Monika Snowdon (PhD '21) is a nano-scientist.
During her PhD, she created microscopic structures that look like tweezers to stabilize carbon nano-tubes when manufacturing microchips. It's a very specific solution for a very specific problem.
But Monika's career hasn't been so specific. If anything, Monika is a great example of how one type of experience or knowledge can transfer into a different area. That electronic nanotech experience she got as a PhD student? She uses it today as a scientist at a water purification company. She also uses it as a podcast host.
How do these various experiences connect? And how can we transfer our current skills into new areas? Monika joins the podcast to answer these questions and share her career story so far.
Mentioned in this episode
Waterpuris: https://www.waterpuris.com/
Future leaders program: https://www.cas.org/about/futureleaders
How to Lie with Statistics: https://www.amazon.ca/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
IMNano podcast: https://www.imnano.org/
Follow IMNano on Instagram: @imnano.official
Follow Monika on Instagram: @MonikaSnowSci
Connect with Monika on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monikasnow/
Monika Snowdon (PhD '21) is a nano-scientist.
During her PhD, she created microscopic structures that look like tweezers to stabilize carbon nano-tubes when manufacturing microchips. It's a very specific solution for a very specific problem.
But Monika's career hasn't been so specific. If anything, Monika is a great example of how one type of experience or knowledge can transfer into a different area. That electronic nanotech experience she got as a PhD student? She uses it today as a scientist at a water purification company. She also uses it as a podcast host.
How do these various experiences connect? And how can we transfer our current skills into new areas? Monika joins the podcast to answer these questions and share her career story so far.
Mentioned in this episode
Waterpuris: https://www.waterpuris.com/
Future leaders program: https://www.cas.org/about/futureleaders
How to Lie with Statistics: https://www.amazon.ca/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
IMNano podcast: https://www.imnano.org/
Follow IMNano on Instagram: @imnano.official
Follow Monika on Instagram: @MonikaSnowSci
Connect with Monika on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monikasnow/
Going from electronics to the water stuff. It's a different application, but the tools that you learned are transferable.
Meg:Monika Snowdon is a nanoscientist. During her PhD she created microscopic structures that look like tweezers to stabilize nanotubes when manufacturing microchips. It is a very specific solution for a very specific problem, but Monika's career hasn't been so specific. If anything, Monika is a great example of how one type of experience or knowledge can transfer into a totally different area. That electronic nanotech experience she got at Waterloo. Well, she uses it today as a scientist at a water purification company. She also uses it as a podcast host. I bet you didn't see that one coming. So how do these various experiences connect and how can we transfer our current skills into new areas? Well, Monika joins the podcast to answer these questions and share her career journey so far. Keep listening. Monika, thank you so much for joining the podcast.
Monika:Thank you for having me.
Meg:Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. You are our first nanoscientist, despite the fact that we have many people studying and researching in that area at Waterloo, so it's great to have some representation there finally. So, look, I want to talk about that area because I think a lot of people would look at your history and what you studied and what you do today, and they would think that you've really stuck to one specific field (nanoscience) throughout your entire career so far. But when you came to Waterloo for your PhD, that actually helped you branch into a completely new area of study. Can you tell me more about that?
Monika:Yes, yes, I will say, University of Waterloo is the nanotechnology university, so that's what kind of drew me in to do nanotech and nanoscience there, and it's an amazing school, amazing program. There's many of us, but maybe we're a little bit camera shy. So I'm glad we're doing this interview today, and so I'll just talk a little bit more about my academic background and then how I got to where I am today, and that's working with a startup company, with University of Waterloo's Mechanical Mechatronics Engineering Department, with Professor Norman Zhou, and the startup company's Waterpuris, which is started at University of Waterloo, of course. So I did my undergraduate degree in nanosciences and that is a field combining physics, chemistry and biology to study materials at a very, very small scale, known as the nanoscale, and so from there I actually went and did a master's in organic chemistry, which you kind of alluded to, Megan, that from an outside perspective it sounds like, oh, you're just doing chemistry, chemistry, chemistry. But if you're in it you're like, oh, organic chemistry is like small molecules, like the pharmaceutical kind, whereas when you're studying at the nanoscale you're more or less doing like a lot of imaging techniques, a lot of microscopy, spectroscopy.
