This is Chain Reaction, a podcast from the American Chemical Society, where we link chemistry's past to its future. I'm your host, Margot Wall.
SPEAKER_00And I'm Shane Hamlon.
SPEAKER_04Shane, you're back.
SPEAKER_00I am back. I'm I'm I'm just interloping.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_04Well, do you want to remind our audience as to what's going on here?
SPEAKER_00I'd love to. It's ACS's 150th anniversary, and that's a big deal. So we thought that it might be fun to hear from our president on this feed for the occasion. But not just in the, hey, let's celebrate ACS being around for 150 years, but also to celebrate the people that make up ACS. So we're featuring discussions between members of the presidential succession and their peers and colleagues.
SPEAKER_04Presidential succession always sounds so formal when I hear it, but I guess it makes the most sense because you know ACS always has a new president every year.
SPEAKER_00And this week we're going to hear conversations with our current ACS president, Rigoberto Hernandez. I first chatted with Rigoberto back in 2025 when he was president-elect, and I was immediately excited to hear from him and the folks he talked to. I'm very comfortable behind a microphone.
SPEAKER_04You are, Shane.
SPEAKER_00Oh, thank you. And it's really rare that I meet someone who shares that sentiment. Rigoberto is one of those people. You know, sometimes he'll just drop some profound thing out of nowhere, kind of like this.
SPEAKER_03Some people think that science can exist without humans. That it's just something that exists. There's truth and not truth. But really, science is also a human endeavor. It does not exist for humans unless humans do that science.
SPEAKER_04Dang, that is profound.
SPEAKER_00I know. We can only feature a small fraction of his conversations in this episode, but I will let folks know that I had such a great time listening to him talk with his colleagues, starting with Ashley Ringer MacDonald. And this was live at ACS Fall in 2025. Ashley is a faculty member at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California, and got her PhD at Georgia Tech when Rigoberto was there and was one of her professors and on her thesis committee.
SPEAKER_04Oh wow. So they really are connected.
SPEAKER_00I know, I know. So the discussion really leans into mentoring and being a leader, both as a professor and a grad student.
SPEAKER_04Okay, well, let's get to the interview.
SPEAKER_03As many of us are, I am a Harry Potter fan, and my favorite character is Professor Snape. And I always think of myself as teaching the dark arts of chemistry, which is statistical mechanics. But just because I know that dark art doesn't mean that I didn't know the other dark art of chemistry, which is quantum mechanics. So it was great to be able to extend on my range and work with different kinds of students. So Ashley did not join my research group. She chose a different group. And maybe as we're talking about mentor relationship and choices, maybe you can talk about how you chose that as your mentoring relationship and yet you still manage to find other mentors.
SPEAKER_02So one of the things that I tell students now when they're like, how do I pick a mentor or how do I find a mentor? I'm like, don't limit yourself in your thinking. So even though I had a different faculty member from my graduate advisor, who was my thesis supervisor, I really made a point to try to get to know everybody on my thesis committee and really find out what they could offer? What, you know, what could I learn from them?
SPEAKER_03That was only because I wanted to be mentored by you. Because I think that mentor relationships are in every direction, very much like leadership. You have to manage up, if you manage down, you have to manage sideways. One of the things that I remember very, very clearly when you were a grad student is that you were one of the founders of the Women in Chemistry. And one time you came up to me and you said, There's a particular person that we want to invite to come to Georgia Tech. You know this person, and she's super important and super famous. You wanted me to invite them, yes. And what was my advice?
SPEAKER_02You said no, you should invite her. Like faculty love it when students invite them to things. And that if we really wanted to have this person come speak at our women in chemistry symposium, that we should be the ones extending the invitation. The grad students who are running this women in chemistry group.
SPEAKER_03That's right. So she came and she came because she understood the power of mentoring. And so this was the sort of the virtuous cycle of mentoring. You mentor people, they learn and figure out new opportunities, and they find out new ways of reaching out to other mentors. I barely did any work advising the women's in chemistry group because once you were empowered, I saw what you did. And so maybe you can say a little bit about how being in that role helped you.
SPEAKER_02So one of my mentoring philosophies, and this is maybe a little bit colored by the fact that the people I work with the most are undergraduate students. So they're at this very critical phase of their life and their career where they're really making decisions that matter. You know, they're really making decisions that set forth where they're gonna go from here. So my mentoring philosophy is always meet people where they are. Like, where are you now?
