🌟 High Pressure and Nanodiamonds with Jodie Bradby: Episode 202 of Under the Microscope 🔬

What to Expect:

In this episode, Jodie Bradby shares her innovative research on high pressure physics and nanodiamonds. Jodie discusses her journey from studying physics in Australia to becoming a professor and her work on creating new materials using high pressure techniques.

About the Guest:

🌟 Key Takeaways from This Episode:

• High Pressure Techniques: Jodie’s research involves using high pressure to create new materials, including nanodiamonds.
• Career Journey: From studying physics in Australia to becoming a professor and researcher in high pressure physics.
• Favourite Experiment: Using diamond anvil cells to create new forms of carbon and silicon.

🔬 In This Episode, We Cover:

Jodie’s Research :

Jodie’s research focuses on using high pressure techniques to create new materials. By applying pressures similar to those found in the Earth’s crust, she can create materials like nanodiamonds and new forms of silicon with unique properties.

Jodie’s Career Journey :

Jodie’s academic journey began with a Bachelor’s in Physics in Australia. She pursued her passion for high pressure physics, leading her to her current role as a professor at the Australian National University, where she specializes in creating new materials under high pressure.

Jodie’s Favourite Research Experiment:

Jodie’s favorite experiment involves using diamond anvil cells to create new forms of carbon and silicon. These high pressure techniques allow her to mimic the natural processes that form diamonds, creating materials with unique and valuable properties.

Life as a Scientist-Beyond the Lab :

Jodie 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.

Jodie’s 3 Wishes

1. Increased funding for research: Jodie 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: Jodie emphasizes the importance of public awareness and support for scientific advancements.

Jodie’s Time on @RealSci_Nano :

Jodie will be taking over the RealSci_Nano Twitter account to share her research on high pressure physics and nanodiamonds. Followers can expect to learn about the innovative techniques and new materials her work focuses on.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. I’m Pranavati, your host of Under the Microscope. And today we have with us Jodi Bradby, who is a professor at the Australian National University to tell us all about her science and herself. And I’m going to ask her so many questions. So hi, Jodi. Welcome to Under the Microscope.

Nice to be here. Hey, excellent. So, so, so, so without any delay, let’s, let’s just dive right in. Can you please explain your current research to us in super simple words, please? Right. So in the simplest terms, I get matter and squish it. Uh, you okay. You get matter and you squish it. Okay. Okay. More, I mean.

That’s the simplest term. She did ask, right? The simplest term. That is true. That is true. Yeah. Um, so I’m a condensed matter physicist. Um, so that means I’m interested in, um, in crystal structures and, um, the properties of generally solid matter. So the stuff around us. Mm hmm. And I’m interested in creating new forms of materials by creating Applying super high pressures to materials [00:01:00] in order to get them to transform into different structures.

Aha. Okay. So is it like how the diamonds are made in the Earth’s crust? Absolutely. Yep. Yep. So that’s the, that’s probably the, the most famous example of high pressure synthesis, which is kind of what I want to do, um, that people know. Um, so deep in the Earth’s crust, diamonds are formed under a really long time.

So they take like billions of years. It’s a pretty slow process, um, with really high pressure. and high temperatures. And if we’re lucky enough and everything is just right, they get shot to the surface near a volcano vent and we can collect them. Um, but we can also mimic diamond formation, um, up here on the top of the earth with the similar high pressure and high temperature environment.

So we can squeeze carbon atoms together and then we can apply a [00:02:00] bit of heat. And we magically get diamonds. And I do that for a range of different materials, but I also actually am super interested in diamonds. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Oh, okay. Okay. So can you also make like different color diamonds and stuff?

So, um, in theory you can make different colored diamonds, but I’m interested in making a different structure diamond. So, You’re familiar with different structures of carbon, so you might remember in school you studied carbon and you might remember graphite, you know, the slippery stuff that’s in our pencil, and it’s so soft we can just scrape it on a bit of paper and it comes off.

