🌟 Nano to Micro to Macro with Levi Tegg: Episode 206 of Under the Microscope 🔬

What to Expect:

In this episode, Levi Tegg shares his innovative research on using various types of microscopes to study materials at different scales. Levi discusses his journey from studying physics in Australia to becoming a microscopy expert at the University of Sydney and his work on understanding material properties through microscopy.

About the Guest:

Levi Tegg is a research associate at the University of Sydney specializing in microscopy. His work involves using different types of microscopes, including optical, electron, and atom probe microscopes, to study materials at various scales. Levi’s research aims to understand how the structure of materials affects their properties.

🌟 Key Takeaways from This Episode:

• Microscopy Techniques: Levi’s research focuses on using different types of microscopes to study materials at various scales.
• Career Journey: From studying physics in Australia to becoming a microscopy expert at the University of Sydney.
• Favorite Experiment: Using atom probe microscopy to study the 3D atomic structure of materials.

🔬 In This Episode, We Cover:

Levi’s Research :

Levi’s research focuses on using various types of microscopes to study materials at different scales. By employing optical, electron, and atom probe microscopes, he can understand how the structure of materials affects their properties and behaviour.

Levi’s Career Journey:

Levi’s academic journey began with a Bachelor’s in Physics in Australia. He pursued his passion for microscopy, leading him to his current role as a research associate at the University of Sydney, where he specializes in using different types of microscopes to study materials.

Levi’s Favourite Research Experiment :

Levi’s favourite experiment involves using atom probe microscopy to study the 3D atomic structure of materials. This technique provides detailed information about the atomic arrangement and composition of materials, helping to understand their properties better.

Life as a Scientist- Beyond the Lab :

Levi values the collaborative nature of scientific research and enjoys engaging with the global scientific community. He is passionate about teaching and mentoring the next generation of scientists.

Levi’s 3 Wishes

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

Levi’s Time on @RealSci_Nano :

Levi will be taking over the RealSci_Nano Twitter account to share his research on microscopy and material science. Followers can expect to learn about the innovative techniques and insights his work provides.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. I’m Pranavati, your host of Under the Microscope. And today we have Under the Microscope, you will understand the pun later on, but today we have Levi Teg, who is a research associate at the University of Sydney, and he lives and breathes microscopes and Under the Microscope and everything.

So please join me in welcoming Levi. Hi, Levi. How are you? I’m very welcome. How are you? Thank you for having me today, by the way. I’m so happy to have you. It’s like your, your wall in behind you for anyone who is watching this video on YouTube. Oh, I like, it cannot get more. Is it matter that under the microscope, under the microscope, like, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So tell me about your research in a, in super simple words, like super simple, like. Anyone who does not live and breathe microscopes and electron microscopes can understand. So, tell me. For sure. So, my research is to use microscopes to study all sorts of materials. Microscopes includes things like the optical microscopes you would have used in school, electron microscopes of various types, and the atom probe microscope.

which is a particular type of atomic scale 3D microscope. I use these materials, these microscopes to [00:01:00] study materials like steels, nanoporous metals, ice, metal oxides, just to understand how their structure causes the properties they have, the big scale. Okay. You mentioned you study Ice. Like, why do you study ice?

Why do you have to study ice? I mean, we know what ice is. What, what, what are you going to change in the ice? Amazing question. So I’m studying ice using the atom probe microscope, not because ice on its own is particularly exciting. Ice is the environment where biological materials live. It’s the solution of life, proteins, DNA.

And so Cryo TEM is a workflow that allows us to look at things like proteins and DNA using a transmission electron microscope. My current role is to sort of take an idea and apply it to atom probe microscopy so that we can get 3D atomic maps. Not of water and ice, but of [00:02:00] the proteins, DNA and other biological materials, which genetically exist in water slash ice.

Aha. Okay. Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, so it’s not about, oh, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, got it. So, but the 3d information you can also get from a TM or a CM language. With electron microscopes, right? Why, why use atomic probe microscope? The data that comes out of the atom probe microscope has some kind of big differences between SEM and TEM.

So first it’s an atomic scale technique. You get data, atom or at least small cluster of atom. Second, it’s natively three dimensional. It’s not like tomography, like in the TEM where you have to tilt the sample. In atom probe, the data is naturally in three dimensions. Together it’s 3D near atomic scale reconstruction.