Monika:So they're very, very different, but combining them is something that I very much enjoy, which led me into doing my PhD at Waterloo, and that's because I became very interested in multidisciplinary work looking at how chemical tools behave at the nanoscale for a variety of applications, and it's very interesting I think they call us nanoscientists, nanotechnologists, or I like the term molecular architect as well because we're dealing with molecules at the very small scale, so combining organic chemistry and then designing at a very, very tiny, tiny, tiny scale. So I came to Waterloo for my doctorate to focus on developing those new nanoscale materials for electronics, specifically something really cool known as carbon nanotube transistors, and those are amazing little components, so they're very tiny tubes that can transport signals very, very quickly, and so we have them in the transistor itself is what we have based on. How we're doing this podcast, how we're able to communicate. We have computers, cell phones. All that is thanks to transistors. We want to make them a little bit faster. One of the ways to do that is by applying carbon nanotubes.
Monika:It's not the only way, but it's one of the ways. So at the early stages of my PhD, I was interested in studying these properties of nanomaterials to create these new type of electronic devices and sensors. Now, however, as I progressed through my program as does everybody we all have a little struggle. I wouldn't say little. There's struggles. There's ups and downs, hills and valleys I became more aware of the environmental implications of nanotechnology and in science in general, we waste a lot of solvents.
Monika:We don't want to necessarily, but it kind of just goes along with doing research. You search and then you research it and that repeats and there's a lot of waste that goes and is produced from that. So I began to ask questions such as how nanomaterials could be used to improve purification techniques, so specifically water and other environmental issues, and so that's why, in the end of the day, I have interviewed a post-doctoral fellowship in partnership with the startup company Waterp uris and the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at Waterloo with Dr Zhou. So it's been quite a journey, a little bit all over the place, but I know we're creating impact in the world and that's what's really beneficial and is my motivation to keep coming.
Meg:Yeah, who knew that there were so many nanoparticles and so many things to do with them, right? Just one of those things where, like, if you're not in a particular field, you don't realize all of the applications necessarily. So that's really great. So can you tell me a little more about the water purification work that you're doing and how did your PhD experience prepare you for it, even though that experience was in, like you know, these particles for computers?
Monika:Yes, for the electronic applications and going into that world. So I think the skills kind of translated themselves and the work ethic and how to do an experiment, how to run an experiment, how to prepare, All those little things kind of helped in order to transferring into the water purification studies, how to do controls, how to do trials, all the kind of how to image, how to characterize, how to make sure I made what I did make, so that was transferable in that sense. And working as a research scientist at this water purification company, my day-to-day tasks kind of involved developing new water treatment technologies and then I test their effectiveness, which is kind of what you do during your PhD you develop or think about a hypothesis and then you test its effectiveness. Now there's a lot of other standards when you're working with a company, so you do new.
Monika:ISO ASTM, so you have to follow a little bit more of a rigorous standard or methodology, but other than that, the step-by-step tasks can be kind of around the same thing. So my PhD experience in nanoscience has been essential for the work I'm doing now and it's giving me the knowledge and skills to design and characterize these new nanoscale materials. It's just kind of like you said, going from electronics to the water stuff. It's a different application, but the tools that you learned are transferable.
Meg:Yeah, that's really great and it kind of feels like when you were describing it. It feels like all that science stuff, all of the traditional science, experimentation stuff, the rigor that you learned in your PhD is applicable wherever you go in nanoscience.
Monika:What's very interesting is that people they do graduate school and then they branch out into completely something different. Some even go into being lawyers for patents and stuff because they're using their science background for that and then they don't understand all the science jargon and then they learn the legal jargon and then they're like perfect, they have careers in that. I like the research stuff so I'm sticking within that pathway. But it's really interesting how people branch out. I have a friend who's very passionate about arts as well, so he's trying to integrate his science skills into dissecting different artworks and how the science brain kind of goes into the art side of things and how we find it in literature and how we find it in paintings. So it's really interesting how people find their passions later on, not like the first year of undergrad.
