Materials Girl: Hey baby, what’s your h-index?

We’re just getting to know each other, but your resume caught my eye and I might be looking to collaborate… How many papers have you published? What’s the typical impact factor of the journals those papers appear in? Or — to be Google Scholar-forward — what’s your h-index? At what rate do you publish? Are you first or corresponding author? Why should we get to know each other better? Is your CV worth a swipe right?  Read more

Reactions: Xin Su

Reactions: Xin Su

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.  Read more

Reactions: Jen Heemstra

Reactions: Jen Heemstra

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.  Read more

Reactions: Paolo Melchiorre

Reactions: Paolo Melchiorre

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.”  … Read more

Materials Girl: Life beyond academia

Mortality is not a concept that many young scholars are in the habit of considering. Indeed, students tend to pay little thought to their health within a frequently frenetic, sleep-deprived, caffeine-powered existence of procrastination and salty ramen (or are those tears?). Self-care was not an issue that I focused on during grad school, or even in the following year of post-graduation burnout. Sure, I dropped 15 lbs in two weeks while preparing for quals — however, starvation, 20 hour workdays and anxiety attacks are neither a healthy nor sustainable lifestyle (and needless to say, that weight came right back)… Only in retrospect have I realized the depth to which I was depressed, hyper-stressed, and overly isolated in The Dungeon – meanwhile medical specialists wondered why my health was so  poor for a normal-looking student in her early/mid 20’s.  Read more

Reactions: Amit Kumar

Reactions: Amit Kumar

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”.  Read more

Reactions: Nilay Hazari

Reactions: Nilay Hazari

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’.  Read more