Travel to the Frontier of Science
Transcriber: Minh Le Quang
Reviewer: lisa thompson
Welcome to my talk.
I’m Yury Gogotsi.
I’m professor of Materials Science
at Drexel University,
and today I’m going to talk to you
about my travel in the world of science,
also my travel from Ukraine,
from work on corrosion
of structural ceramics,
which some of you may be able to read
on the cover of this book,
through many countries, many years,
to nanotechnology research,
to discovery of new materials
which are being researched nowadays
by thousands [of] scientists
over the entire world here.
But first, I know
we have a diverse audience here.
Let me talk about my profession,
about materials science.
You don’t need to be an expert
in materials science engineering
to know that the world
is made of materials.
From the Stone Age to the Silicon Age,
humans have crafted tools by carving
them out of first bone, stone,
then making them out of bronze, iron.
Today, we live in the silicon world.
All our electronic devices
are made using silicon chips here,
and we are pushing the world even further,
building them out of new materials,
creating materials, atom by atom here.
So those are types of things
my research group is doing here.
But let’s go back, actually -
back more than 40 years back -
to Kyiv, Ukraine,
at that time, former Soviet Union.
I know some of my students today,
even by the end of their PhD study,
are not decided
what to do with their life.
But to me, this decision came very early.
When I was in high school,
I got excited about chemistry.
I didn’t really need a textbook;
I could listen to my chemistry teacher,
and I would memorize everything.
So my father took me to chemistry club,
and probably starting from eighth grade,
I was in this chemistry club
doing crazy experiments.
I was throwing metallic sodium
into pools of water
and see how it explode.
I would work with mercury
or hydrofluoric acid,
something that, pretty much,
graduate students are not allowed to do
nowadays in most of university labs.
I would work with liquid metals,
actually creating metals out of oxides,
out of raw materials
at temperatures approaching 5000 degrees.
And well, it was maybe a little bit
dangerous, but it was exciting.
And I really loved chemistry.
I still do.
And naturally, after I graduated
from high school,
the decision was obvious:
I would go to study chemistry,
just like most of my friends
from the chemistry club.
And this is when I met
a first major challenge.
When I applied to Kyiv University
to study chemistry,
I was told I was not good enough
because I had some mild color blindness,
and I was told, no,
if you cannot distinguish colors clearly
enough, you cannot become a chemist.
So what did I do? I didn’t stop.
I actually went and learned
all these, like, tables
for checking on color blindness
to memorize them.
But by the time I was doing this,
I also found that there was
a metallurgy department
at another university in Kyiv,
Kyiv Polytechnic -
something dealing with high temperatures,
dealing with chemistry,
but chemistry at these extreme
temperatures I liked before,
so what I did, I went to study
at Kyiv Polytechnic.
I went to study high temperature,
working on high-performance
ceramic materials
that were designed for engines here.
It was very exciting,
very interesting here.
When I graduated, I continued towards PhD,
and in 1990, when Gorbachev came
and started perestroika,
I was among the first ones
to go to see the world.
I went to Germany.
I went, afterwards, to Japan
to see how Japanese
make the best functional ceramics.
And Japan was exciting experience.
And I would recommend
everyone who wants to become a scientist,
everyone who wants to work
at the cutting edge of engineering,
to go and explore different
countries, different places.
In the Soviet Union,
I could not really travel much,
I could not see the world.
As a postdoc, I was able to see the world.
I was able to travel here.
And, actually, Japan was great.
I published my first paper in Nature.
I made a very important finding.
And for scientists,
publishing paper in Nature
is like if a mountaineer
climbing Mount Everest -
getting to the very, very top here.
But I actually did not feel like in Japan
I had enough freedom to do what I want.
And this may sound surprising
for a guy coming from a very, very
restrictive country, Soviet Union -
at the time, actually,
Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union
when I studied.
Japan, not enough freedom.
But it’s a very traditional country,
where seniority defines
pretty much everything.
So I decided to go back to Europe.
I went to work in Norway.
I went to Germany again.
And the time actually came to decide
where I wanted to build my career.
After traveling around the world,
after visiting
United States several times,
I actually realized
that the best opportunities
will be offered to me in the U.S.
And the main reason is
that I was looking really for opportunity,
not just follow someone else’s
path in research;
I want to do something different.
I didn’t want anyone
to tell me what to do.
And that’s exactly what U.S.
academic system offers actually here.
As an assistant professor,
I would be able to do everything -
what I wanted -
as long as I could get funding
to do what I wanted here.
So, what I did, I started
to apply for positions.
And as you can imagine,
and anyone who applied
for jobs knows probably,
you get rejections.
You have to learn
to get lots of rejections.
But finally,
I got an invitation
to fly from Europe to the U.S.
for an interview
at a very good university here.
And actually, I did fly there.
I went for an interview,
and I failed it spectacularly.
I had no clue what was expected
from a professor in the U.S.,
and I didn’t get discouraged here.
What I did, I learned.
I succeeded in my next interview.
However, I didn’t still get an offer,
and the reason was because
I was in a somewhat different field
and the university
was looking for someone else.
What happened?