Monika:So don't be stressed at anyone listening that you haven't figured out by the time you're 20 years old. It takes some time.
Meg:Yeah, great point. Now listen, I think you're selling yourself a little bit short, though, when you said that you are just sticking to the research path. You are in your day job with the water purification startup, but you also are very passionate about science communications, and it sounds like that passion is really born out of your personal experience, so you started a podcast. Can you tell me how your experience in science inspired it?
Monika:Yes, of course, I'm very excited to talk about that too. So my podcast is called the IMNano podcast. So it's like I'm nano, you're nano, we're all nano. Instead of ice cream, we're all nano, which is technically very true and in a little sense, we're all made out of cells, which are all made out of nanoparticles on a very tiny scale. So it's the IM Nano podcast and it's a show about talking about nanotechnology and making it approachable to a wide scale audience. So we're thinking like, maybe first year science that you've taken it as an undergrad, maybe actually 12th grade, and it's okay, actually, if you have never taken science before, because some of our episodes we do explain, like, what DNA is and all that kind of fun stuff.
Monika:So I started the podcast because I wanted to. I wanted to share my passion for nano science and I found a co-host who she felt the same way and who is also a UWaterloo nanotechnology alumni. And we wanted to create a space where women in science could share their stories and experiences. And my own experience which you kind of alluded to, Megan, as a woman in science has inspired me to create a very much more inclusive and welcoming environment for women in STEM fields. There is that what we call a leaky pipeline, where we have a lot of women going to science at 18 years old. By the time we're 25, we're not doing science anymore, and so what's going on? How do we retain individuals to be role models in biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, and so that paves a pathway for the future generations, in that if you think of a scientist, it's not going to be an older male with white hair going everywhere, which is like, if you, even if you search now scientist on whatever web browser you have, that's one of the first few pictures that come up, and we've been trying to kind of you know, change that a little bit, which I think we're headed in the right direction, and I believe that it is very important for scientists to be able to communicate their work in a very in a clear and engaging way.
Monika:So I hope that my podcast can help do that. It's a small contribution to a big problem, but it's something that I very much enjoy doing, and I think also, you mentioned, oh, that I'm selling myself short when I mentioned this kind of stuff earlier in the talk, the way I kind of spoke about it, and I think that also comes from the fact that, well, women in science. Well, we're told oh, we're just women in science, we're not doing anything. We use the word just a lot as ladies. So trying to eliminate that, oh, we just do this.
Monika:No, I am doing this, trying to, you know, not feel imposter syndrome where we are and just stand where we are, like every time we go on to, like Google scholars, stand on the shoulders of giants, and that's what we need to do. We need to be proud of ourselves and our accomplishments and not be degraded in that sense. So even I'm working on it and I have all this experience with clients, so hopefully I can influence the younger generations and actually current generations as well, older or younger to really take their space and wherever they are, I love the way you described that their space.
Meg:That's awesome. So, yeah, look. Earlier you also talked about how important you think it is that scientists are trained in communications, and right now you're actually pursuing that training to make yourself, or give yourself the skills needed to really make your work clear and understandable to everyone. Why do you think that it's so important for scientists to home their communication skills?
Monika:Yeah, that's a great question and everyone will answer that a little bit differently, but the advice that I would give to those who want to branch out into this new area of science communication it's that I believe that it's essential for all scientists to be able to hone these communication skills, and I know it's difficult it is. It's not an easy process to undertake, especially in today's world. Scientists need to be able to communicate their work to a wide range of audiences, including policymakers and that includes the media as well and the general public. So and everyone has different backgrounds that you have to try to make your research more digestible and accessible. So it's very important for scientists to hone these type of communication skills via social media or doing podcasts or just going out and having conversations, because science is there for the public good. That's how it always was throughout history. We had the philosophers at first too, and then, you know, going into the alchemists.
