Xin Su studied chemistry in China and the United States and started his career in scholarly publishing with John Wiley & Sons in New Jersey. He just flew across the pond to London to join Nature Chemistry as a Senior Editor, and will ultimately be based out of the Springer Nature Shanghai office.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

Certainly a biography book of Michael Faraday I read when I was a kid. In retrospect, it is far from being a fine piece on this great scientist, but it did successfully interest me, sparking curiosity and inspiration in me to go and explore chemistry. Throughout my school years, I also had very good chemistry teachers, which reinforced my pursuit.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?

I would choose to become a historian, naturally and ideally studying the history of chemistry. I always had an interest in history, as I still do. I minored in history when I was in college, and was attracted to grammatology and classical Chinese literature. I was seriously thinking of apply for a postdoctoral fellowship from the Chemical Heritage Foundation when I was about to finish my PhD. So if I ever get an opportunity to take two half-time jobs, the combination will be publishing and history.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

Now that I have just switched to Nature Chemistry, I look forward to serving truly innovative and broadly influential research results to the readers. In the meanwhile, I’m interested in promoting communications and exchanges among chemists and between scientists and the public (with deep-rooted fear for the demonized chemistry).

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

Nikola Tesla. He was such a prolific genius, but a lot of work he did in his later year remains largely unknown. I’d be very eager to learn more from him.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?

It was after I left research and started in publishing and it wasn’t chemistry at all. I replaced a cracked screen on an iPad in the lab. It would have been quite awkward to maneuver elsewhere, and you could hardly imagine how easy it is with a lab jack, a heat gun and clamps unless you try yourself (DO WEAR GOGGLES).

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

Shishuo Xinyu (Chinese: 世說新語), or literally, A New Account of the Tales of the World, and to complement it, Guangling San (Chinese: 廣陵散), a qin (ancient Chinese zither) melody long enough to be considered as an album. They make the best companion for solitude, I think. Citing the comment by Graham Sanders, a sinologist at University of Toronto, “few works can match the importance of the book…. for its portrayal of cultural attitudes and social practices among elites in China from the second to fourth centuries”, simply a fascinating age.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?

Professor Gordon Gribble at Dartmouth College. He is a highly achieved scholar, as well as an avid winemaker, but  more importantly, he cares about the public image of chemistry and defends against the so-called “chemophobia”.

Hosea Nelson is in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA, and works in organic methodology and catalysis.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

Biology. Early in my career I became fascinated by biomolecules like DNA and protein enzymes. This led to a strong desire to have a more atomistic understanding of how they work and how they interact with small molecules. I found out quickly that I had to study chemistry to do this.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?

Valet parking. The second most fun that I ever had working. I did this when I was in my early twenties. I got to drive a lot of nice cars, had the opportunity to interact with cool people, and made cash tips. Working for tips can be fun.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

We are working in quite a few areas of catalysis ranging from small molecule activation to asymmetric methodology. My dream is to develop reactions that are broadly applied to solve the many problems that plague humanity!!!

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

Albert Einstein. I may be naive when it comes to physics, but I view the theory of general relativity as one of the most insightful and creative additions to science. I love to rub shoulders with creative scientists…. Maybe some of their magic will rub off on me.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?

Last month. I screened conditions for a transition metal-catalyzed alkene hydration.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

For music, the soundtrack to Superfly by Curtis Mayfield. For reading, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?

Ken Houk. He could tell cool stories about Woodward.

Jen Heemstra is in the Department of Chemistry and the Center for Cell and Genome Science at University of Utah, and works on understanding and utilizing the molecular recognition and self-assembly capabilities of nucleic acids for applications in biosensing, bioimaging, and stimuli-responsive materials.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I had fantastic mentors. I entered high school thinking that I wanted a career in math. This changed when I joined Science Olympiad, largely because our coach was so effective in conveying to us the joy of scientific discovery and the fact that science is a constantly evolving field. In college, I had the opportunity to work in a chemistry research lab with an outstanding mentor, and after two years thought “hmmm, maybe this is something I want to do with my life.” This was followed by outstanding mentors in graduate school and my postdoc, who nudged me toward academia. I now recognize that l love chemistry because I love to design, build, and explore molecules. But, I think there are many careers that I could have been happy in, and it is interesting to ponder whether things might have ended up differently given a different set of formative influencers in my life.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?

