"So my name is Ryan Landis.
I'm here at the University of Massachusetts of Amherst working under Professor Vincent
Rotello.
My research typically entails developing polymer-based materials, nanomaterials specifically used
for therapeutic delivery of proteins and antimicrobial applications.
I was born in York, Pennsylvania.
Shortly after moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
So when I was a young kid, my mother actually gave me a book on rocks and minerals.
Kids growing up, they wanted to be firefighters or policemen or astronauts.
I wanted to be a geologist.
For some reason, I thought looking at rocks was pretty interesting.
One of the materials that interested me was quarts.
And it turned out, I grew up on a mountain and we had a plethora of quartz.
So I spent my days just, you know, collecting every single quartz.
My dad wasn't too happy about it though because the rocks would always get lodged in his lawn
mower.
But my parents always supported my interest in, you know, anything science related.
And going into high school, I got away from geology because geology seemed a little bit
too static for me.
I was more interested in dynamic systems, things that change over time.
So the first one that I became interested in then afterwards became chemistry.
Something about chemistry and understanding how molecules form, how they interact and
how they can form really interested me.
So it was kind of like being a construction worker on the nano level, which I thought
was interesting.
Always interested, growing up, you know, building and constructing things.
And I think if you had a tool set to be able to construct something on the nano level,
that's kind of interesting.
So that's really what drew me to it.
And easy way to think of what a polymer actually is is that if you take a single entity, a
single type of structure, and have it repeating over many, many units, that is typically what
we classify as a polymer.
So the ultimate goal is to be able to design polymeric systems that can be used for delivery
of antimicrobial systems.
These have inherent challenges in and of itself.
In order to have good adhesion onto wherever, such as bacteria, biofilms or tumor cells,
cationic or positively charged materials are preferential.
However, it's noticed that cationic based polymers can be kind of toxic.
So developing a system which can do what it actually needs to do without having inherent
toxicity is an issue.
So the overall goal is to be able to deliver your payload to do its job without having
any, you know, negative side effects to normal healthy cells.
Dynamic systems interest me tremendously so one of the reasons that I joined the group
that I'm in, Professor Rotello's group, is that it's very dynamic, very diverse.
And I like that because I enjoy actually learning new things.
I try and learn little bits and pieces.
Whether it's actually the language itself or the culture or certain customs.
[Speaker 2] And you can almost have a different outcome.
[Speaker 1] In this group, we have Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese.
We've had visiting scholars from Turkey, Germany, France.
You know, all over the place and I like that because it keeps things interesting.
You know?
It always keeps open for opportunities and new things to learn every day.
In order to be successful in research and science, you have to be willing to do whatever
it takes.
You have to be driven to be successful, to be motivated, and sometimes that motivation
has to come from yourself.
You gotta ask yourself, why do you get up every single day?
Do you get up just to get through the next day and the next day or do you get up because
you wanna make a difference?
It comes down to one fundamental question is always I ask myself, how bad do you want
it?
How bad do you want it?
Are you willing to do whatever it takes to progress science?
You know?
Because you have to be willing to get out of your comfort zone, too.
There's times when things don't work.
In fact, I'll be honest with you, there's times when most things don't work but it's
how well can you deal with that?"