SPEAKER_03I've been telling people that we have to meet members where they are. And so I go everywhere.
SPEAKER_02You know, meet them where they are. And I mean that in terms of, you know, physically, like meet them where they are. Like we have this great classroom facility that is in the freshman dorm complex. So I always have one of my office hours in that facility to literally meet my general chemistry students where they live.
SPEAKER_03Don't you have a little bit of angst? Like just before you go there, what if they decide to throw pepper me with questions about this winning Zam or this grade?
SPEAKER_02I don't know. They're always very welcoming when you come over, when you come over the drone complex. But I try to meet them where they are, both in terms of physically where they are, but also where they are in their life. And what I mean by that is I know that they haven't thought about all of the possibilities. And it can really be like you were saying, I can introduce them to possibilities that they didn't know were an option. For example, I had a very, very formative experience in my undergraduate research group. But when I went to college, I didn't know that undergraduate research was a thing. I didn't know that research was a thing, really. It's the addictive drug of science.
SPEAKER_03Yet everyone can do undergraduate research and they'll stay doing it for life.
SPEAKER_02So now, you know, that's an opportunity that I try to immediately meet them with is like, oh, have you thought about joining an undergraduate research group? You know, we've really found in our department that participation in undergraduate research is also one of the strongest contributors to feeling like you're a member of our department community and in the bigger picture, feeling like you're a chemist. And then they do things like come to an ACS meeting and they actually realize that, oh, there are other people doing research in this area. I can meet these other people too. That's one of the things I really try to do with my students is see where they're at where are you now? And what can I tell you that will help you take a step towards where I know you could be? And I really liked your sustained confidence because I feel like that's one of your super talents that I've always felt like Rick America felt like I could do this, I could probably do it, you know? And that's one of the ones that I really take, that I really try to work with the students and like you can do this, and just the language that you use with them from the very beginning about like what they can do. And you said you never thought about being ACS president until someone said that about you. And then I'll say something like, Oh, well, when you go and give your talk, you can say, and they're like, wait, I could go and give a talk at a conference. Yeah. So those are those are some of my mentoring philosophies as well.
SPEAKER_04Ah, it was so fun to hear from a mentor and a mentee that are still so close. And it's true that even as you keep progressing in your career, you always need mentors. There's always people to look up to that can teach you stuff.
SPEAKER_00I agree. So, next we talked with Michelle Francel, who I will admit I was not familiar with, but I should have been. Michelle is the Frank B. Mallory Professor of Chemistry at Brynmarr College and is also an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory.
SPEAKER_04Uh, what? Vatican Observatory? What is that?
SPEAKER_00I I honestly I wasn't really familiar with it before looking into it either. I I uh suggest folks do, and we can't really get into it for this conversation, but what I will say is the Vatican does support a lot of really interesting scientific initiatives. So yeah, kind of fascinating.
SPEAKER_04Okay, sorry to, you know, get us on a non-sequitur, but No, of course, of course.
SPEAKER_00It's it's it would uh it kind of threw me off at first, too. So Michelle had an excellent conversation with Rigoberto talking art, science, and the importance of candid two-way communication. They started by discussing the value of both basic and applied research.
SPEAKER_01When I started doing theoretical and computational chemistry, there was sort of this general sense that it couldn't really predict anything useful or helpful. But over the course of my career, I think I'm drawn to showing ways in which it can be useful to answer chemical problems as part of just a general, you know, that you have the synthetic piece, you have the spectroscopy piece, you have a lot of pieces coming together to answer a chemical question. And I think that theory is really taking its place at the table in a much stronger way than it was 20 years ago, I would say, certainly. But I've also done the development of methods. I'm working on knot theory and molecules right now, which is a real sorry, it's gonna be a pun, a real stretch.
SPEAKER_03Puns are okay, especially if they captivate the imagination.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, it's right. It's launching that imagination. So I think that there's a tension between wanting to try things that are far outside the zone of applicability, because it does stretch the imagination, and it alerts you to looking kind of underneath the hood of more common problems.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I think that this idea of separating basics through applied has both substantial implications on how it's funded, um, how students are engaged in it.