Yes, that’s what we’re doing when we’re writing with pencil. We’re just squishing carbon onto a bit of paper or we can make it super hard and transparent like a diamond ring. Mm hmm. So there are two different structures of carbon. Mm hmm. And what I do is I take the diamond structure and I squish that and change that and we can get different [00:03:00] arrangements of carbon atoms that is still bonded like carbon.

Mm hmm. So they still have, every carbon atom has four friends, so it’s fully, fully coordinated. Um, But it has different properties than diamond than the diamond that we know. So the it’s sort of like trying to make a Diamond version 2 so instead of having the hardness of say a hundred gigapascals, which is how we measure hardness.

Uh, in traditional diamond, we can have a hardness of 150 gigapascals, which is a huge improvement. Yeah. We can make a lot of it. Okay. Okay. So you make diamonds, better diamonds. What, what other, because you also mentioned that diamonds is just one of the material or one of the element that you’re interested in.

What else do you squish? And make pretty things out of. So, I started off, um, being very interested in silicon. So silicon, um, of course, you know, drives our phones, drives our computers, drives our cars, basically all of the silicon chips that we [00:04:00] have, um, also really important for energy applications. So solar cells, they’re all made out of silicon.

Um, there are only, it’s all made out of one structure of silicon. So it’s all the same type of silicon and it’s the same type of silicon crystal. And actually, um, just interesting fun fact, it has the same crystal structure as diamonds. like shiny regular diamonds. So your diamond ring and your, your, your phone phone, the silicon chip have got the same internal structure.

It’s, it’s called a diamond cubic structure. And it’s basically one of the simplest structures that you can get. It’s all sort of cubic in terms of its arrangement. So I’m super interested in how we take this one form of crystal and we turn it into a whole different type of crystal. So we take the same elements Uh huh.

We just rearranged them. Uh huh. And we know if we rearrange carbon, we can go from graphite to [00:05:00] diamond. Super different. All we’ve done is rearrange the crystal structure. Right. The same with silicon. We can go from the diamond cubic structure and we can rearrange and form actually 13 different types of structures of silicon.

And what, what do these structures offer us? Like, can we make our phones faster? Yes, well, can we make our phones faster? Probably not. Okay, what else can we do? I think we could possibly make solar cells more efficient. Oh, that’s even better! Yeah, so it has energy applications. Um, at the moment when we use regular kind of this boring type of silicon that everyone else uses, the diamond cubic, I know just so over it, um, when we use that form of silicon, um, we lose a whole lot of the solar spectrum.

So we’re not absorbing all the light that’s coming down or all the energy that’s coming down from the sun. We’re only absorbing a very small, well, not a very small part, but a One part of the spectrum. Exactly. So if we had a form of silicon that absorbed more, then you would have a more efficient solar cell.

Now the catch with all [00:06:00] this is you need to make these, these new crystals, you have to make them at high pressures. Mm hmm. And that is sort of a relatively complex and expensive process. Mm hmm. So one of the real challenges in this area is how to create an industrially scalable amount of these materials, because when I do all of my work, most of it is done in these tiny little devices, well, they fit in the palm of my hand, about this sort of, palm of my hand sized, and the samples I load into, into these little devices are about the size of a relatively large speck of dust.

Grrrrrrrrrr! So I load those in and I squeeze them together and I squeeze them together using, well guess what, more diamonds. I get the diamonds to squeeze stuff together because diamonds are super hard and also transparent. And that’s really important for us, because if it’s transparent, we can literally watch what’s happening.

We can watch with microscopes, like light, or we can watch with really big, fancy x [00:07:00] ray machines called synchrotrons. So, we can watch what happens to this little speck of dust that’s been squished by the two diamonds, and see when it starts to change its properties. And sometimes it’s quite dramatic.

Sometimes they change their properties and they go from black, and you can’t see through it, to transparent, or green, or yellow, or red, and you’re like, oh, wow, what have we formed here? Um, and sometimes it turns silver, so silicon looks kind of silvery anyway, but it’s not a metal, right? It’s a crystal.