I would love to be an architect. Over the past three years, I’ve had the opportunity to serve on the design committee for a new building on our campus, and that has been a really neat experience. I’ve come to appreciate much more of what architects do. Similar to chemists, they have some mundane aspects to their jobs, but they spend significant amounts of time creating, problem solving, and engaging with other people, which are all things that I love about my current job.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

Our lab has spent the past seven years developing and studying biomolecular platforms for molecular recognition, self-assembly, and catalysis in vitro. We’re excited to now be pushing these towards applications in living cells, and eventually in vivo. We anticipate that this will open up new avenues in a variety of areas including metabolite imaging, biocatalyst discovery, RNA-based diagnostics, drug delivery, toxin sequestration, and transcript-targeted therapeutics. Over the past few years, I’ve also become increasingly passionate about the challenge of how to educate and prepare students for future success. In particular, I think that we need to help students overcome fear of failure, and encourage them to embrace failure as a necessary step on the path to innovation. My grand hope is that this will lead to an overhaul of how universities assess student success in courses – our current approach teaches students to avoid failure at all costs, which is in dissonance with the values of today’s most innovative workplaces, where we hope our students will end up.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

Rock climbing has been a passion of mine for the last 20+ years, and so I would choose to have dinner with Lynn Hill. She was one of the few women hanging out in Yosemite’s Camp 4 during the dawn of sport climbing in the 1980s, and has crushed barriers across multiple disciplines of climbing. Right at the time that I was starting to climb, she became the first person, male or female, to free climb The Nose on El Capitan. A year later, she repeated the climb in under 24 hours. When I first subscribed to Rock and Ice magazine, the free gift was a poster of Lynn Hill climbing The Nose – this hung in my dorm room all through college as an inspiration to work hard and push limits.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?

These days, I’m only in lab to do experiments related to our educational or outreach activities. My last experiment was flooding a plate of GFP-expressing c. elegans and trying to pipet them into a 384-well plate to measure fluorescence intensity. My experiment didn’t work, but then two graduate students from my group tried the same experiment a week later, and they got it to work great. That’s pretty typical these days, and I’m thrilled to be surrounded by a group of people who are all much more competent in lab than I am.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

Album choice is easy – The Heist by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. They are one of many artists whose music I enjoy, but what makes them unique is the diversity of emotions that are captured on one album. This album in particular has songs that span the themes of working hard to achieve big goals (“Can’t Hold Us”), the shame that comes with failing yourself and those you care about (“Starting Over”), and not taking yourself too seriously (“Thrift Shop”). I would need a lot of positive energy to survive in exile, and it’s impossible not to smile when singing along to lyrics about rocking flannel zebra jammies from a thrift store. Book choice is much tougher. Most of my favorite books right now (Mindset, Creativity Inc., Give and Take) are focused on how we relate to those around us, so reading one of those on a desert island would make me feel even more lonely. I would probably choose Bossypants by Tina Fey, as that book can still make me laugh out loud, even though I’ve read it at least five times.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?

I would love to see an interview with Cathy Drennan. She is an outstanding researcher, educator, mentor, and advocate for diversity, manages to balance all of this with family life, and seems to be having a blast in everything she does.

Elaine O’Reilly is in the School of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham, and works on the development of biocatalysts and biocatalytic methodology.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I originally went to University to study genetics, having been fascinated with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution and natural selection from a young age. During my degree at University College Dublin, I took chemistry as one of four choices in first year with the intention of dropping it as soon as possible. I would love to say that the subject captivated me from the onset but in reality, I really struggled with it. Thanks largely to help from one of my lecturers (Prof. Earle Waghorne – thank you!) and a good group of friends, I managed to scrape by. It was in second year that I started to really enjoy chemistry and after spending time in a research lab in my final year, I realized that I was hooked.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?

