ChemE 6350: The Theology of Colloids

[October 2018]

The actual reason I was in Houston was not, shockingly enough, to see space shuttles and astronaut gloves, but for a conference. A rheology conference. Rheology is the study of the flow of matter, but because it’s a scary science word¹, it often gets “corrected” to theology, as you might have guessed from the title of this post.

Also shocking, more than three dozen people were in attendance at this conference. The conference attracts all the rheologists (not theologists) in the country, including former Cornell ChemE classmates, lab members, and a professor. Due to graduation, all of us are now at different schools, but it was nice to catch up with some familiar faces. My current lab had a few of us in attendance, plus our advisor, another professor and student from the University of Michigan, and one of our collaborators. Besides all these people who I personally knew, there were also professors who I met when I visited Carnegie Mellon, professors whose papers I’ve read, and a couple of those names who everyone in the research area just knows. If you’ve never heard that academia can be a bit incestuous, you’re hearing it now.

The Gerald D. Hines Waterwall park, right next to the mall where we were staying

This particular conference ran from Sunday evening to Thursday morning. The only event on Sunday is a welcome reception which basically turns into all the professors cross-examining each other about research, all the students alternately avoiding/being ignored by their advisors, and everyone eating free food while trying to see who’s there that year. For the next three and a half days, the day begins with a plenary lecture followed by seven hours of talks by students and professors. I presented during the last slot on Tuesday, which wasn’t a terrible time. I had a day at the conference to prepare, time afterwards to relax and listen to other peoples’ talks, and it was so late in the day no one bothered to show up. The talks cover everything from theory to molecular simulations to experimental techniques about polymers, colloids, polyelectrolytes, surfactants, and more.

In the evenings, after the talks are over for the day, the conference plans an event. Monday night was a trip to a local brewery, where we had dinner, got as much beer as we wanted to drink, and received a pint glass with the society’s logo on it. It’s the drinking accessory I never knew I wanted. Tuesday night was the awards banquet. I didn’t attend because it costs extra money and you have to dress up, but I went to the pre-banquet reception because it was open to everyone, I had a drink ticket, and there was free food. Wednesday night was the poster session, also with free food. I’m a fan of this conference for several reasons. One, it’s small enough that it’s not overwhelming, but large enough that you’ll probably be able to find someone else doing semi-relevant work. Two, we went to a brewery. The last time I attended, the conference was held in Baltimore and the social event was at the aquarium. And three, free food (and alcohol). You could almost survive on free food alone if you supplemented with granola bars.

At the brewery (Monday night)

On Thursday, one of my lab mates, my travelling partner, and I left the talks a little early (sorry to anyone still presenting) to wander the mall and get Chick-fil-A before leaving for the airport. At the airport, our basic economy tickets afforded us the opportunity to board with group 4 and sit in the window seats in the very last row, the third-to-last row, and the sixth-to-last row. We had an uneventful flight back, and with that we returned to a cold and dark Ann Arbor. It was a good trip. I fulfilled my graduation requirement of presenting at a national conference, saw some fellow Cornell alumni, had Texas barbeque, went to Space Center Houston, met up with a Cornell friend attending school in Houston, and had fun.

¹Phenolphthalein, a common indicator² used in acid-base titrations, is one of my favorite science-y words to spell because of that “lphth” string in the middle.

²The one that goes from clear to bright pink at a pH of 8.2. It’s often used in freshman general chemistry labs, and no matter how many times the TA reminds everyone to put the indicator in the base before beginning the titration, someone will always forget. Half an hour later, when this student has dumped three gallons of acid into their beaker without witnessing a color change, someone will cautiously bring up the indicator. When a single drop of phenolphthalein is added, the solution will go from clear as a mountain spring to 90s neon windbreaker pink.

The Pros and Cons of Computational Research

Pro: No dress code.
Shorts, open-toed shoes, socks and sandals, bare feet, long hair, hats, necklaces, watches, contacts, and banana costumes are all acceptable attire.

Con: No windows.
Because people can’t look into the lab and catch a glimpse of you professionally attired in a lab coat and safety glasses gazing thoughtfully into a test tube of blue liquid or intensely pipetting, you will most likely be placed in a basement office next to either the loading dock or a storage closet filled entirely with broken swivel chairs. [Our basement office actually has windows, but we’re below ground level and the ground around us was dug out so it feels like we’re at the bottom of a moat.]