Semiconductor, um, but if you squeeze it, it actually turns into a metal. And when you do that, I know it’s so cool, in the, in the microscope, you see it go all silvery and metallic looking, and it looks a bit like mercury, and you can see it kind of ooze out a little bit, and it’s turned into this metallic form of silicon.

And then when we unload it, depending on how we release the pressure, we can get all these different exotic phases formed. Oh my god. Oh my god. I could talk to you for hours. Oh my god. Oh my god. This is so cool. Oh my god. So you can literally [00:08:00] see With the microscopes or these fancy extras like synchrotrons or whatever, you can actually see the silicon atoms moving around and being like, I don’t like to sit here, I want to go sit over there.

And like, because when you change the pressure, you’re completely changing the energy state. And as we know, nature is super lazy. So it’s just like, Oh, I can’t be up here. This is just too high energy. And so I have to fall down into this other crystal structure, which has lower free energy, and that’s why we get phase transformation.

Oh, yes. Oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So we have carbon, we have silicon. Do you also squeeze, or is it, is it worth squeezing other elements, first of all? And also, the second follow up question to that is, is it feasible, or does it make sense to squeeze not just one element together, but more like multiple, like a, not a molecule, I don’t want to say, a compound?

Yeah, [00:09:00] definitely. So, um, you can, so I’m a very fundamental scientist, really. So I’m interested in very fundamental properties of materials. So, um, I’m interested in things like something called the phase diagram of materials. So that is, like, what happens to a material at a particular pressure and a particular temperature.

And you might think, good grief, surely we’ve got that sorted out for carbon and silicon and. Germanium is another material I’m interested in. No. What? No, we do not. Because these are such tricky experiments, that Going up in pressure is not that straightforward. Uh huh. The center of the Earth goes up to about 360 gigapascals, and I can routinely go to about a third of that in my lab.

So, They’re still, they’re high pressures, but you know, they’re still not the center of the earth style of pressure. So it’s a pretty complicated thing to do. And also you’re only doing it with this grain of dust. [00:10:00] So then you have to do all these in situ measurements, focus everything, have a look at things down in this tiny scale.

So it’s really, really complicated and there’s still lots of science to do. And to get back to your question about, well, could you squeeze? Alloys or compositions of materials, absolutely. And that’s what people are doing to create room temperature superconductors. Ah! Ooh! I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the controversy around the Nature paper that came out a few months ago or weeks ago even, I can’t, yep.

So there was a recent Nature paper that came out and they found this new form of a room temperature component. potential new material that would enable us to have a room temperature superconductor, which is like one of the, the big things condensed matter physicists have strived towards. So if we could have this, this, this material, you could have a, a way of transmitting electricity from one point to another with zero losses.

Right? You could make these magnets that would work perfectly, supermagnets that would work perfectly even at [00:11:00] room temperature. It would really sort of dramatically change the world and the way that they’ve been exploring how to make these superconductor, new superconductor materials is by the same technique.

They’re called diamond anvil cells, and that’s what they do. They squeeze different compositions of materials, and then they measure their mechanical and electrical properties to see what happens. Is it a theoretical paper? No, no, it’s not. It’s a, it’s an experimental paper. And um, And, um, They actually show a color transformation too, so they start off with this, um, it’s quite a complicated starting material.

Um, when they squeeze it, and it’s only to, it’s not super extreme pressures, um, it changes to a red color. So it goes from blue to red. Um, and the, the, all the measurements they’ve done at this red color indicate that it’s very promising in terms of superconductivity by using the same technique that, that I use in my lab in order to create these super high pressures and change the structure of materials.[00:12:00] 

Oh, so then what’s the controversy? It’s, it’s like, it’s great. No, this is what we have been waiting for. And it’s like, absolutely, absolutely. But you know how science works. So somebody does one experiment. And what we have to do next is we have to repeat it. So I think everybody is just waiting. Because if we can’t repeat it, then unfortunately, something else must have happened.