Monika:All throughout history, science has been for the greater good, or it should be at least anyway, and, scientists, we have a great responsibility to communicate the results of our research to the public in a way that is clear and accurate and engaging, and this is especially important in today's world, where there is a lot of misinformation about science circulating online, and there's also what's what are sometimes people will be able to do. Sometimes people will publish scientific papers but they're not actually a scientific paper. They didn't go through the rigor of a peer review, but that information is still out there, and so sometimes there's this like mismanagement of publications being out there in what we call predatory journals. So it's out there. It's research that happened, but it wasn't peer reviewed. And then you're comparing it to research that has been peer reviewed. They went through a lot of more rigor, and then you find people on social media quoting the two, when one has a lot more accuracy or depth to it than the other one.
Monika:So it's a big responsibility to be a scientist today, and for those to answer the question, for those interested in branching out into scientific communications or into a new area that you haven't studied formally in general, I would recommend starting by building your network. I think that's very important, and that can be through sending cold emails or connections through your LinkedIn network or you're like oh, I know, like a second connection or the second know someone who knows someone, that kind of thing. Talk to people who are already working in the new area or the field that you're interested in and asking them for advice. People are very approachable when you ask them about what they're doing and how to kind of get into that. You can also attend conferences and workshops to learn more about the new area that you want to enter. My advice to someone who may want to use their skills to branch into new areas is to start also by identifying what skills that you are lacking and then what skills that you do have Like what are you good at and what do you enjoy. Once you have a good understanding of yourself and your skills that you do possess, then you can start to look for opportunities to apply them in a new way and applying for different initiatives, which is so.
Monika:For example, I'll give the leadership program that I am undergoing training in. So in 2023, I was selected to be part of what is the CAS Future Leaders Co-Horts and Program, which is part of the American Chemical Society and so ACS is for short and this is a very, very big organization for a lot of scientists and especially all the chemists in North America and on a worldwide basis. So the program was very, very competitive. I applied several times to try to get in and it was very rigorous. So I'm very happy to say I'm part of the cohort in 2023 and then I will be undergoing training in leadership and science communications so I can improve my skills, and I've had a podcast for two almost three years now, so it's going to just help me even more to be able to reach out and to learn to be a leader in science.
Monika:I also mentor as part of an undergraduate science journal and I do volunteer consulting with other STEM programs and even with that, I still wanted to apply for a future leaders program or this leadership program. So even if I have a background in some things, I'm still willing to put myself out there and learn more. So I think that's a very good example to show others what they could be doing as well Not that they have to, everybody has different paths but also it's showing that, yes, I have certain skills, but I can make them better and I can always learn more from them. So there are opportunities out there and it's just knowing how to find them and who to ask to find them and looking for them is very key as well for branching out. So that was a very long-winded answer, I know.
Monika:I covered all the bases. I hope that's very helpful.
Meg:No, you did, and then some, I think. And to your point of, like, you have had a podcast for three years now and you still feel that it's important to get more training in scientific communications. As someone who is a communicator and produces content full-time, I can tell you that it is important to constantly be updating your skills in communications, because things change regularly. I started out writing only blog posts for different companies, and now I'm also running a podcast and very quickly into my career, I was asked to write video scripts and different things like that too, so you never know what you're going to be asked to do or what opportunities arise. And yeah, it sounds like you've kind of taken the opportunities that you're passionate about, which is great.
Monika:Yes yeah and I will add to that because blog posts are very difficult to write. So good for you very, because that's very tricky.
Meg:Well, it's all that I did.
Monika:But also using new like artificial intelligence and machine learning is everywhere in the media right now, so I'll mention it as well. It's like it's not being intimidated by those tools, is being able to use those tools to help you create your content in a way. So not just being like, oh, Chat GPT, right me a podcast episode. That's not gonna work, but what I can ask it is like oh, can you proofread the grammar of it? So then I don't have to think about that. So just learning how to adapt the new technologies and learning that, okay, I have a gap in this skill, so I'm going to try to learn it rather than be intimidated by it, because there there are others that are going to be doing that, learning how to prompt these language models and all that, and then that I think that's gonna be very key in helping push progress forward. And but it being very critical of it as well, right, because it there's a lot of issues that it takes a lot of things from the internet that could not necessarily be true.