Pro: Not fighting over spectrometers and beakers.
Some days, everyone just needs to run a reaction in a 100 mL round bottom flask and purify their compound using column chromatography. In computational research, everyone has their own computer.

Con: Fighting over computer cores on the lab allocation.
Everyone might have their own computer, but if you want to graduate before the next century, many of your simulations will be run on an external cluster. The cluster tends to be faster and you can have dozens of simulations running at the same time, unless that guy decides to run four 48-core jobs for two weeks on your lab’s 200-core allocation. Don’t be that guy.

Pro: Cluster maintenance.
A few times a year, depending on the computing department’s schedule, you get to go in to meetings with your advisor and say that you couldn’t get any results because the cluster is down for maintenance. Never mind that you’ve been warned three months in advance and could have planned data analysis, literature searches, writing manuscripts, preparing presentation slides, applying for grants, sending in conference applications, or any other of the dozens of things you never get around to doing to be completed during this time.

Con: No broken equipment.
If a vital component of the NMR machine suddenly breaks and the manufacturer insists that they’re working as quickly as they can, but the new part won’t be able to be installed for four months, well, guess you’re not doing NMR for the next four months. What a pity.

Pro: You can do your research anywhere, at any time.
Can’t be bothered to change out of your pajamas or get out of bed? Work from your bed. Forgot to submit some jobs to the cluster before you left work? Do it from home. Need to rearrange your schedule for doctor’s appointments, meetings, classes, or midday trips to the bar? Fine. Your source code doesn’t care if it’s 8 am or 8 pm.

Con: You can do your research anywhere, at any time.
Out of the country? Use a VPN to connect to the cluster. Broken leg? Doesn’t matter. You’re sitting all the time anyway. Broken arm? No big deal; your typing might be slowed down a bit but you can still use a mouse. Your only hope is a prolonged power outage.

Stuff I Did This Summer

Or: The Effect of Spherical Confinement on a Monodisperse Colloidal Suspension using Brownian Dynamics Simulation

Or: Everything I Never Wanted to Learn About Diffusion

After it was all said and done, I was left with some graphs, several gigabytes of free software on my computer, and approximately ten million data points. I’m actually not even exaggerating. The program I worked with kept track of the positions of hundreds to thousands of particles for several hundred time steps, and that’s a lot of data.

How I ended up doing research is yet another of my “Well, it’s kind of a funny story” stories. I met with one of my professors to talk about working on the project I had worked on the past summer. She said, sure, I could work on it, but how about research? It would involve coding in Fortran. I hadn’t programmed anything since my freshman year Intro to MATLAB class and told the professor so. No problem, she said, you’ll be fine.

Okay, then. After talking to the grad student I’d be working with, I decided to do research over the summer, because why not? And that’s how I ended up reading research papers about exciting topics such as long-time self-diffusion and modeling hydrodynamic interactions while coding in Fortran to confine imaginary spherical particles in a larger imaginary spherical cavity. When I told my dad I was working in Fortran, he asked if people were still coding things in Fortran. Apparently so.

My job over the summer was to modify existing Brownian dynamics code to simulate particles enclosed in a sphere. By tracking their positions and collisions, you can do magic math to determine properties of the fluid. I also got to edit Python code (another language I had never seen before in my life), and do post-processing on my millions of data points.

All of this mostly took place in Olin, making it two consecutive years of not being out of Olin for longer than two weeks, discounting winter break. I was jammed into a corner of the group office with two grad students, but I had my own desk and I could see out of a window, which instantly elevated the space over the senior/undergrad lounges. Actually, lounge is a bit of a misnomer, because there’s very little lounging done in the lounge. A lot of last-minute-deadline-meeting, procrastinating, complaining, some sleeping and eating, but not much on the relaxation front. Which makes it the natural place for many of the seniors to congregate during their final year. #FunInTheSunDingyGreyBasement #ChemELife

Anyway, in the end, when summer was over, I learned some stuff about colloids and computational microrheology. I had fun, because I’m a nerd like that.