These are very difficult experiments. Cool. Fair enough. Yeah, that’s a good point. Okay. So we just have to let the scientific process run its course. I mean, it’s been through quite a vigorous peer review. Um, there’s a lot of debate in the, in the literature about how this could be super interesting, very exciting.

Honestly, if it’s true, it’s got to be a Nobel prize, right? So yeah, yeah, definitely. Okay. Let’s save this conversation for another episode. So anyway. We can squeeze mixtures of stuff too, and it’s super [00:13:00] interesting, but mainly I just squeeze um, single, single elements or some, or some mixtures as well. But yeah.

Uh huh. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Wow. I have so many questions for you. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. I have so many questions for you. Oh my God. But okay. I’m going to brace myself. Like, okay. So, Jodi, how did it happen? Like, tell me about, how did you end up squeezing elements at, um, at the, the Australian National University, being a professor, squeezing elements and like, tell me about your journey, basically.

That is my long way of asking you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, um, so I, I sort of fell into science way back in school because, Where I went to school, um, if you were kind of a bit bright, they’re like, Oh, you should do the sciences, and off you trotted into that discipline. Which I was a little bit sad about, to be honest, because I also like, I liked literature.

I’m a big reader. Um, I enjoy, I enjoy writing as well. And so I was a bit like, oh, I don’t really know what I wanted to do. But, um, I ended up majoring in physics and really, really enjoying it. Experimental physics, I should say, [00:14:00] like it’s really the experiments and that’s what really hooked me in. So it was the, I guess in second or third year where we really started to do more complicated experiments in undergraduate.

And, um, Where we would be doing things like, you know, setting up and making our own holograms, uh, we’d be using like, uh, accelerators to, to measure, we measure like air filters and things like that. It was just so, it was so much fun. Sorry, did you just say you used to make holograms? Like the, the, the, Yeah, we literally made, we literally made our own glass plate hologram and even developed them, um, as a third year optics lab.

It was fabulous. Wow. Okay, please go on, go on. Okay. Okay. Anyway, so I just had this fabulous, a fabulous undergraduate degree. It was at RMIT in Melbourne in Australia. It was a fairly small degree. I think that’s why they could offer us this amazing hands on experience. So I just got [00:15:00] totally addicted to experimental science and physics.

Then I came up to the Australian National University, which is about 10 hours away from Melbourne, to do a PhD. And at the beginning, I was looking at the mechanical properties of the. The nanomechanical properties, really, of, um, of silicon and trying to understand how silicon breaks. And to do that, what I was doing was poking it.

Oh, oh, okay. And guess what I was poking it with? A diamond. Diamond! And you can see where this is going, right? Because I was talking about squashing materials with two diamonds. So I started off poking materials with one diamond. And I was seeing all this really interesting stuff, and actually what I was doing was starting to induce phase transformations in the silicon.

So even with one diamond poking it, it was starting to undergo this structural change, turning into a metal, and then forming all these exotic phases. Right. So I thought, well, okay, looks like [00:16:00] what I’m doing is basically high pressure physics and there’s a whole, it’s a whole group of people that do that, but they use two diamonds.

Uh huh. Uh huh. So then I, I, I do both now. So I still do the one diamond poking and that’s actually an interesting technique, but then I use two diamonds and squeeze together. Uh huh. And. I think what really, um, what really gave me the edge and why it turned out to be such a successful course of research was the, the background I bought in terms of the characterization techniques and these, that sounds like a fairly boring thing to say, but I’ve got a whole lot of microscopy skills, spectroscopy, all these different measurement style of, of skills that I brought to this.

This discipline of the high pressure physics that they hadn’t traditionally done before. So I was like, well, sure, let’s squeeze it and we’ll watch through the diamonds to see what happens. But then when we unload, let’s get the sample and let’s [00:17:00] look at it some more. And this seems to be pretty revolutionary to the high pressure physicists because they would be Well, we’ve shined an x ray through them.

