Nicholas P. Deifel is a Visiting Professor the Department of Chemistry at Washington College in Chestertown, MD and works on applying crystal engineering to actinide containing hybrid materials.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

Fireworks drove me to study chemistry. Growing up in Pittsburgh, I was exposed to local Zambelli fireworks shows over the three rivers. The exciting combinations of colors and explosions intrigued me at a young age; when I later discovered the source of these colors were metal salts I was hooked on chemistry. My love and excitement for the sciences was further crystallized through the efforts several awesome high school teachers.

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

If I could go back in time and put as many years into music as I’ve put into chemistry, I’d play banjo in a blue grass band. I love bluegrass.

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

I’ve been working on synthesizing several families of uranium containing materials. While the initial characterizations of these materials are complete, we’ve been lucky to pair with researchers at UC Davis, Argonne National Lab and Los Alamos National lab to look at their thermochemical and electronic properties. I hope that thermochemical data (specifically the formation enthalpies) of structurally related uranium-bearing materials will be beneficial to future discussions in areas such as waste stewardship.

In addition to experimental work, I’m busy teaching an academically diverse group undergraduate students at a small liberal arts school. They are both traditional students of chemistry and nontraditional – political science and English majors. Perhaps a bit sappy, but I hope my efforts in teaching these scientists and non-scientists lead to graduates who smartly question the practices of today and are ready to tackle the problems of tomorrow.

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

Since college, I’ve been interested in both travelling and the history of the Silk Road. That said, I’d like to have dinner with Ibn Battuta, a 14th century traveler who spent over twenty years of his life discovering the far reaches of Africa and Asia. I’m impressed with the fortitude it must have taken to leave ones family and home to engage in such extensive travel in the 1300’s. Perhaps he’d have some words of wisdom to offer as I endeavor to quench my own wanderlust.

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

Last Tuesday I monitored 12 simple distillations for my organic chemistry lab sections. Though I’ve done this experiment many times, it is still very cool to see the excitement each student feels when the first few drops of distillate hit their receiving flask.

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

I’m a huge sci-fi nerd, so the first half of this is easy. I’d bring “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide”, by Douglass Adams. Technically it is a collection of the first five books in the series, but I’ll assume your lawyers will allow this. Choosing one album is difficult, but it would have to be something soulful like Otis Redding’s “The Dock of the Bay.”

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

I would like to see Dr. Ahmed Zewail interviewed by Nature Chemistry, though Reactions is likely not the forum for this. I think Dr. Zewail may become the second chemist to win a Nobel Peace Prize after first winning one in Chemistry.

Anna I. Krylov is in the Department of Chemistry at University of Southern California, and works on electronic structure and spectroscopy of electronically-excited and open-shell species.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

As a child, I read several books about scientists and inventors (Marie Curie, Robert Wood, Bell, Paster, Koch, etc), and I was taken away by their world of everyday intellectual adventure and excitement of trying to solve puzzles of Nature. It was very different from the adult world around me where people regarded their jobs as a drag and counted hours left till a weekend and days left till a vacation. I wanted to be part of that other world. I liked all science subjects. I first wanted to a geologist (travel and wild outdoor life), then I read a book on biology that had scanning electron microscope images of cells, and decided to become a biologist, then I wanted to be a physicist cleaning spectrometers with cats and exposing dishonest boarding house operators using atomic flame tests (like Wood), but somehow chemistry took over. I think I really got excited about chemistry as I was experimenting in my home-made lab (stocked with not an entirely safe selection of chemicals that went beyond a chemistry set I cajoled my parents to get for me). I really loved explosions and mischief — like sodium in a toilet or nitrogen triiodide in the teachers lounge (almost got kicked out of school for this one). And then of course colors and smells (stink bombs are fun too!) and precipitates — it was like magic!

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

Hmm, I dunno. I guess any job involving scientific research would be fun. Physics, biology, astronomy, engineering — it’s all good…

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

I am getting increasingly drawn into biological problems. Currently, I am obsessing about fluorescent proteins (from the green fluorescent protein family — yes, this yucky stuff from a jelly fish). I am fascinated by their rich photo-physics and at the moment I am just trying to understand how do they work on the atomic level (if you want to learn more — check out our recent feature article in Acc. Chem. Res. DOI:10.1021/ar2001556). I hope that eventually we will be able to transition from understanding to engineering, that is, to use what we learned to solve important practical problems, like developing better genetically-encoded labels for 3D in vivo imaging or employing fluorescent proteins in photodynamic therapies.

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

Richard Feynman. He is so sharp and so funny!