SPEAKER_01Well, I certainly have been thinking a lot about the funding for basic research. I mean, I've been writing about it in various places. In the inquirer. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, indeed. A couple of times.
SPEAKER_03This one came out this week, too. I think it's important in this context to note why isn't it cheap, right? We need to fund the infrastructure, the apparatus, the laboratory where that research is going to be done. I find that it's even more expensive, almost very often even more expensive to fund the time of the researchers doing that work. And those researchers can be the faculty, yes, but the vast number of those researchers are our trainees, uh, our technicians. They could be undergraduates, whether they are undergraduate researchers or students, and their time is valuable too.
SPEAKER_01Right. We need the resources to train the people who will come after us. I mean, I think that's another responsibility that as professors we take pretty seriously. It's not just to develop new knowledge, but it's also to make sure that the next generation can follow us and continue to produce that kind of knowledge. And it's important that we think about how we share it. For example, nature chemistry asked me to write something about Marie Curie and the Nobel Prize in women. So I ended up writing about how we shape our laboratories, whether they accommodate women physically or not. You know, everything from the size of the lab benches to the color of equipment is kind of coded in various ways. But I was trying to think about how chemistry had changed over the time since Marie Curie's, you know, got her PhD and what did that look like and how could we capture that in a single image? And so in the end, we ended up making a Marie Curie's face from the face of I think 400 women chemists, mostly living, but not all, including the current head of the Curie Institute in Paris, some of my students, colleagues, people from all over the place. I mean, once this got rolling, I was getting emails from people. But the it was the cover image for that issue of nature chemistry, and it was entitled The Changing Face of Chemistry. When I look at it, it's really reminds me of the importance of the work I do of getting lots of students from all sorts of different backgrounds, all sorts of different levels of preparation, you know, kind of ready to do science in a big way.
SPEAKER_03To me, it was very impactful. For those who are listening, you may be having trouble picturing how this picture looked like. So let me just say that if you can imagine pixelating an image and each little dot is a color. Well, what Michelle and her team figured out how to do is that they could over-index each given pixel with the corresponding color that was a highlight, the main color of any one of the images that was contributed. So they were able to slowly tile the entire image so that when you zoomed out, it looked like Madame Curie. But as you zoomed in, you could start to see and uncover all 400 of these faces. And I and I think that in itself is a kind of a research and innovation. It shows that as you go more deeply into a problem, in this case, into Madame Curie's image, you see even more possibilities and more impacts that each of these individuals contributed. That's what I got out of it. Did you get anything other things out of it?
SPEAKER_01Well, I got out of it this idea that there are so many that contribute to science, right? And that it's not just individual contributions, but those individual contributions make up the bigger picture. And that certainly was for me an important part of doing that. But also too surfacing women across these large ranges of their careers, women at the end of their careers, women in the middle of their careers, women just beginning their careers. That was really to me, you know, what kind of wonderful to see women coming out of the woodwork, so to speak. And I can almost imagine you know, it would be lovely to get all of the women who were part of that together in a single room.
SPEAKER_03That sounds like a call to action for another symposium and a get together at the American Chemical Society meetings. Maybe switching gears, part of our job is to communicate the research innovation that we find, that we advance, that our students find and advance collaboratively. When you write in the Inquire or when you write in chemistry world, or when you write in other venues, or speak at some of the public venues that you've had, how do you focus yourself in a way that you are engaging with audiences?
SPEAKER_01You phrase it really beautifully about engaging with. So you really have to think about communication being a two-way street, and you have to listen to the kinds of questions people have to ask and the kind of language that they have to address them. So, you know, I can get up and talk about quantum mechanics in front of a group and have it go over everyone's head. And what they leave with is gee, she knows a lot of symbols. But what I want them to do is to leave with a sense of what are the big ideas that are pushing the chemistry or whatever it is I'm talking about, but particularly the chemistry, what are the big ideas pushing that? And I'm trying to make sure that I use language that's accessible, but also not patronizing. And so you're dancing that line.
SPEAKER_03Early on when I was at PUSAC, I gave a presentation about my science. And this was to a very science aware audience of specialists, and I thought I needed to really impress them. And at the end, one of the scientists came up to me and he said, Hugoberto, equations sing for you. They don't necessarily sing for the rest of us in the same way. And it taught me that I couldn't necessarily lead with the technology. I needed to lead with the interpretation and with sharing understanding. And that that in order to share understanding, I need to know where my audience is. And from that I learned more. So it's not that I am better or worse, it's that I'm different and together we're better.