I would love to be an actress on the West End! Aside from the fact that I can’t sing or dance, I would be absolutely perfect! My mum, Phyllis, always told me I was a real ‘abbey actor’ when I was a child and I think I still am.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

We are trying to develop biocatalysts that will convert abundant materials into high-value chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Our overall aim is that we will have a ‘toolbox’ of (engineered) enzymes available for a much wider range of synthetic transformations, with a particular focus on those that are challenging or impossible using a more traditional chemical approach. My ambition is for our research to make a real difference in peoples’ lives and if we achieved this directly with our science, I could retire happy. However, perhaps on a smaller scale, I try to be a good mentor to the next generation of scientists, who have the ability to make a powerful impact on people’s lives. I like to think I do the best I can for students who choose to work in my laboratory with the hope that they will become far more capable scientists than I am and truly make a difference.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

I suspect that he gets a lot of fantasy dinner invites, but it would have to be Charles Darwin. His work has fascinated me for many years and I would love to hear how his theories and ideas were carved out. His research not only directly inspires the work we undertake in our laboratory (directed evolution and protein redesign), but has shaped the way we all look at the world around us.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?

I have been on maternity leave since August 2016 so between that and being pregnant, I have mostly avoided the lab. The last time I was active was in 2015 and I was trying to develop a high-throughput screening strategy to enable the directed evolution of transaminase biocatalysts. This involved synthesizing some diamines, which should have been easy (it wasn’t). I have since passed the task over to one of my students.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

I would take How to Survive on a Desert Island’ by Tim O’Shei and Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?

I would like to see Prof. Donald Hilvert interviewed. His group is doing some inspiring work in a similar area to our own.

Paolo Melchiorre is an ICREA Research Professor and a Group Leader at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), Tarragona (Spain). He works on the discovery and mechanistic elucidation of enantioselective organocatalytic and photochemical processes. Paolo recently published a paper in Nature Chemistry entitled “Visible-light excitation of iminium ions enables the enantioselective catalytic β-alkylation of enals.”

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

My father is a medical chemist (now retired) — I guess the fact that his colleagues/friends were often around during my childhood might have had something to do with my decision to study chemistry. As for innate propensity, I was always curious about natural phenomena, their mechanisms and meanings.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?

Any activity related to freedom and exploration. But I’ve always liked sports and, when I was a child, I would have loved to have become a sportscaster.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

We are exploring the reactivity of chiral organocatalytic intermediates upon light excitation. An electronically excited state can unlock reaction pathways that aren’t available to conventional ground-state chemistry. So combining enantioselective organocatalysis with photochemistry can offer unconventional ways of making chiral molecules. We believe that this approach will not be limited to organocatalysis, but could be applied to other areas of modern synthetic chemistry.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

It is really hard to choose only one! There are so many historical figures with whom I would love to have dinner: from Julius Caesar and Charles Darwin, to Copernicus, Primo Levi, and Marie Curie. But probably my final choice would be Leonardo da Vinci, a real man of the future – I could even use Italian to talk with him and try to understand how a genius thinks.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?

A long time ago, in 2010. It was the very beginning of our studies on photochemistry, and I performed a reaction that required UV irradiation. As a light source, I used the UV lamp that was generally used in the lab for thin-layer chromatography visualization. Incredibly, the reaction worked a bit.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

La Divina Commedia – a long time has passed since I read it at school, and it would be long enough to keep me busy and thinking for a while. As for the music, Radiohead’s full discography, but only if I am alone. Otherwise, my wife and kids would destroy it.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?

Ryan Gilmour and Dieter Seebach. I believe the former will strongly influence Europe’s organic chemistry community; the latter has profoundly done so.

