I finished my PhD in the Geiger lab in June of 2006, and by way of a visiting position at Bowdoin College and a Dreyfus Environmental Chemistry Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard, I am now a tenured Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. The road to tenure as an experimental physical chemist was not easy, especially since my research program in nonlinear spectroscopy of environmental interfaces required a certain level of capital to get going that did not match favorably with my startup research funds. Nonetheless, I was determined to establish a successful research program in nonlinear surface science at a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest, and here’s how I did it:
During my initial years at Puget Sound, I tried (unsuccessfully) to get an external grant for a laser system to conduct second harmonic generation studies. I was, however, the recipient of a generous forgivable loan from Franz: a Tsunami® femtosecond oscillator and pump laser. I spent the next months acquiring laser tables, optics, and detection equipment, and slowly started to piece together an SHG system. Unfortunately, during this time, the pump laser started to perform poorly, and was deemed “on its last legs” by the service technician. This could have spelled the end of my nonlinear spectroscopy dream, given the tight funding climate. As fate would have it, just weeks after receiving the dire prognosis for my pump laser, I serendipitously made the acquaintance of Dr. Hongfei Wang at the ACS National Meeting in San Diego in April 2012. Dr. Wang is the lead scientist for the nonlinear spectroscopy instrumentation in the Environmental Spectroscopy Laboratory at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA. EMSL is a national scientific user facility that makes its “scientific capabilities–people, instruments and facilities– available for use by the global research community” and is sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research. Dr. Wang advertised his lab’s state-of-the-art nonlinear spectroscopy instrumentation in his ACS presentation and informed the audience that these instruments were available through the EMSL user facility. I approached Dr. Wang immediately after his talk and we discussed the possibility of me becoming a user in his lab during my upcoming pre-tenure sabbatical. Within two weeks, I was awarded a DOE Alternate Sponsored Fellowship that, along with a supplementary award from the Puget Sound University Enrichment Committee Faculty Research Fund, allowed me to spend my entire junior sabbatical conducting research at PNNL in Dr. Wang’s lab. This was quite a change in my original sabbatical plan of conducting SHG studies in my lab at Puget Sound, but I embraced the opportunity and moved to Richland, WA once classes ended in May.
I embarked on an intensive 8 months of full-time research in Dr. Wang’s lab, where I was trained on high-resolution broadband sum frequency generation (HR-BB-SFG) and scanning SFG instruments. This experience was immensely educational and productive for me, and allowed me to conduct research of a caliber that would not have been possible for me at Puget Sound. It was also great to be able to discuss my results and experimental plans with Dr. Wang’s research group on a daily basis. Having been out of the intense research environment for a few years, these conversations were crucial to getting me current on the field and pushing my research along in the right direction. PNNL is a uniquely stimulating environment, as it houses some of the world’s best scientists from just about any area you could be interested in. I took advantage of my proximity to these scientists and arranged periodic meetings with those whose research interests intersected with my own. They were able to give me insight into my planned experiments, help me figure out the best approach to fabricating iron oxide thin films, and also gave me advice on how to write more competitive grant proposals. Since the world is entirely too small, I also ended up collaborating with Franz once again on HR-BB-SFG experiments I conducted in Dr. Wang’s lab on the a-pinene vapor/CaF2 interface, which is important for atmospheric chemistry applications and climate models. This work was recently published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A.
In addition to the collaborative a-pinene work, I spent some time conducting preliminary experiments on my personal research project involving organic ligand interactions with iron oxides. I was able to obtain a scanning SFG spectrum for the aqueous desferrioxamine-B (DFOB)/air interface that gave me proof of concept to include in grant proposals. Overall, I feel that my junior sabbatical was transformative for my research program, and I continue to benefit from the contacts and collaborations I initiated during that time.
Since my initial experience at PNNL was so successful, I have returned for the past two summers (and will again this summer) through the DOE Visiting Faculty Program to continue conducting SFG experiments in Dr. Wang’s lab. This program provides stipend and travel funds for me and up to two undergraduate students to conduct research with a mentor at a DOE facility for 10 weeks in the summer. The first summer, I brought undergraduate Tyler Ueltschi ’15 with me. I can’t say enough about how wonderful this experience was for Tyler and me. Tyler dove right in at the lab and quickly became proficient at operating the laser systems and performing all of the wet chemistry tasks involved in preparing the experiments. He made solutions, cleaned sample holders (which involved a significant amount of safety precaution), and conducted experiments independently by the end of the summer. It was such a fun and rewarding experience for me to work with him everyday in the lab, and it was a very different experience than I’ve had doing research with students in my lab at Puget Sound. Since we don’t have the luxury of continuing experiments at PNNL during the school year, our days were often long and intense to make the most of our time there. Lasers can be finicky instruments, and when they go down, they can go down for weeks. Thus, the laser jock’s mantra is “keep collecting data while the laser is working”. This resulted in a few 18-hour days of experiments for us. Usually, I would have to be there for the entire 18-hour period since I was the only one running the experiment, but with Tyler’s proficiency on the instruments, we were able to trade off with each other on those long days. To date, Tyler is the only undergraduate student that has independently operated the scanning and high-resolutions SFG spectrometers at PNNL. By the end of our 10-week program, we were able to collect SFG spectra of the aqueous DFOB/air interface under various pH and concentration conditions, and also obtained some preliminary results on the interaction of DFOB with an iron oxide thin film sample. Tyler and I also initiated a collaboration with Dr. Patrick El-Khoury during our time at PNNL on a chemical imaging project involving non-resonant tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS). This work was recently published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C.
In the summer of 2014, I brought another undergraduate, Daniel Messenger ’15, to PNNL along with Tyler. We continued the experiments with DFOB, concentrating on obtaining publication-grade spectra and control experiments for the pH and concentration studies. In addition to the laser experiments, Tyler and Daniel also spent a significant portion of their summer working with Dr. El-Koury on an ab initio molecular dynamics study of IR and Raman spectroscopy of dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO). Tyler and I are also involved in ongoing work exploring the relationship between the theoretical prediction and experimental SFG spectrum of DMSO, which was recently submitted to Journal of Physical Chemistry C. I plan to continue working on the SFG spectroscopy of iron oxide films and modeling of SFG spectra with two new undergraduate students this summer at PNNL, once again through the VFP program.
It’s safe to say that my research program at Puget Sound has changed significantly over the past few years, and for the better. It was definitely a challenge to find my research footing in my initial years, but I feel that I have found a sustainable way to remain current and competitive in the active field of nonlinear spectroscopy through my collaborations at PNNL. The research I was able to conduct at PNNL with undergraduate students was instrumental to my being awarded tenure at Puget Sound in February. I will continue to develop these collaborations that allow me to engage in state-of-the-art laser spectroscopy research with my students that will not be feasible at Puget Sound in the foreseeable future.
A further benefit to the collaborations and research that came out of my time at PNNL is that I was awarded a Murdock College Research Program for Natural Sciences. Undoubtedly, my proposal was bolstered by the work I was able to conduct at PNNL with my students. This award will allow me to replace the pump laser and get the SHG system up and running in my laboratory at Puget Sound, and will fund summer research opportunities for students. My research program will now have the combination of on-campus research opportunities in SHG spectroscopy and off-campus SFG and modeling collaborations at PNNL, and I can proudly say that I have successfully implemented a nonlinear spectroscopy research program at Puget Sound.