Ask me questions about my job?
Jun. 21st, 2014 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI kind of want to be excitable at people about my work (and I kind of want the human contact without needing to actually parse audiovisual cues as required in in-person conversation), so... if you are curious please Ask Me Things? <3
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 01:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 01:43 pm (UTC)As for getting here -- so there's this awkward thing where I actually experience physical arousal in response to, well, anything that strikes me as especially beautiful or elegant, be it poetry or music or prose or science. And the point at which it became completely apparent that I Wanted To Science was in a GCSE chemistry lesson - I can't remember whether I was 15 or 16 - and we talked about the allotropes of carbon, that is, the different forms that pure elemental carbon can take. There's graphite (like you get in pencils) and there's diamond (obviously!), but there's a few others two (like graphene - a single sheet of graphite - and buckyballs/buckminsterfullerene, which is a ball-shaped molecule in exactly the pattern of edge-sharing pentagons and hexagons that a football has).
From there, I was pretty sure I wanted to be an organic chemist, working with carbon chemistry, probably in drug research & development (the thing I like most of all in chemistry is building up complex molecules from simple building blocks). I continued pretty sure of this all the way through sixth form (16-18). I mean, I knew I liked the outdoors and hiking - my mum's always been pretty outdoorsy; she grew up in rural Cornwall, and her mum grew up in the Alps, and hiking is a thing we've always done. And then I applied to university and specifically applied to Cambridge, because unlike most universities in the UK you take a broad base of courses in the first year of a science degree and narrow down from there (usually, you apply to a university to Do Chemistry, or Do Biology, or Do Physics, or Do Earth Sciences, and specialise down from there - in the Natural Sciences tripos, in my first year I took chemistry, geology, and material&mineral sciences). I had a bit of a fight to actually take geology - it's seen as an "easy option", so convincing my tutors that I was serious about it and should take it instead of physics was a bit of a struggle, but I managed!
And by the time I got to the end of my second year, and had to choose between one of chemistry and geology... well, chemistry at that level was for me about as intellectually satisfying as playing Su Doku: like, it's fun and you do get a small sense of "HAH, I did the thing", but it's not particularly engaging? This is in part because I am ludicrously good at organic chemistry: it's a field where to some extent either you have an instinct and you look at reaction schemes and Just Get It, or you have to memorise a bunch of rules about what governs chemical reactions, and then every single specific reaction you learn about is an exception to the rules. I am very firmly in the former group, to the extent that I was able to help one of my housemates with her chemistry homework through most of her third year despite the fact I'd never taken the courses she was doing and was working purely off instinct. (There are also quantitative measures of how ridiculously easily org chem comes to me, but I don't think it's necessarily helpful or relevant to describe them.)
Geology, on the other hand... geology I don't get like that. I have to work at it. But in working at it - in the field trips - I realised how much I enjoy the challenge, how much better I feel for trying to wrap my head around difficult stuff. And then there's also the bit that over the course of those field trips, I learned how to interpret the landscapes I was hiking through: the summer before my first year at university, my mum and I went hiking through a spot she's been going to for decades, on the Austrian-Italian border, and I loved the landscape but I didn't understand it. We went back two years later, and this time I brought a photocopy of a geological map from the 1940s, and it was astonishing to realise how much more I saw. Like, a pale streak on the sheer rockface above a glacier several miles away and significantly above us? Obviously a streak of carbonate rock/limestone that'd been metamorphosed, and was the source of the paler-pink garnets we were finding in the glacier till, as opposed to the darker-red ones from the surrounding metamorphosed mudstone.
And just... getting to see the world that way, getting to look out a train window and know what's going on, is kind of intoxicating. The sense of understanding the rock beneath my feet is incredible.
Which doesn't have much to do with my current dayjob, though: I'm not a field geologist, because health. Where I am is the intersection between chemistry and geology: I use my chemistry background on a daily basis, to help me generate and interpret data from a small handful of volcanoes from around the world. And the thing that I think is proper incredible about this, right, is that from looking at tiny quantities of ground-up lava from these volcanoes, I am contributing to our understanding of how the Earth works on the scale of plate tectonics, because I can go from 100mg of rock powder to going "okay, so the material that melted to produce this had a composition of X, which means it must have contained at least some Y", and... it's amazing. It's this tiny niche field and I get to work out how our planet works and it is absolutely incredible.
Why volcanoes? Mmm, I don't know, they just sort of grabbed at me. Very thin slices of volcanic rock under a microscope are beautiful; I'm interested in the processes by which they form, in a way that just hasn't ever happened for sedimentary rocks. And why the data and machines in this subfield? Because my chemistry background is enough of a part of my identity that I get kind of sad if I'm not getting to spend regular time in Proper Labs with pipettes and concentrated acids and lab coats and gloves and such. I'm not sure why that's turned out to matter so much to me, but apparently it has: there's something incredibly soothing about getting to sit still and quiet and move with care and precision.