Now we’re done. And you were like, no, no, no, that we are just getting started. Exactly. Exactly. So what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years or so is, is, um, making little like salami slices. through those recovered samples, and remember these are only the size of a yeah, dust grains, making salami slice through that’s electron transparent, very, very thin, like a hundred nanometers, very, very thin, and shining, In this case electrons through and then imaging what we see from that.

So that’s, that’s opened a whole different area and understanding things in a whole different way. Right. Is we are, we are going in the transmission electron microscopy, that’s exactly right. Electron microscopy and all of that. Yeah. I love electron micro, I love electron microscopy. I did so much of it during my master’s and my PhD.

My ideal job would be [00:18:00] that I would be left alone with an electron microscope, looking at different samples, just playing around. That would be like a dream job. If anyone wants to do that, I just want to do that. Honestly, if you don’t get excited about an electron microscope, you’re dead inside, right? It’s so much fun.

It’s so much fun. Oh my God. And there are so many different kinds of things you can do with electron microscope. Oh my God. Oh my God. It’s ridiculous. Just give me a room with an electron microscope and a few samples. And yeah, you can come back in a few months or a few weeks, depending on how interesting the samples are.

Oh my God. Wow. That. Wow. Ooh. So you’re doing electron microscopy as well. I mean, you bring the expertise of other characterization techniques, by the way, characterization techniques. I love it. Sounds very boring for the people. Probably. I don’t know. I don’t care. Those people. Whatever. Um, but I love it. I love it.

That is so cool. Oh, so can I ask you how many diamonds do you have? in your lab right now? Like, so we do have a big safe in our lab. I should say that upfront. Yep. Yep. Definitely. Like the university is like, um, Jodi, you can’t keep like buying all these diamonds and just leaving them out on the bench [00:19:00] because even though they’re, they’re diamonds for, you know, these particular experiments, some of them do look quite pretty, you know, and they are big enough that you think, actually, that’s pretty cute diamond.

So we, we put them, we put them in the lab and probably, I don’t know, we would have 50 to a hundred diamonds at various stages of doing things in the lab. Many of them, well, diamonds aren’t actually that expensive, um, when you buy them like this. And these are sort of in diamonds for these industrial purposes.

But, and we do also break quite a few. So quite a lot of those diamonds are broken and we’ve like smashed them because of the, the way that they’re broken. Yeah, essentially, when you put two diamonds together like this, and you’re trying to get up to like 100, you know, a third of the pressure in the center of the earth, you’re going to break something.

Yeah, that is true. Oh, I’m happy to take the broken diamonds off your plate if it is crowding your save. I mean, in case you need, like, If I have to, I mean, if you need space to buy new diamonds and store new diamonds, I mean, we have this, we have this little jar [00:20:00] and we call it the jar of broken dreams.

This

is not unique to me. I stole that from someone else’s lab. It’s pretty common in the high pressure world.

I’m so tempted to suggest naming this podcast, like the title of this podcast to be Broken Diamonds just for the sake of it. A broken dream. Sorry. Oh my God. That’s so cool. Awesome. So Jodi, it sounds to me that it not just sounds to me. I’m definitely sure that you’re involved in a lot of interesting projects.

I mean, with like holograms and diamonds and Oh my God. So This is a tough one, probably a tough question for you. Uh, so apologies in advance. If you have to pick one research project that you’re most proud of, or the most [00:21:00] fun or quirky one, could you pick one and explain it to us? Yeah, so it is, it is hard.

You asked like more than one question in there, right? It was just like, which is your most proud of? Which is the most fun and quirky? I’m really only allowed to have one? Yeah, just one. Okay, well, then it would have to be our discovery of this new form of diamond, which is, which is this hexagonal form of diamond.

So this is our diamond 2. 0 that we made, the one that’s 58 percent harder than regular diamond. It’s called Lombie’s Light. Did you say 58? Well, that’s what the predictions are, right? But remember, we only make a tiny grain of dust of it. In fact, even smaller than that, because it’s not pure at the moment.