Meg:So, using that critical yeah, I mean really with that answer.
Meg:You have brought me back to something else that you mentioned before, that that I wanted to point out to the the fact that we are Just surrounded by so much information and how difficult it is to know whether or not it's true.
Meg:You know, when you were talking about the importance of of scientists being trained in communications and being able to explain why some research is maybe more credible than others, or helping people in the media to present it properly, you know, I think back to I In one of my courses in first or second year, I had to read this like really I think it's fairly famous, this book called How to Lie with Statistics and it's and it is very easy to misinterpret numbers or you know, scientific information for something completely different than it is. So you know, it's great to hear that there are programs that that are actually helping people who are experts in the scientists and understand the statistics to actually explain them to people, because often these things are, I mean, the studies and things that we hear about on the news, the things people are talking about. It's like warnings about products that we're using or, you know, things that we're coming across in our daily life.
Monika:Yeah, and then I think, and then also a lot of that is like okay, well, it's a warning on this product label, but why was that product in there in the first place? That's not explained to me. So what was the purpose of it being there? Like that would also be interesting to know, because you don't know who's listening. Well, maybe they can be like oh well, you know, in my culture I use this product, which or this like seed or remedy to do the same property. So I guess that company could just use this. You know, know where ideas can come from, and especially like multi disciplinary, multicultural environment. It's amazing. So we could just share all the awesome knowledge that we have.
Meg:Yeah, I mean, you're clearly very, very passionate about it, so I guess you're the right person to have a man of science podcast Monica. So look, if I wanted to listen to your podcast, you mentioned that it's. It's really geared towards people who maybe have a grade 12 or first year university science information, but you said it could be for anyone. So if I know someone or if I want to listen myself, do you have any suggestions of what episode I should start with?
Monika:All of them, no it's okay.
Monika:So there's a variety. So if you're new to the IM Nano podcast, I recommend I would recommend starting with our latest Meet the Expert episode, and this is episode 60, where we interview an expert that wrote a very highly recognized publication and we talked to her and she dissects it and breaks it down into layman's terms, and this is part of our new Meet the Expert series and it's actually something that's not been done before in this type of very specific type of interview where we're not interviewing just the person. We are talking a little bit personally and organically, but it's more so. She's she or whoever is the expert. They're explaining what they did and how they did it and talking in depth about that and so all the work that went into it and this why this paper is so important. So that's part of our new series that we have, which is very interesting because me, as a non-expert in her field, I can ask her specific questions about what she did and how she did things, which is great and something I always wanted to do, and people are very passionate about their work too, so it's always nice to chat. So we release episodes every two weeks and have done so fairly consistently over the past two years and so since 2021, our episode two, three and four.
Monika:I would also recommend, there are also discussion based episodes that were, or have been, typically very well received and are still are. We still get a lot of views on those, and all our interviews are also, I would say, amazing where we have very raw conversations with scientists. So I would recommend going to episode 21 for that. We had a great discussion with this one of my friends from Max Planck. He did his PhD there doing some nano work, but he also worked as a chef at a Michelin star restaurant and now he has his own startup company. So I think that one is a great one to start with, so you can see how people have their journeys and it's not very linear at all. So there's a variety of content and we're always open to feedback on how to improve, and maybe one day we will monetize, but that day is not today, not yet. But we're getting there yeah, nice.
Meg:Well, yeah, monetization is a tough road for content. So I don't blame you, Monika. It's been great to speak with you today about science communications and just all the options that are available to people who are studying nano science or, you know, science in general.
Monika:Thank, you very much for having me and everyone out there stay curious.
Meg:Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, like, subscribe, whatever your podcast player lets you do you. Waterloo alumni podcasts are produced and hosted by me, make Vanderwood. Thank you to angle media for editing this episode.