So: a mixture of activities I enjoy doing, and topics that grab at my heart and compel me to wonder. This is a good deal of why I say that my day job is the thing I do for fun, to give me the energy to keep going with my activism.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 02:02 pm (UTC)I like that - that you went with a field that required EFFORT. That you knew would take WORK to learn. That's awesome! And proves that you really are a scientist. Scientists are learners, they want to learn.
So going into a field where you HAVE to learn instead of just coasting on "this is cool and I can do this easily" says lots and lots of good things about you.
The graphene....I think I've heard that before. Don't they use that in things like electrical switches? Stuff to conduct electricity?
Also YOU WENT TO CAMBRIDGE?! That's, like, even better than Harvard!
It's easy to see, now that you describe it, how those trips out to the fields and areas where you live played into the things you are doing now. And beautiful, that you can take something you loved then into something you love NOW. That's such a direct way of going about it - I envy that. And it's strong that you kept on the right path to DO all that.
Also volcano's are AWESOME. They are like the Earth's organs. Okay, not that, but they are the closest link between what goes on underneath us to what we can see above us. Like, whatever gets spewed out was buried way deep below and is OLD. So many clues about how things used to be.
It's important that we study that.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 02:55 pm (UTC)Graphene: it's incredibly strong, very light, and a brilliant electrical conductor, yeah. It hasn't got any commercial applications yet, but it's really cool stuff from a research perspective!
And -- yep, Cambridge grad. I have Many Feelings about the way science undergraduates are taught there, mostly negative, but I'm really conflicted about how to even talk about them, because it is undeniably the case that the network of professional connections I have as a result has been incredibly helpful in terms of getting positions (my paid summer research positions in Zurich and LA; some of the conferences I've been to; getting the PhD stipend that pays my rent) and simply in terms of being sociable. So I am torn between wanting to tell potential applicants that they'll probably get a better education elsewhere, and recognising that Cambridge as an undergrad institute isn't really about the teaching, in most useful senses, and it's honestly a bit grim. I have no idea if I'd choose the same way if I were applying to universities now.
YESSSS about them being the best window we've got to the Earth's mantle etc etc -- this is some of what excites me so much. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 01:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 02:12 pm (UTC)Beyond that, I've a very definite preference for my supervisor's personal Eppendorf pipettes over some of the other crap we've got lying around lab for public use (can't even remember what they're called, I just never use them -- the hand-shape's all wrong and so's the trigger action). I'm extremely insistent that I have a steady supply of small-sized gloves (nitrile + vinyl) and I do wear extra-smalls when I can find them, but they're mostly not stocked by places - I'm extremely finicky about wanting my gloves to be very tight over my fingers, both for sensory reasons and for fine motor control. Of my columns, there's some I like better than others - a couple of my 150μl polypropylene columns run less smoothly than others, but I've got about 16 of the fuckers and only need 12, so it's a constant Exciting Game to guess which is which when it comes to setting up that stage of things...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 05:43 pm (UTC)Also. Do you anthropomorphize your instruments/samples as much as we do?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 07:04 pm (UTC)AREN'T THEY VILE
(Eppendorf: SO MUCH NICER.)
Also, hell yes. >>;
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 07:09 pm (UTC)The blue ones were the first kind I used in bio labs. Then in o-chem we used the Eppendorfs and I did the thing where you depress the plunger all the way to get the liquid out and lost a tip in a liter of... something unpleasant.
We've got a mix of old and new blue ones, and while the new ones are better, my thumbs are still too short when the thing is dialed all the way up.
When did 1mL become a large volume? (Same way as 50k years is not that long for you, I suppose)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 07:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 01:36 pm (UTC)2. What are the questions in your field that you're most excited to answer, or to find out the answer to?
3. How long have you been focused on your subject? What was the learning curve like? What are some of the skills that help you, and which ones did/didn't you expect you'd need?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 02:47 pm (UTC)2. Am I allowed "what the fuck even"? ;) Mostly, the thing I'm proper enjoying is that I'm working with mantle convection dynamics from a chemical perspective - I'm using the chemistry of lavas to trace some of the workings of plate tectonics and specifically the origins/sources/character of mantle plumes, which are the proposed (and generally accepted!) major cause of intraplate volcanism. (I can make this bit in more lay-people-friendly words once I have showered - everyone, please do feel encouraged to ask me to clarify if you'd like!) It's a field that still involves a lot of argument, and because I'm me I'm kind of delighted that my data has the potential to really piss people off in fascinating and conversation-stimulating ways. Pleased! Basically, what material exactly mantle plumes are composed of - whether they're lower mantle, or incorporate subducted material, and if so how much; or whether they include material from the core-mantle boundary - is an open question and one that attracts a lot of research, and my work will hopefully provide significant information on the are-sediments-included part of that question.
3. I describe above some of how I got here and how long I've been focussed: isotope geochemistry only really became The Thing I Was Definitely Doing about eighteen months ago. The learning curve was much less bad than it could have been, precisely because I've got a strong background in chemistry. I've talked a little before about identifying chemists by how they use their hands: that these habits were already ingrained has been helpful. The thing I still struggle most with is memory and self-directed reading, unsurprisingly; the self-directed reading is obviously autism-related, but memory is unfortunately a side-effect of the citalopram -- it used to be much much better before I was on the stuff. It's an occasionally frustrating trade-off to have made, but fundamentally I am way more functional with a fucked memory than I am unmedicated, so.