But the fact that we made this material, we made it at room temperature. That’s another really cool thing because we made regular diamond actually alongside it also at room temperature, which was sort of unexpected because normally when you make diamonds, you have to, you know, squeeze [00:22:00] and heat. But we, we just, we just squeezed.

Um, so I think that would definitely, I mean, that was one of those career changing moments that we’re just like, wow, I think we’ve made something pretty cool here. Oh, that’s so cool. So what temperatures are we talking about? Like typically in the earth’s crust, I don’t know, what temperatures do you need?

Like you need the high pressure of like giga, uh, giga. Yeah. So typically diamonds are made at a couple of thousand degrees. And when we make diamonds, by mimicking the pressure and temperature in the middle of the earth, we do, I think it’s about 15 gigapascals and a couple of thousand degrees, but we also use precursor materials.

So we chuck in a bit of metal and stuff like that, and that makes the process go faster. We were able to do it in, in our little diamond anvil cell just at room temperature, but really high pressures at a hundred GPA. Oh, wow. And why did you want to make a hexagonal diamond? Why, why, what is that against the cubic diamond?

Well, the cubic diamond is so pathetic, [00:23:00] right? No, the hexagonal diamond is, is predicted to be harder. Oh, wow. than regular diamonds. Yeah, yeah. One of diamond superpowers is that it’s the hardest material that we know of. That is true. So if we can make a material that is 50 percent harder than the hardest material that we know of, that’s pretty significant news.

And it’s not significant for the ring on your finger. And this is really not the, what we’re aiming for, but it’s pretty significant for the drill bit or something, or, you know, If you’re trying to drill through really super hard rock, and the rock turns out to be very hard, which is what happened to the building that was built outside my office over the last few years, the rock turned out to be much harder than they predicted.

So they had to stop and take the drill pieces off and put them on. Much more than they thought. And I always joked, if only we had enough lungs to lie, they could take the pieces off like half as many times and the building will be finished by [00:24:00] now. You know? That makes sense. Just walk across the street and borrow some diamonds from the safe.

Um, yeah, that, that, that, I understand that this is, uh, why you picked this as one of the projects. Let’s just. Let’s not play favorites here, but one of the projects that you’re, you’re proud of because it’s It’s, it’s fascinating. Like, how, how did you do that? And please, please tell the followers on Real Scientist Nano when you’re taking over the Twitter account, how you managed to do this.

Because this is, yeah. Is so cool. Oh my God. Yeah. We’ll, yeah. Oh, that is so cool. Okay, Jody, tell me, tell me, it’s, it’s, it’s, I have a feeling that you really like the research aspect of being a scientist or being a professor. What else do you like about being a scientist? Fundamentally, the job of an academic, so I’m a professor in a university, so I have a couple of different hats, right?

So when I go through customs, you know, they have that little box where you have to write down what you do, um, depending on what, what sort of mood I’m in, I can write down several different things, right? So I could write academic or professor, or I can write teacher. Or I can write scientist, [00:25:00] or I can write researcher, um, and the teacher and the teaching side of things is also pretty, pretty fun and, um, it’s one of the, I, I say to me, I say to me teaching is a bit like, um, it’s like some sort of Zen meditation or yoga, because when you teach, you’re just in the moment.

You can’t be multitasking over three different platforms or doing this, and also keeping an eye on two other things in the lab if you are giving a lecture. You’re there 100 percent and you’re reacting to the students and you’re answering questions and you’re trying to explain things in the easiest way possible.

I do a lot of laboratory based teaching. So I teach our first year physics labs. I’m involved with the all the different first year, second year, third year physics labs, trying to make them fun and exciting so people can catch the experimental science bug like I did. Um, Even though sometimes you think, wow, I think I must have taught a hundred people how to use a micrometer this week.