The third big advantage is that it also natively gives you micro analysis. You don’t know that an atom popped off, you know what atom. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen. can all be seen equal sensitivity in the atom microscope. So not only do [00:03:00] you know where the protein is and what its structure is, if we do it right, we can hopefully see what every atom in the molecule is and its original.

Perfect micro analysis of the molecule. I feel like I have to visit your lab, your center of microscopy and your sister facility, because this is like, This is candy land for someone who loves microscope, especially electron microscopes and all kinds of microscopy. It’s amazing. Um, so, uh, Levi, how did you end up being the microscopy ninja that you are?

How did, how did, how did this happen? Uh, tell me about your journey in science so far. Yeah, for sure. So I did a bachelor’s of science in physics in my hometown at the University of Newcastle, and as part of an undergraduate summer program. I had the opportunity to learn the Transmission Electron Microscope as an undergraduate for a [00:04:00] six week period over the summer.

And I fell in love. I had so much fun using this microscope. And so I stayed in physics and I started doing a PhD in physics. Although it was delivered by physics, it was more broadly described as materials science and materials characterization. I used x ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy to understand complex metal oxides.

And based on the skills I developed in my PhD, I got the job that I’m in now at the University of Sydney in the Australian Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis, where I’m lucky enough to use microscopes almost every day. So now I study not only the complex metal oxides from my PhD, but through collaborations I’ve come to study all sorts of different materials like the ice I described earlier, steels and alloys.

That is so cool. It’s very similar to my journey in science as well. I got the opportunity to do an internship during my bachelor’s, like during my undergrad, uh, for like two and a half months or something. And there, that [00:05:00] was the first time I was introduced to electron microscopes and it was like love at first image, literally.

Fantastic. There was no going back and it’s, um, uh, there is no going back. Okay. That’s awesome. So it’s very, very interesting. So now in your current role, you don’t just work on like one material, but you get the opportunity to work on several different materials and with different labs, different groups, answering different sorts of questions.

So it sounds to me that you. Are involved in a lot of interesting and fascinating research projects. So if you have to pick one research project that you’re most proud of, one of the most, okay, it’s a mean question. I know you do not very mean question. Oh, let’s say, who is your favorite child today? Yeah.

Let’s not like, let’s just go with that. So could you explain it to us? [00:06:00] Pick your favorite child and explain what the, everything about that child in super simple words in the section we call in other words. That’s such a hard question. Cause I’ve got so many projects that I’m so fond of. I think I’ll, I’ll actually go back in time.

I’ll go to the project, which I have. most maturely explored. And, uh, there’s the work from my PhD studying these complex metal oxides. In my PhD, I studied these perovskite like oxides, which although metal oxides are usually insulators, these metal oxides were conducted, gave them interesting applications in nanophotonics, which gave them more applications in catalysis and all sorts of other things.

My project was to study their synthesis. Uh, everything we can possibly find out about them at the new atomic scale and some applications. So I did all sorts of really cool experiments like, um, the one that springs to [00:07:00] mind is you make these metal oxides, sort of like making a cake. We mix all of the reagents together, push it into a pan and heat it up in an oven.

Except it’s like 800, 900 degrees, rather than 220 for 30 minutes. And the literature, when we started the project, said you needed about eight hours to complete the work. But some experiments we had done, we found it was taking more like a couple of minutes. But we wanted to know just how fast. Now, this is not microscopy, but microscopy later, I promise.

To find out how fast it actually took, we, we were lucky enough to get some time with a neutron source to do neutron powder diffraction. Just like x ray cloud infraction, but with neutrons instead, so it’s a bit harder to get to, particularly in Australia. Uh, and so what we did is we mixed our little cake batter together and we put a furnace into the neutron beam, and we literally dropped our samples into the furnace, into the beam, to heat them really quickly.

It collects patterns every few seconds and see what would happen. And in our first few [00:08:00] experiments, we watched the patterns change every 30 seconds or so, and then all of a sudden, the reaction was complete. We were shocked. It was faster than our regular, than as fast as we were collecting patterns. So we had to do more experiments.