SPEAKER_01Right. It's it's about listening to each other, right? It's about listening to the sorts of questions people are going to ask. It's about listening to the sort of language that they can do the equations thing for them. They do for you and me, but really not for very many other people. And so, you know, how do you find the imagery that captures people's imagination and allows them to sort of imagine themselves alongside of the science that's happening? Like, what does it do to help someone peer over your shoulder as you're working? For me, I think the biggest takeaway is this notion about communication. How do we talk to each other? How do we find each other to talk to? How do we talk to groups that are outside of chemistry? How do we communicate with them clearly and effectively? So that sits underneath all of this notion of collaboration.
SPEAKER_04Shane, I know that we're on a podcast talking about science as professional communicators, but I also think it's really important for scientists to be able to communicate what they do. And I love that Michelle's out there intentionally trying to engage with people outside of her field.
SPEAKER_00She's a real champion for broad communication. It was truly delightful to listen in on her conversation with Rigoberto.
SPEAKER_04So I assume you have something special for our last discussion?
SPEAKER_00I do. Rigorberto is Cuban and isn't shy about ensuring representation in the sciences, especially chemistry. A name that rose to the top when thinking about who he might have a discussion with was Angel Marty, a professor and chair of the chemistry department at Rice University. A fun fact about Angel and Rigorberto is that they won the same prestigious award, an ACS National Award, for their work helping underrepresented students get into chemistry.
SPEAKER_04Amazing. Let's listen.
SPEAKER_03We can start with this is this idea of mentoring and championing. I was championed by a colleague of mine, Bob Lichter, years ago, and he promoted me, encouraged me, championed me to have a voice in our community. And he went so far as to nominate me for the ACS Award for encouraging disadvantaged students into careers in the chemical sciences. This is an award which I received back in 2014, I believe. And the circle goes around because you are the 2026 awardee. Can you share a little bit about your process of getting that award and what you did to be recognized?
SPEAKER_05Again, and I have had so many excellent mentors that have shown me the way and shown me what are the things, what are the values.
SPEAKER_03And for you, it's literally north from Puerto Rico going north.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yeah, right. No, yeah. But you know, we have different experiences throughout life. Most people, when they talk about science and the onset of their career, they said, Well, I have this wonderful professor that was very impactful in my life. And I had this professor that was wonderful and was really impactful in my life, and really motivated me in many ways, but he was very tough. Many of the ways that he used, I would say, were not the ways that I will use for students. So, in part, I have been motivated sometimes when I look in retrospective, what things I would have done differently. Students learn differently, and we are individuals, and that I think that that is related to engagement, community, and diversity, right? We all have our own needs and mindsets, and recognizing that is important, but also to be compassionate. I think that all the journeys are different, right? We have so much richness, so many students that come from different backgrounds. I think that the most important thing, the first thing is to listen, to listen to the student, to listen to the stories, to listen to the reason, to learn. We need to engage the students in conversation. And sometimes we need to experiment, try different things. And that is true both for undergraduate and for grad students. But there's something about grad students, right? That about their maturity, about the level in their in their academic preparation, that the relationship between grad student and mentor is so important. And being able to understand what are the needs of that student. There are students that thrive when you let them leave them alone and let them try things. And there are the other students that get lost, there are other students that thrive if you meet with them regularly. And understanding what are the needs of the different students, it is important. And then, as you were saying, right, how do we promote the students? How can students learn and actually pay it forward? How can they take the torch? So this needs to be propagated, it needs to be exponential. If it is linear, then then it is very localized, very regional.
