Tom Mallouk is in the Department of Chemistry at the Pennsylvania State University, and works on nanomaterials of relevance to problems in energy conversion, catalysis, and electronics.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

As an undergraduate I was majoring in chemistry for not very good reasons when I starting doing research with Prof. Aaron Wold at Brown University. He inspired me and my fellow students (many of whom are now professional chemists and leaders in their fields) with his encyclopedic knowledge of solid-state chemistry and his love of discovering new compounds and structures. It was my first glimpse of chemistry as a living science, and of the fun and the power of making new materials.

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

I’d have to go with professional baseball player, preferably with the Boston Red Sox or the Oakland A’s. But if excluded from that career or from the entertainment industry by my lack of talent, I would choose to work in education or public policy. I like teaching, and I think teaching science well at all levels is very important. The world is facing some big problems and choices in the areas of energy and climate change. This is really the greatest challenge of the next decade or two. Probably the most effective thing we can do about it as scientists is to communicate what we know.

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

We have a number of projects related to solar energy, including solar water splitting and improving the ultilization of light by solar cells. We are part of a collaborative project on nano- and microscale motors that we hope will one day lead to robotic microsurgeons and other diverse applications. We are also working on the chemistry of layered materials, which are interesting for catalysis, electronics, and electrochemical energy storage.

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

Without singling any one out, I’d like to have dinner with the people who founded religions to see if any of them had an idea of the kind of trouble they were starting.

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

My wife, who is not a chemist but brilliant in many ways, convinced me to take our recent sabbatical in Paris, and one of the wonderful things about that was being able to work in the lab until about 2 pm before the first distracting email arrived from the U.S. The last successful experiment I did there was in 2010, in collaboration with Mauricio Hoyos. We accidentally discovered the ultrasonic propulsion of microscopic metal ‘rockets’ in fluids and it has since turned into a very interesting project. I did some unsuccessful experiments with two other collaborators, Leila Boubekeur and Christian Amatore, trying to grow self-assembled monolayers on tungsten microwires. We still haven’t completely given up on that idea.

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

I would like to have a practical book on how to build a sailboat from driftwood and palm fronds. For the music, is a double album OK? (e.g., George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’) If not, I’d choose ‘American Beauty’ (Grateful Dead) or ‘Down Home’ (Seals and Crofts). After 40 years I’m still not tired of listening to them.

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

Three academic chemists whose careers are inspiring, and whose comments are always interesting, are John Goodenough, Allen Bard, and George Whitesides.

Margit Müller is in the Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and works on calcium and cAMP dynamics in brain energy metabolism — she is also one of the winners of our In Your Element essay competition (we’re hoping to feature all of the winners on Reactions over the coming months).

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

When I was fourteen years old I attended a university biochemistry lecture given by my father. I don’t recall the topic of this lecture, but I remember vividly how he explained the interconnections of single molecules in enormous and dynamic biochemical networks and how, during the course of his explanations, these networks slowly started to make sense. Also, I remember him instructing the students not to learn these things by heart, but to understand them. This was the first time I experienced a scientific view of the world and the moment I first wanted to become a scientist.

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

As a child I always wanted to be a writer and ever since then this idea has been living in a tiny corner of my brain, so…

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

I am studying calcium and cAMP dynamics in connection to brain glycogen and am hoping to find out why our brains seemingly “waste energy” on storing glycogen.

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

I would choose Ludwig van Beethoven. I grew up deeply admiring him and I don’t want to imagine what the world would sound like without his music.

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

Last week I used fluorescent calcium indicators to monitor signal transduction in neurons.

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

I would pick Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems, because I would miss poetry more than stories.

My one music album would be Ludwig van Beethoven, The 9 Symphonies, played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra with Herbert von Karajan conducting.

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

Someone working in eastern Europe, because we don’t hear enough from there.

Christine Cardin is in the Department of Chemistry in the University of Reading, and works on the crystal structures of both small and large molecules. Her particular interest is nucleic acid crystallography, and she loves working at the Diamond synchrotron, near to Reading.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

My father gave me lots of encouragement. He came from a family of Manchester engineers and had himself studied maths, as my son later did.  I was his eldest daughter, and he had no sons. I think he could see that I had the practical aptitude (which he lacked) and thought that a woman would have more chance in chemistry than in engineering. I had a very enthusiastic (female) chemistry teacher from the age of 16 who suggested I apply to Oxford – chemistry was a fashionable subject back then, and Oxford was the best place, so I was astonished when I was offered an scholarship, and felt my path had been chosen for me. Chemistry was fun, and seemed a great escape from all sorts of mundane matters into a world of ideas.

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

There are some professions that seem to generate people who live long productive lives, or perhaps it’s that they attract them in the first place. I’m thinking of creative people such as orchestral conductors and pianists, who often continue well into their eighties and nineties. But gifted scientists like Max Perutz were also like that. My careers advice has always been to find out what you love to do and get paid for it, and now it might include using some  interest or skill which will last for the whole of your life. On that basis, perhaps I should have been a travel writer. I could go round the world by train and ship, and write about that.