We’d change our experiment plan while we were there to bring down the time sampling period. And the reaction was done in like 15, 20 seconds, so much faster than we thought and way faster than the literature made it seem. That sprung to mind as an experiment that was really cool because it used brand new equipment on high end, high end research infrastructure and found something totally different with the literature.

That project was also overflown with microscopy, like, Those metal oxides naturally grew as these beautiful little cubes, look like dice, I suppose, um, which look beautiful under the SCM and the TEM, um, you can change the synthesis conditions and get these rods, look like bundles of sticks, beautiful stuff.

Oh, wow. There’s a lot of fun [00:09:00] material science and characterization. That sounds so cool. That sounds so cool. So I hope you publish that work other than just your PhD work that, hey, you don’t need eight hours. All you need is 15 to 20 seconds, however longer. We submitted a journal cover and they accepted it.

So, although, you know, microscopy is known for its pretty pictures and neutron diffraction is not. We’re still able to get a pretty picture out of the neutron diffractor journal cover for that issue Oh my god, that’s so cool with journal cover. Are we talking about here? You can name drop. It’s okay Journal of physical chemistry c sometime in 2021.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember the issue number. That’s okay That’s okay. I’m sure you will show it to us. Uh your followers and we are talking about Yeah, we’ll find this nano Twitter account, sir. And how was the response of the research community then? They must have been like, what?

That’s a hard question. I didn’t see that one coming. Um, well, then the reality is it actually hasn’t been cited more than a couple of times since 2021. So the impact was a lot less than you think. Okay. You talk about this paper. And different conferences. Well, as soon as I published this paper, we, as soon as we did this experiment, we entered the Coronavirus [00:10:00] era and conferences were all essentially shut down.

So although I had abstracts ready to go to present them, I didn’t actually attend any conferences related to crystallography in this sort of metal oxide from serial science after my PhD. So unfortunately, no, I haven’t had a chance to present this exact work at any conferences. Okay Always regretted it.

Okay, let’s let’s try to change that when you’re taking another twitter account This this is like a game changer, right? Because going from eight hours to 15 seconds That’s a humongous amount of time that can be saved and not just time but also resources because it takes It takes a lot of energy to keep the oven or the pan going for eight hours at 900 800 900 degrees.

So this is amazing clear to me that you love the research aspect of being a scientist using the microscope and making a cake. All of that. So what else do you like about being a scientist? You’re absolutely right. I love the research part. I love the sense of discovery. I love using cool tools. [00:11:00] Other than the research part, I think the part that excites me is the sense of community and collaboration.

Academia and science has such a huge emphasis on collaboration and attending conferences and it is not without merit. You learn so much just by going to other laboratories and going to conferences and seeing maybe something you already knew but explained in a whole new light. And afterwards, talking to somebody working in the same field and realizing that either they’re struggling with the same thing as you.

Or they have already struggled and they already know the answer. So I think that the ability to, science’s emphasis on collaboration, connecting with other like minded scientists, is one of the greatest strengths of the field. Academia, it’s, it’s, It’s not secretive. It’s collaborative. I think that that’s something that’s really great about the sense of community and the sense of collaboration.

I think that’s that’s that’s amazing. So it’s been going well for you with now. Tell me what a what you would like to improve. So if you had three wishes to improve your research experience, what would you ask for? And I’m not promising anything here. Okay. You can ask for [00:12:00] all the microscopes in your basement.

You can ask for anything. Ooh, okay. So, two wishes. Okay, so in the Australian tertiary sector, there’s this increasing casualization of teaching and research staff. And I think that if I, my biggest wish for the Australian academic sector would be More ongoing positions of all types, academic research, teaching, academic teaching, technical.

A lot of these positions are contracted, but I think that a lot of people would prefer them to be more ongoing, so adding some certainty to people who may be in the same role year after year. I think everybody wants that. Everybody wants more ongoing positions in academia around the world. That’s how really special.

I mean, you can always highlight it that in even in Australia, this is a need. This is a wish. So even if it is like a commonly known wish, it’s always good to reiterate it and say that, Hey, I also would like to. Do that. So, okay, that’s the first one. I think that this is getting a lot better in recent years, but something [00:13:00] that I think Australia can really do with is a more diverse funding landscape, more funding opportunities, more targeted funding opportunities and funding opportunities that are maybe smaller with quicker turnaround times.

