this with the same precursor in different environments, and there, there is always background deposition. Okay, alright. If you want pure metal [00:27:00] deposits, but it’s not going to be perfect. No, it’s never going to be perfect, but it’s still better than using, uh, or creating the, the platinum nanostructures with this other precursor, which is the With a huge amount of carbon in the precursor.

Exactly. So we do know that. Right. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Now that makes sense. Awesome. Awesome. That makes sense. So, uh, Lisa, it’s quite, uh, clear to me that you love the research part of being a scientist and being a professor. I mean, it’s just like, I love that. But what else do you like about being a scientist? I love working with students.

Okay. So if you have the kind of faculty position that I have, uh, especially as a department head, you don’t have time to do experiments with your own hands. And so what you really are is a teacher of students how to do research. And so at first, of course, you tell them, do this, do that, right? Because they’re inexperienced, they don’t realize But there’s a fabulous moment when the light goes on for the student and suddenly their ideas about their project are better than yours.

And I have [00:28:00] never had a problem with teaching students who are smarter than I am, who have better ideas about the project, because if you’re training them correctly. You get that, right? And I would certainly hate to think that I personally in the acme of this field, eek, that’s awful. I should be training people who can do it better than I can.

Yeah. And so I, that is one of my favorite things about this is when the light goes on and it’s their project instead of mine. Uh, that’s, that’s such a, that’s so nice to hear and it’s very heartwarming. And yeah, I can. Imagine that that moment where it’s like, yeah, you got it. You got it. Wow, that’s a really good idea.

You should do that. You should do that. That’s really good. Wow. Yeah, that is a good point. We, I can tell you, we have never had this on the podcast. You are the first, uh, yes, we had like a hundred guests on this podcast, but we Have we never had this answer? Of course we have had the answer that yeah, I like to be a mentor, I like to work with students, and da da da da, but this particular, to this [00:29:00] detail, ah, This is you’re absolutely right.

I love that. I love that. So Lisa, it sounds to me that your research experience has been wonderful because I feel like we only talked about the highlights of your career, but of course, of course, of course. Um, but if you have three wishes to improve your research experience, what would you ask for? And they can be anything.

Okay. Ask for a coffee machine for all I care, but Hey, I can’t miss anything. Okay. I’m not promising anything here. Okay. Three wishes, go. Well, I’d like to have more time to work on it. As a department head, my time is fragmented. And so getting, getting time to sit down and really think about things in a meaningful way is hard to achieve.

Um, I, yes, I would like that. So maybe I should get rid of my administrative job. Wait, what? Um, my department has almost 500 people on the payroll. if you include the graduate students. So it’s a large administrative task, and we have a good administrative structure. There are a lot of professional staff who do the, so many of the things I don’t want to do.

Okay. But it’s, it’s [00:30:00] still extremely time consuming. So there is that. Um, The other thing that I would like to have is people would give me research funding that I didn’t have to write grant proposals for. There are people who tell me that they love to write grant proposals, but I used to get down and think that is.

What’s other I so personally I hate to write grant proposals, I just absolutely hate it. It’s a good thing that I percentage wise and moderately successful so that I don’t have to spend all my time writing unsuccessful. I don’t, I don’t bat 1000 as they say in baseball I don’t get 100 percent you know, but I do pretty well.

So, I utterly hate that. Um, So, and then the last thing is. It would be really more time to work with students, which is kind of the same first answer again, but I love to work directly with students. And as as a department chair. I don’t teach in the classroom. That’s the one thing that goes away out of my schedule, but I do have a fairly large research group for somebody in this position.

I have 14 graduate students and four undergraduates who work in my [00:31:00] group. So I’d like to have more time to actually work directly with students. And that, that time has gone down as I’ve become an administrator as well. Very realistic wishes. I want to say they are realistic, even if I know they’re not, because we would, I think we would continue to have to write grant proposals.

And for some reason, that’s really sad. Yeah, that’s really sad and I really I agree with you. I think people who say that they enjoy writing grant proposals. They are psychos. There’s something wrong there. They may enjoy thinking about the project. But the actual writing part, no, no, no. And then you need like recommendation letter, then you need the budget plan.

And then, uh, no, no, no, not doing that. No, absolutely not. But no, all three very realistic. Quote, uh, wishes. I hope they come true. Um, and a better coffee pot would be good too. There we go. Of course, coffee, coffee is always there. Absolutely. Okay. So I hope all three of your wishes come true. I hope your admin work.

Load [00:32:00] goes down. Uh, and you only do the things that you actually enjoy because there are some parts of admin that you probably do enjoy. I don’t know. I do. I like hiring people. I like hiring faculty. That’s interviewing and hiring. Exactly. I don’t like all of the other bits.

Let’s talk about that. Hopefully next time you’re on the podcast and yes, you’re coming again, Lisa. That’s happening for sure. Hopefully by then, uh, you can give us an update on all of your three wishes, um, how it has improved. Let’s just put it all out in the universe. Great wishes. I hope, I really hope, I genuinely hope they do come true, uh, to not 100%.

But maybe 95%. That’s okay. This has been wonderful, Lisa, but before I let you go and do your thing, be it admin, be it science, be it, uh, uh, supervising the, the, the students or writing a grant proposal, what can the followers expect in the week that you are taking over the Real Scientist Nano Twitter account?

Ah, well, Early in the week, I thought I would introduce them to my research group, [00:33:00] kind of a little bit of what we do. And then I was going to cycle through the project, kind of one at a time, and explain a little bit, as much as you can on Twitter. I’m not going to write long threads. Um, but I can come up with some visuals as a photo to go with it, and maybe reference to a paper every now and then.

We’ve written some review articles on some of these things that people could go look at if they’re interested in the deep dive into any of these things. Uh huh. Uh huh. Okay. All right. So we are going to get like an introduction and all different kinds of, uh, magical. I’m not going to let go of that word.I still think your research is magical. It’s just. Wow. Uh, and I can’t wait to read the review articles that you’re going to plug and learn more about your research. Thank you very much, Lisa, for taking the time. This has been lovely. Looking forward to having you on Real Science Nano. My [00:34:00] pleasure.

Podcast title – we got the INK – Nano 3D printing