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.