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

As a crystallographer, I find that seeing is usually believing. I like working with people who have a mental picture of how their molecule or interaction will look, and want to see if it’s right. Sometimes they don’t like the answer, but that’s another story. So, right now, we want to link our recent work on crystal structures showing how ruthenium ‘light-switch’ complexes bind to nucleic acids to their photochemistry. Can we use crystallography to capture some photochemistry in action? That could be exciting. We’d love to take a nucleic acid crystal containing a photoactive species of some sort, shine a light on it, and see the result in the crystal. The Diamond synchrotron is well set up for this sort of thing, and we would get some insight into DNA damage mechanisms.

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

Hmm, that’s a hard one. It would also be interesting to think of where you could have eaten, and what dining locations fostered the development of science. I used to work in Trinity College Dublin, whose Dining Hall must have hosted some eminent scientists  for erudite discussions. There I was once shown a letter from Charles Darwin, perhaps he also visited that Dining Hall, and would have had some interesting stories to tell. A person I would like to have met, perhaps over a meal in Turin, was the great Italian and chemist Primo Levi. He most famously wrote about his Auschwitz experiences in ‘If this is a man’, but his 1975 book ‘ The Periodic Table’ is a wonderful autobiographical, but short, book, in which each chapter is named after a chemical element. It’s a masterpiece of conciseness, so there must be so much more he didn’t say.

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

Last night I was looking at some crystallisation experiments in the microscope, that’s my therapy. It’s like a gardener checking on how the vegetables are coming along.

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

I’m not very good at hypothetical situations. But my daughter has recorded some of her music, and the sound of her singing to her guitar would keep my spirits up more than anything. We have hundreds of classical CDs at home, but I couldn’t choose between them. Any Mozart opera would be good, though.  I should probably take the last novel I started reading and still haven’t finished, a year or so later, Haruki Murakami’s ‘Norwegian Wood’. Murakami was reacommended by my daughter and I did read ‘Kafka on the Shore’ which has a strange hypnotic quality.

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

My former PhD supervisor Mike Lappert. He’s how I met my husband, David. He’s still travelling the world as a chemist, and it’s keeping him young.  He’s also the person that suggested I try crystallography, guessing that I might perfer that to organometallic synthesis. I never really looked back.

Bas de Bruin is in the Department of Homogeneous and Supramolecular Chemistry at the van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences (HIMS) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and works on catalysis research. He specifically focusses on fundamental development of homogeneous catalysis with metals in unconventional oxidation states and with unconventional ligands, aiming at the development of new catalytic reactions.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

As a boy at the age of 10, I got inspired by visits to the laboratories of the KEMA institute in Arnhem (Netherlands), where my father took me sometimes. Since then I already wanted to become a chemist. This has not changed since.

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

I would probably be working in physics or biology, areas which have always appealed to me besides chemistry. I could well imagine exploring the fascinating world of deep-sea marine biology, for example.

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

I am currently working on a quite broad range of topics, all involving coordination chemistry, organometallic chemistry and catalysis. My primary interest is to understand reactivity, in a broad sense and in particular around transition metals. I am involved in explorative design and synthesis of new materials based on highly functionalised polymers, metallo-radical chemistry, carbene and nitrene transfer reactions, modelling transition metal catalysis (combination of synthetic modelling and computational catalysis), and EPR spectroscopy (combined with computational methods), as well as the development of applied homogeneous catalysts in unconventional oxidation states and/or with unconventional ligands. Current and long-term future activities aim at development of new (supra)molecular catalysts and (polymeric) materials, focusing on increasing demands to uncover new catalysts for new desirable and atom & energy efficient transformations providing several opportunities for new research lines.

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

I am fascinated by the history of Fritz Haber. This German scientist saved many people from starvation (Haber-Bosch process) and developed several important concepts in chemistry (e.g. Born-Haber cycles). However, he was also named the “father of chemical warfare” as a result of his work in developing nerve gasses during World War I. He lived in a dangerous, dynamic and fascinating time. It seems intriguing to me to talk to this controversial man about the role he played in history.

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

I still do occasional experiments in the lab myself, but this mostly involves preparing samples for EPR spectroscopic measurements. My last real synthetic efforts were around 2004. Unfortunately, I do not have enough time left to do that anymore myself. Luckily my PhD students and postdocs keep me updated with their fascinating chemistry almost every day.

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

Difficult question. I guess every book and album becomes boring if you are alone on a desert island for a very long time. A survival handbook is probably the smartest choice, but I guess the question involves a novel. In that case I would choose “The world according to Garp” (John Irving). The music album would probably be Communique (Dire Straits).

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

Jonas Peters (Caltech). He seems to be an interesting guy, and his chemistry is fascinating.