SPEAKER_03In my case, the that same Bob Lichter, who I mentioned before, he once introduced me to Madeline Jacobs back when I was an assistant or associate professor, and he introduced me as a future president of the American Chemical Society. This was 20 plus. Years ago, I thought this was a crazy idea, not something that was in the realm of possibilities. But someone said it was possible. It put that little seed, it planted that seed in my head, that maybe someday I could do that. Many people have that seed planted. Not everyone manages to succeed with that particular direction, but something good comes out of it when you start to aim for something bigger than what you have already. We haven't had an opportunity to talk about the beautiful science that you've done as a researcher and the impact you had in inorganic chemistry broadly and in bioinorganic chemistry and in catalysis, enzyme catalysis, et cetera. But what I can say is that that led you to be where you're at. And right now you are the chair of the inorganic division of the American Chemical Society. And what I've been impressed with over the past nine or 10 months that you've been in this role, that you have done something that I have not seen any of the other chairs do in quite the same way, with quite the same Elan that you do, which is you send routine emails and messages through social media, encouraging uh people to come to conversations about inorganic chemistry. And I wonder how you have the time to do that and how you have managed to get all these people to buy in to this level of engagement in inorganic chemistry.
SPEAKER_05I think that the community wants that. I think that these things that are done at the division level that they are not necessarily my ideas because we have so many good people that are engaged, that want to do stuff, that want to make the community grow and want to share science. And of course, there's no way that this can be done if there's not a battery of people behind it. So, yes, I feel energized by the community, but at the end of the day, it is also the community that do all these activities, that pull all these things together, that really want to meet and to engage in conversations about why science is important, hear about nanoscience or coordination chemistry or bio, inorganic chemistry. The community wants that. That is part of being a human, right? We are not isolated entities. We thrive when we can share our perspectives, our science, our thoughts with others.
SPEAKER_03That's right. It's funny because when we were born, children, they have this innate curiosity, and somehow sometimes the educational system takes that curiosity out of them. And I think that we have an opportunity through our passion of science in the ACS to encourage that curiosity among our community and the things that you're doing are doing exactly that.
SPEAKER_05These things are central. How can we be better mentors? And how can we be better communicators of science, not only to our fields, and not only speaking to our community, but also speaking to the broader community that is interested in learning, or also maybe not interested in learning? How do we make science appealing to everybody?
SPEAKER_03Engagement and advocacy is about conversations. And so it's easy to see that that has to involve humans because you can't have a conversation unless you have humans.
SPEAKER_05I think that you said something that is extremely important and personal to me. That engagement and that inclusion, right? To me, it has always been the inclusion of everybody, that has always been the driving force that everybody should be welcome, that we create communities that remove barriers for people to participate. The color of the skin is not the important thing or the ethnicity. There are many challenges inside of people from different origins.
SPEAKER_03And of course, we value those identities. Yeah. They're completely welcome, and we want everyone to feel free to express themselves as they are. It's just that no one should be excluded because of it.
SPEAKER_05Indeed. And that is exactly the point, right? How to welcome everybody and how to help people to feel themselves welcome. Developing an identity in science is something that is central. Most of the attrition in science is not related to intelligence, it's related to belonging. Whether I belong here, I don't feel that I belong here. What am I doing here? How do we make people feel welcome? Is important.
SPEAKER_03Some people think that science can exist without humans, that it's just something that exists. There's truth and not truth. But really, science is also a human endeavor. It does not exist for humans unless humans do that science. And I think it's really important to understand and for us to convey that science is a human endeavor. It involves conversations with ourselves, it involves conversations with nature, and it involves conversations with each other. And when I say each other, I mean everyone. Because if we, the scientists, the chemists that know the fundamentals of our science don't engage with the rest of humanity, they won't know what we did, they won't know why we do it, and they won't know how to leverage it to together make the world better.
SPEAKER_04I've literally built my career on communicating science broadly, and it's so great to hear Rigoberto and all the people he talked to echo that sentiment.
SPEAKER_00Agreed. It's really important to have those still doing the science also be able to talk about what they do and in some cases advocate for their science and themselves. I really just want to thank Rigoberto for his enthusiasm in being part of this project, and to Ashley, Michelle, and then Hel for sharing their wisdom, expertise, and life experiences with us.
SPEAKER_04And thank you, Shane, for bringing all of this to us. We'll hear from you again next week.
SPEAKER_00Yep, two presidents down, one to go.
SPEAKER_04That's next time on Chain Reaction. This was Chain Reaction, a podcast by the American Chemical Society. Our executive producer is Sam Jones. Our producer is me, Margot Wall. This mini series was also produced by Shane Hanlon in partnership with Brand Lab. Production help from Michael David and Matt Radcliffe. Theme song by D. Peter Schmidt.