Sarah Reisman and Melanie Sanford on how organic chemistry is changing and how they’ve learned to choose priorities

02/15/22 • 23 min

Being a chemistry professor is a juggling act. But sometimes professors have too many balls in the air. How do they know which ones to grab and which to let drop? In this episode of Stereo Chemistry, C&EN's Leigh Krietsch Boerner sits down with organic chemists Sarah Reisman and Melanie Sanford to hear how they decide what projects to work on, what sparks joy for them in the lab, and what being an organic chemist really means to them.

A transcript of this episode will be available soon at cen.acs.org.

Sign up for C&EN’s Selling Your Science: The Art of Science Communication at cenm.ag/sciencecommunication. Contact Stereo Chemistry by emailing [email protected]. Image credit: Will Ludwig/C&EN/Lance Hayashida/University of Michigan

A transcript of this episode will be available soon at cen.acs.org.

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Jose-Luis Jimenez and Kimberly Prather on the intersection of aerosol science and the COVID-19 pandemic

Imagine you’re an atmospheric chemist. There’s a pandemic. And public health officials release information about how the virus spreads from one person to another—information that directly contradicts your knowledge of how tiny particles move in the air. What do you do? In this episode of Stereo Chemistry, Jose-Luis Jimenez and Kimberly Prather talk to C&EN editor Jyllian Kemsley about how they’ve handled that situation over the past 2 years. They share their frustrations with public health officials along with the heartbreak and rewards of communicating science with the general public, and what they plan to take from their experiences as they think about their research going forward.

A transcript of this episode is available at bit.ly/3rzzCzI.

Sign up for C&EN’s Selling Your Science: The Art of Science Communication at cenm.ag/sciencecommunication. Contact Stereo Chemistry: [email protected]

Image credit: Will Ludwig/C&EN/Mariana Pereira (Jimenez)/Erik Jepsen/University of California San Diego (Prather)

Next Episode

Bonus: The helium shortage that wasn’t supposed to be

Helium shortages can derail research and threaten expensive instruments that depend on the gas to operate safely. In late 2020, analysts predicted—and we reported—that pressures on the global helium market were likely to ease as new production capacity came online. Today, helium users are again facing price spikes and limited supplies, driven by a variety of factors including political instability in Europe and technical malfunctions at key suppliers. In this bonus episode of Stereo Chemistry, C&EN industrial gas reporter Craig Bettenhausen explains how we ended up here again and how the outlook for the global helium market has evolved. A transcript of this episode is available at bit.ly/3tBSGzF.

For more background about where helium comes from, why it's so important to science, and what happens when you can't get enough of it, check out our October 2020 podcast episode, How helium shortages have changed science. Image credit: Boris Steinberg, Johns Hopkins Chemistry Music credit: “How Did I Get Here” by Sean Solo Contact Stereo Chemistry by emailing [email protected].