Although it’d be harder for any researcher to keep on top of all the new funding opportunities. I think that it’s good to have a diversity of different types, not just large multi year projects, not just small travel, not just for travel, not just for consumables, more funding opportunities and diverse funding opportunities, I think would be really, really great.

But like I said, I think it’s gotten a lot better. Even in the past few years. Interesting. Third one. Gosh, that’s a hard one. I reckon a dedicated coffee shop just for our microscopy facility. I think that the benefits to work life balance at my institute would be greatly improved by having a coffee shop.

Coffee shop and a barista specifically dedicated to out of art. Okay, coffee, coffee shop and barista. Okay. One step further. That’s, that’s, I mean, we have had like a coffee machine, decent coffee machine, uh, sometimes, but A barista, that’s actually good. [00:14:00] Australians are real coffee snobs, so a machine on its own wouldn’t cut it.

You need a trained barista, you need single origin, you need the whole, a whole coffee shop experience. Yeah, that makes sense. And that’s also a great place for discussions, right? Because oftentimes I think collaborations and best ideas. Yes. Okay, let’s try to make that happen. So give me the email address and name of the Institute.

I send it to them. That is

Honestly, your point about being a place for collaboration makes me wonder if I can walk in there now and get it done. Like maybe there’s already enough of an argument. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe they are, whoever the person in charge is, they’re already thinking about it. They just don’t have the request officially to do it.

So, yeah, exactly. You mentioned about the different sorts of grants. So, Do you [00:15:00] like in Germany? I know we have this. You can apply for research grants from the state or from the from the country or from the EU, which go for, like, three years, five years, and that includes Everything like there is a budget for instruments.

There is a budget for Supplies like solutions or whatever. There is a budget for project meetings. There’s budget for traveling There is a budget for paying salaries and stuff Is that does that happen in australia or do you have to apply for all these different pieces separately? Like how does that work?

There is a big analogy in Australia. In non biological or non health sciences, the Australian Research Council fund all sorts of different types of projects that are multi year. So the big one would be the Discovery Project, which is Three years, it funds students and NAMI staff, consumables, travel, equipment time, that sort of stuff.

Novel, cutting edge discoveries, basically. Um, it can also, the same program can also fund [00:16:00] individual researchers, say, an early career researcher or a mid or late career researcher with similar schemes. They’ve recently introduced a industry style fellowship where it’s similar, say, perks to the Individuals research, but it’s done in conjunction with the industry.

Um, so there’s all sorts of different funding opportunities in material science. They’re all quite large funding schemes, multi year salaries included. Um, smaller funding schemes are more commonly internal. Okay. Um, depending on what you want to do. They’re often a lot more targeted. So, yeah. We do have a big national funding agency, NHMRC.

Health is the, uh, NHMRC. I’m curious about how does the science funding or material science funding works in Australia? How is it structured? But it’s good to know that and get like these long term, Long term to you. Yes, grand. In brief, material science, um, discovery as opposed to commercialization research is mainly funded through the Australian Research Council Discovery Project scheme, [00:17:00] which is about usually about three years duration.

Okay, similar to what we’re describing from the DFG. Okay. Interesting. Levi, thank you very much for answering my questions patiently. Even if I, I took you away from your point. Uh, this has been wonderful, but before I let you go and do your lab stuff or go to your director, uh, to talk about one last question.

So what can the followers of the Real Scientist Nano Twitter account expect in the week that you’re curating? The Twitter account. What? What can they expect other than beautiful pictures and a coffee shop, hopefully. Well, I was so excited to say they can expect incredible microscopy images. They can expect atom probe microscopy of incredible interfaces.

They can expect atomic scale TEM. They can expect videos of in situ TEM. They can expect incredible biological material science structures using SEM. It’s going to be a big focus on. microscopy, not only from the University of Sydney, but around the world, all sorts of different types of [00:18:00] materials, all sorts of different applications, basically all the incredible things you can learn about materials using microscopes and what that means for their real world applications.

Oh, that sounds so cool. This is amazing. I cannot wait to follow your tweets. This is amazing. This has been wonderful. Thank you very much, Levi, for Speaking with me and looking forward to having you again and again and again on, under the microphone, who else to talk to other than the microscope ninja himself.

Thanks for having me.