Amit Kumar is the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) energy club and a research scientist in the Lienhard research group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He works on clean energy technology and sustainable water-energy-bioelectrochemical systems for energy generation and resource recovery. Amit recently published a paper in Nature Reviews Chemistry entitled “The ins and outs of microbial-electrode electron transfer reactions”.

1. What made you want to study chemistry?

Chemistry is unique and plays a huge role in the world we live in, especially with respect to chemical commodities and energy production. I recently completed my postdoctoral studies in the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT, where my continued interest in engineering chemistry evolved – I feel we cannot do any resource recovery or energy science without chemistry. In my view, chemical/biological/environmental engineering without chemistry is like a skeleton without bones.

2. If you weren’t an engineer and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?

I would love to be a full-time world explorer, such as Sir David Attenborough, because exploring unexplored nature is fascinating. My upbringing in a farmer’s family may well be the reason for this!

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

I am working on the water-energy interface for the production of chemicals using electrochemical systems. This is fascinating because the world needs access to sustainable clean water and energy. In addition, I am also working on energy-efficient electro-systems to recover resources. I am hoping that my current work will help provide environmentally sound and sustainable solutions to the pressing need for clean water and energy.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

If I could time travel I would like to have dinner with the revolutionary Nelson Mandela and would love to learn everything from his struggles for humanity. I have so many questions for him (such as how he felt, what type of energy kept him going for decades, and difficulties he faced… this list is long) which I would not trade for anything, I would rather ask him during our personal conversation instead of reading a third party.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?

A couple of months ago, I was converting leftover fracking gas into biofuels. The experiment involved coupling the oxidation of methane — from reserve fracking gas — to reduction of sulfate in an engineered system as an environmentally sound and sustainable alternative technology. In other words, this work aims to use natural biocatalysts to capture electrons from methane to give sulfides.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

For the book, I would take The Incredible Human Journey by Dr Alice Roberts. The album would be Radioaxiom: A Dub Transmission by Jah Wobble and Bill Laswell.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?

Prof. Alan Aspuru-Guzik of Harvard University has a unique approach towards materials for renewable energy. Although I have known of his work for some time, last week I moderated a panel discussion including Alan and I realized he is a great human being on top of a great scientist.

Nilay Hazari is in the Department of Chemistry at Yale University and studies synthetic inorganic and organometallic chemistry, with an emphasis on reaction mechanisms and catalysis. Nilay recently published a paper in Nature Reviews Chemistry entitled ‘Well-defined nickel and palladium precatalysts for cross-coupling’.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

As an undergraduate I was a double major in chemistry and statistics. Pursuing a career in either of these two areas would have enabled me to understand how systems work and analyze data regularly. However, chemistry allows me to interact and work with many different people on a daily basis, which I greatly enjoy.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?

A sports commentator. There are so many different sports that I love watching, playing and understanding. A job as a sports commentator would allow me to watch a large amount of high level sports live and also pass on my passion to other people.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

My group is working on developing transition metal catalysts for a range of different process relating to the synthesis of both pharmaceuticals and fine and commodity chemicals. More specifically, there are mechanistic challenges associated with nickel catalyzed cross-coupling and carboxylation reactions that I would like my group to assist the community in solving in order to design improved systems. Additionally, the incorporation of a catalyst for formic acid or methanol dehydrogenation that my group and our great friends the Bernskoetter group at the University of Missouri develop into a functioning and practical device is another long-term goal.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

Richard Feynman, who was a great scientist who by all accounts was a lively story teller with a diverse range of interests.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?

Around one month ago I made a pincer supported Pd complex from the literature for an undergraduate student who I am working with. I find working in lab to be an excellent break from my normal routine, which involves spending a large amount of time in front of my computer and in meetings. I also enjoy interacting with my co-workers in the lab.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

For the book, I would choose A Catcher in The Rye by J. D Salinger, and for the album I would go with What’s the Story Morning Glory by Oasis. I was introduced to this album by my lab mates during my PhD and have numerous pleasant memories associated with it.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?

Ann Valentine, as she is an excellent role model and always has amusing and interesting anecdotes.