It’s still [00:26:00] really I mean, they’re just great. They’re, they’re, they’re always so relaxed in the lab and I think they’re a lot more relaxed than they are in a lecture. You know, a lab goes for three hours, you know, they get to do their own thing. Usually they’re talking and meeting people at the same time.

I mean, some of my best friends from uni I met in the lab, right? It’s a place where you meet people. So, you know, they’re all kind of forming these little relationships and they’re always so grateful when you help them with something or when you solve some question, Oh, thanks. That’s really. It’s really, you know, that’s really clear now.

And you’re just like, so that’s a really satisfying part of my job as well. And just trying to, trying to break down some of those stereotypes, I think, around physics, um, that you have to be this like super intelligent person, and that the physics knowledge is somehow gifted to you at birth. And, you know, if you don’t have Well then, oh, I’m just no good at physics.

It’s like, no one is good at physics when they’re little. You learn physics just like you learn any [00:27:00] other skill and, you know, you just, you practice it and you get better at it. And yeah, like I’m really quite keen on breaking down some of those stereotypes that to do physics or maths or any of, you know, those things that have this, you know, And I think that’s a whole lot of the gendered aspect to things too, because women say that, Oh, well, that’s not for me, where I’m very much like, no, physics is for everybody.

If you enjoy it, just practice it and you’ll be fine. Yeah. Just come. And the more you, the, the, the, I feel like the more you learn about physics, the more, the, the, the deeper you go, the more you realize how much you don’t know. So it humbles you then. I remember like as a master, when I was doing my master’s, I was like, yeah, oh yeah, I know physics, but oh shit, there’s so much more.

I don’t know. And then during my PhD, I was like, I have no idea about, wow, there’s just so much to learn. So, but it makes me very happy that we have teachers like you, or we have humans like you, who are, um, professors and who are [00:28:00] teaching the next generation, uh, basically sharing the excitement and igniting that spark in the next generation.

I think that’s Oh, I get so much more back from the students than I give, actually. Like, you know, they’re just Mostly, um, I mean, sometimes, you know, they just have to do it as part of their engineering degree or something, but mostly I walk out a bit more energized than I go in. That is so cool. I’m so happy to hear that.

That is so cool. So, Jodi, I hope your research experience has been wonderful so far and will be will continue to be wonderful in the future as well. However, if you had. Three wishes to improve your research experience. What would you ask for? And I’m not promising anything here.

So, um, I also do a lot of work around women in STEM. Um, yeah, so I, um, I would love to work with more women. You know, I, I think when you have, um, when you have just teams that are like, mixed and you have a variety of [00:29:00] backgrounds and a variety of genders and a variety of lived experiences. It’s usually more fun and it sometimes pushes you in directions that you wouldn’t have gone otherwise.

So I think that’s just fundamentally super important. Um, but from a personal kind of selfish point of view, um, sometimes I just really want to hang out with more women. So I think it would be kind of cool, um, if there were, if there were more women in science, um, and just so well in physics in particular.

So it was just sort of more, So, um, I mean, we have about 20, 25 percent women, but you can easily end up in areas where, you know, you’re the only woman time after time, and you just get a bit fed up with it. Yeah. So that would be good. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, and I, and I think that would just, if we could just magically change it so we’re up to like 50 percent women, I think we wouldn’t have to do any more magic after that, right.

It would just be self reliance. It would just, yeah, it would just happen. So, so that would be great. But then, then it’s really getting down to things [00:30:00] like resources, so it’s finding money to run research programs all around the world is becoming more challenging. And the amount of time that I spend writing grants,

fun time, let’s just put it that way. If we had a more efficient way of writing grants, that would be great, um, or, or allocating money or, it’s just so inefficient, it’s ridiculous. You write these massive proposals. It’s just such a waste of everybody’s time. Yeah. Um, yeah. And the way, also the way that we do research in terms of, Well, the way that the whole system is set up around publishing, I think, is really problematic as well.