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

My lab is my computer cluster — I do virtual chemistry most of the time. Two weeks ago I was looking at IrBr_n^– clusters (a request from a collaborator) — our goal was to understand their electronically excited states. Turns out, they are very, very tricky ;). The last real chemistry experiment was, I think, an overpressure explosion in a General Chemistry class last spring — liquid nitrogen in a cola bottle — ummmm, very, very loud!!! One of my favorites.

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

Book: “The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy”. Music: an album by “Neschastnii Sluchai”, my favorite band.

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

My colleague Curt Wittig. You will know why when you get his answers.

Huaqiang Zeng is in the Department of Chemistry at National University of Singapore (NUS), and works on the applications of broadly defined, bioinspired supramolecular chemistry into both chemistry and biology.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

Chemistry has been my most favorite subject in high school due to my natural interest in science. The wonderful chemistry experiments conducted in my high school time slowly lured me into the splendid world of chemistry. When I started going to college, I knew that I wanted to study chemistry and to become a chemist someday.

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

Government officer who has the power to transform the society not into “Utopia” type, which is unlikely to realize, but at least into a one that is free of poverty and hunger while providing more opportunities or according more status to the more capable, regardless of races and genders, on the fairness basis.

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

The major emphasis is placed on realizing synthetic ion channels capable of transporting ions across the lipid membrane in a highly selective fashion. Priorities are given to (1) mimic and recapitulate nature’s almighty ability to hormonally combine high ion selectivity into rapid ion conduction using simplified chemical systems that have not been made possible yet and (2) devise general and reliable strategies for synthetic ion channels and pores easily tunable toward binding and differentiating various ions (and other molecular species in the future) so that we don’t simply stop at the frontiers defined by nature. The ability to do so will lead to diverse interesting applications.

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

Albert Einstein, one of the world’s greatest minds. I have wanted to know his thoughts behind all those great theories and to get infected by his utmost courage and determination during “the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light”. A spiritually contagious dialog with him during the dinner shall greatly encourage me to continue venturing into the unknown world of chemistry as a pathfinder and to deal with all the uncertainties that come with it.

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

I can hardly remember, but it must be biology-related one because I always completed the synthesis of target molecules first, followed by biological applications, and because I worked until my last day with Prof Peter G. Schultz at The Scripps Research Institute, it must be around the end of June of 2006, a time I left TSRI and headed to NUS to take up my current post as an Assistant Professor.

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

Being a chemist is great in that one’s knowledge-based imaginations can be physically tested, and can sometimes solve perplexing enigmas. So, rather than a book and a music album, I would love to take with me a set of laboratory apparatus (hotplate stirrer, magnetic bar, rotary evaporator, etc).

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

In balance, I will choose Professor Samuel Gellman from University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a genuine scholarly man of integrity. I met him once in the conference held in France, talked to him for a short time and was deeply impressed by his scholarly spirit, humble attitude and true love of great sciences of not only his but also others.

Christophe Copéret is at the Department of Chemistry, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, where he works on functional materials with applications in catalysis, molecular recognition, imaging and microelectronics.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

When I was a kid, I read books from my older brothers, and one of them discussed about possible jobs in the world of adults! I was struck by a section dealing with “ingénieur chimiste”, because that job dealt with making complex structures and processes using small Legos, named molecules. This was definitely one of the key reasons for me to become a chemist, and this was further motivated over the years by very good and rigorous high-school teachers in physics and chemistry.

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

I would certainly love to be a historian and a sociologist, because I am fascinating by the history of human beings, but a more realistic alternative would be to be a chef.

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

We are dealing with the understanding of chemistry occurring at the surfaces of materials. We hope we can reach the level of precision of today’s molecular biology and chemistry with complex inorganic systems in such a way that we can design very complex functional materials via a molecular approach like we currently do with molecules.

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

I would be thrilled to be able to have dinner with Tocqueville; he had an amazing foresight of political systems regarding the advantages and disadvantages of different democratic systems, while he was working for the King of France. His views were so clear at the time that they are still applicable today, explaining most of our current world turbulences.

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

A few weeks ago, helping students with glass-blowing (a very important technique in our lab and a good way to relax between proposal and manuscript writing!).

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

Choosing is always difficult, I guess I would go with the collection “A la recherche du temps perdu” from Marcel Proust and if I had to take a single book it would be the last volume “Le temps retrouvé”.

Concerning music, it would be a piece of one the Russian composers, and I would then probably pick the piano concerto n°3 from Rachmaninov.

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

This would certainly be among emerging scientists. I would thus pick within close collaborators and friends, with whom I have enjoyed discussing chemistry: Olivier Maury from ENS Lyon, specialist of luminescent molecules and materials, and Chloé Thieuleux from CPE Lyon, experts in material chemistry.