Actually, a couple of weeks later,
I got an email
from Professor Selçuk Güçeri
from another university -
University of Illinois in Chicago,
where I got my first faculty position -
with a question:
Yury, I know you applied elsewhere.
Would you be also interested
to consider our university?
I came.
I got a job offer.
I moved [to] Chicago in 1996 here
and started to work
on nanomaterials there:
first carbon nanomaterials,
making carbon nanotubes,
non-porous carbon,
discovering new materials,
finding applications
for those new materials,
basically having fun with science,
doing discovery science,
discovering materials
that I wanted to discover here.
And in 2000, I moved
to Drexel University.
After four years, what normally takes
basically about a decade,
I got a full professor position,
actually, on the invitation
of same professor, Selçuk Güçeri,
who, some of you affiliated
with Drexel University know,
has been a very successful
dean of engineering
after he moved from USC to Drexel here.
And I’ve been at Drexel for 20 years now.
And a decade ago, we discovered,
with my colleagues at Drexel University,
an entirely new family of materials here,
and this will be the next thing
I’m going to talk about.
But before that, I just want to tell
people who may come from other countries,
who may come from this country but some
underprivileged neighborhoods,
difficult situation here:
If you have a dream,
if you love something,
simply never, never, never give up;
you are going to succeed.
You will overcome many difficulties,
but if you have a goal, you will succeed.
And I still get failures:
my proposals for findings get rejected,
my papers get rejected.
I got paper rejected by Nature magazine
just a couple of days ago.
And I know it’s great science,
and I’m going to fight
to get it published here.
But you should not stop here.
Now, let me tell you
a little bit about science we do,
about science of two-dimensional
materials, nanomaterials.
It, actually, to a large extent,
started in 2004 with discovery
made by other scientists:
Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov
at the University
of Manchester in U.K.,
who showed that monoatomic
layers of graphene,
basically materials
made of single layer of atoms -
invisible, virtually, here -
have very unusual properties.
They got a Nobel Prize
in 2010 for it here.
But what it did -
actually tell other scientists
that it’s possible to build materials
which are like a sheet of paper,
but made of single atoms,
which are thousands of times thinner
than a sheet of paper,
and use this material
to build new materials and new technology.
Now, imagine, if you like
to play with Lego bricks
and if you are given
Lego bricks of one type -
all of them blacks, all of them same -
you can do something,
but it’s not much fun.
And now imagine you can get Lego bricks
of all possible colors,
of all possible sizes.
And this is largely what we did
by discovering MXenes,
which showed that there are
materials that are metallic
and even more conducting,
better conductors of electricity
than graphene films,
but they come in different colors,
in different thicknesses.
You can see, for example, the red dots
in this picture, those are single atoms,
and they have one layer, two layers,
three layers, four layers,
five layers, nine layers, eleven layers.
We can basically build new technology.
We can make materials which have not been
known before, which didn’t exist before.
We can combine them
and then build entire devices
by simply assembling those tiny layers
into something much bigger, very useful.
We can make new types of batteries.
We can filter water
and remove salt from water
and give drinking water to people.
We can make sensors, which will sense,
for example, contamination environment.
We can make something else
which will be useful -
for example, deliver medicines here.
And what we actually do,
going from graphene to MXenes,
we are trying to solve useful problems.
So, what do materials scientists do?
They discover materials.
But the next step is [to] find
where those materials can be used.
So what we’re doing, we’re trying
to use these materials for energy:
generation, storing, better batteries,
batteries that charge faster,
store more energy,
desalinate water,
make sensors that will sense
spoilage of food,
but also prevent degradation
of food in packaging
and make food stay good longer.
We can clean air
and desalinate or purify water,
We can also deliver drugs.
For example, in my group, we are working
on building artificial kidney,
using Mxenes that we can save life
of patients and improve quality of life -
patients who suffer
from acute kidney disease.
And of course, there are many other
potential applications here.
Also, we are trying to not only improve
the current technology,
we’re trying to build future technologies.
I don’t know what your vision
of the future of technology is,
but I see many technologies
becoming flexible, wearable,
connected in the Internet of Things,
using renewable energy
or harvesting energy from our movements
along with sun, wind,
and other things here.
So what we are trying to do
is to use these 2-D materials
to build flexible devices,
incorporate devices into clothes
that we wear every day here.
So, basically take electronics
from separate, large, bulky mobile phones,
computers, laptops, large screens
into something that will be with us
all the time here -
basically the next world in technology.
And those things are truly exciting
because we feel
we can make a difference here.
But what is also important
is that science is beautiful.
I love chemistry. I love materials.
I love science the same way
I loved it when I was a high school kid.
I’m equally excited with every discovery,
every new material we make,
every change in the materials,
every way to create the material,
every new application here.
And we’re also trying to show the world
the beauty of science surrounding
this NanoArtography competition,
when we show people pictures
of the invisible world:
colored, creative.
And again, actually,
anyone can participate;
bring your picture,
send it to NanoArtography,
and you may win a prize
and see your pictures in calendar
and online anywhere here.
So, I still continue following my dream
of material discovery,
of using chemistry to make materials
that can improve technology,
improve life, improve environment,
improve health of people.
And I wish all of you the same.
Follow your dream, believe in yourself,
and never, never, never give up.
Thank you.