So, I don’t think it does us any favours to keep all our research in these little boxes. Um, and we give all the little boxes numbers called impact factors, and if you publish in a high box, then you get like a 30 impact factor, [00:31:00] and everybody thinks that research is much better than if you put it in this box that has an impact factor of 3.

And it’s just such a A pointless exercise that does not increase. Human beings understanding of the world, which is really what science should be about. So there’s a few, yeah, major problems that science has got to tackle. Yeah. A lot. Definitely. So grand writing process. Can charge ability help. Oh, absolutely.

Yes. Yeah, I, I’ve already talked to my students about how we could use ChatGPT to, um, to get over writer’s block. I find that it really helps them. I’m like, okay, so what do you want to say in this paragraph? Let’s just type it in. And that process of thinking through your three or four points that you want to say, your prompts, um, That’s actually the human part.

That’s the bit that requires creativity. That’s the bit that we need to do. And I think [00:32:00] sometimes we feel very blocked in our writing because we think it has to come out perfectly. Yeah. Like how we read it in papers never comes out like that. No. But if you can think through your three points and just put them in something like chat TPT and it comes out, and even if it comes out to be slightly you.

You know, not quite right. At least it’s a good start. Yeah. You know, and then we can move forward. So yeah, I think chat GPT can help. Yeah. I’m very excited about the possibilities of that. I, yeah, I think it’s fascinating. It is. It, it, it indeed is. Yeah, definitely. So more women in STEM or diversity in general, not just women.

More diversity, better, uh, proposal writing. Process and getting funding for the, for the research around the world, just, just better, more efficient process. And the third one is the, the better publishing or science communication, uh, outputs. We need to do something about them. Yeah, definitely. Here’s hoping that we will soon, sooner rather [00:33:00] than later, these things will be realized.

So from 20 to 25 percent we go to, I don’t know, 80 percent diversity? I mean, 100 percent diversity would be good. I mean, if you’re asking for it, let’s go with 99%. I think 99 percent is like a good, good, like Yeah, you don’t want to be greedy. Yeah, of course. No, of course. We are. We are. We are not greedy. So this has been wonderful, Jodi.

But before I let you go, I have to ask you one last question. What can the followers expect in the week that you’re taking over the Real Scientists Nano Twitter account? So I think I’ll be doing a bit of live Live tweeting in terms of my day, I definitely want to do quite a lot of lab based pictures Because I think little pictures and video clips can really I don’t know my experiences There’s so much more engaging right than text So I want to really take Take followers on a bit of a journey where they can understand some of the work that [00:34:00] we do, but they can also see it and perhaps see some of the, like the minor challenges that we’re doing, um, and how we overcome them in the day.

Um, also talk a little bit about some conferences and things and how all that works, because I think people might be interested in that in terms of what are the cool things that My community is talking about at the moment and what science is really, really, really interesting. And I’ll try not to do any kind of tweeting from boring meetings, because I am head of department and I do have to go to quite a lot of fairly boring meetings.

So I’ll just leave that part out. No, no, no, tell us about that. No, no, no, no, we want to know that as well. We want to know what kind of meetings does the head of department go in. We want to know everything, just tell us everything. Okay, alright. I’ll try not to make it too boring though. Okay, that’s fine.

Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, definitely. We want to know everything. Don’t leave anything out. We want to know what kind of coffee you [00:35:00] drink, what do you eat for lunch. We want to know everything, literally everything. Like, this is our chance to see the, the, your, your lab, your university, not your safe. No, no, no.

But the, The jar of broken dreams that tell us everything, show us everything, everything, everything, everything. We want to know everything and beautiful pictures and videos. That sounds good. Excellent. Thank you very much, Jodi. Cannot wait for you to take over the Real Scientist Nano Twitter account. This has been so wonderful.Thank you. And thank you so much for inviting me. I’m sure I would love to have you more often on the science talk because there are so many questions I still have where I want to pick your brain and learn more. So thank you very much for your time. No worries. All right. Thank you. Bye.