(More? I kind of feel like I need to put more fluid into my face to answer your questions competently - gonna put a pot of tea on - but does that start to answer?)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-28 09:08 am (UTC)Sorry for taking so long to answer. I haven't been braining well lately, and I couldn't come up with good questions.
But yes, that those were good answers, and I did read your other comments on this post too, and your job is really cool.
I am curious about the bit about organic chemistry:
it's a field where to some extent either you have an instinct and you look at reaction schemes and Just Get It, or you have to memorise a bunch of rules about what governs chemical reactions, and then every single specific reaction you learn about is an exception to the rules.
Particularly since you related that to sudoku, and it reminded me of a friend of the family who is like that with anagrams. She can glance at the target word puzzle (do they have that in UK newspapers? it's a 9 square grid of letters, and you get as many legal words as possible (no plurals ending in S, no reusing the same letter in a word, no proper nouns or foreign words, etc) using the centre letter in every word, and including at least one 9-letter word) and she'll get the 9-letter word immediately. Is it like that, a pattern recognition thing? Or something else?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-28 07:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 03:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 03:46 pm (UTC)The first involves getting my rocks from rocks to the point at which I can actually analyse them: this takes about two weeks. The zeroth step, which I don't usually need to carry out, is getting from "actual lump of rock" to "rock powder" - mostly my samples arrive pre-powdered. Having got a powder, I need to (1) weigh my (cleaned with three rounds of boiling acid) Teflon beakers empty, (2) weigh out some sample (typically around 100mg), and (3) set it digesting, in a mixture of a few drops of concentrated nitric acid and ~3ml of concentrated hydrofluoric acid. A sample set is made up of 12 dissolutions: one is always a total procedural blank (you put no sample into the container, but you otherwise do absolutely everything that you to do the rest of the beakers: this lets you identify any contamination); one is always an extremely well-characterised reference material, so I can confirm that I'm getting the right numbers out for that (and therefore probably getting the right numbers for the rocks I'm investigating that haven't ever been measured before!); and the other ten are unknowns.
Weighing takes about two hours; adding in HF typically takes me 45-90 minutes depending on how slowly I'm having to move (being sufficiently careful takes longer if I'm having a shaky day, for example). Having done this, I leave my samples to digest in (sealed!) beakers on a hotplat at ~150degC for 1-3 days: in the same way that HF is used to etch silicon chips, it's used to remove the SiO2 that is the major constituent of most volcanic rocks. Once that's been done, I (very carefully!) evaporate the HF off, add small volumes of conc nitric repeatedly to destroy the insoluble-in-hydrochloric-acid fluorides that form with the elements I'm interested in (as opposed to the SiF4, which just evaporates off), and once I've taken my samples back up in hydrochloric acid it's time for columns [a flowchart I made of the process: "RV" is "resin volume", and the volumes at the top of the two columns are resin volume).
Making up all my reagents (most of them need to be made fresh) takes about a day of combining chemicals in the correct proportions; performing that set of steps takes about a day for each set of columns; and in between I take a day to dry things down and prep them for the second stage. The whole process from digestion to having samples ready to go on the mass spectrometer takes about a week and a half; things I haven't mentioned throughout this description are all the points at which I have to clean things thoroughly, but I can give more details on that if you like!
Once that's all complete, I can actually use the mass spectrometer (after I've managed to book time!). As prep, I need to make sure I've got enough running solution (0.1M HNO3--0.1% H2S0$), that all my samples are taken up in it, that I've got enough clean vials to make up samples-for-analysis from the stock-samples solution, make up any standards as necessary, etc. The first day on the mass spec tends to go a bit like:
- fire the machine up (check argon supplies and pressures; check water level in the chiller; turn on the chiller; check I've got the introduction system I want hooked up, turned on, and warming up; swap in my dedicated-to-thallium-analysis beam-focussing cones; turn on the radio-frequency generator that lights the plasma; light the torch; run a pre-amp gain calibration, to establish the electronic background noise generated by the analysers at the far end of the machine; tune the machine to get the highest sensitivity I can)
- run concentration checks (make up 2% dilutions of all of my samples - so, 20μl of the sample solution to 980μl of my running solution - and run them through the machine, to get an approximate concentration of thallium in each of sample, and therefore know how much of each sample stock solution to use to make up my samples-for-running)
- make up samples-for-running based on the results of the previous: for accurate results, it's important that the concentration of the element of interest in the solution being analysed is consistent between solutions and standards. Having made them up (this typically takes 60-90 minutes), go back to the machine and double-check I'm actually getting the same intensity of signal from each solution. If I'm not, calculate how to adjust the dilutions and do so.
- having got thallium concentrations matched, dope the samples with lead of a known isotopic composition (used to correct internally for the fact that lighter isotopes are preferentially incorporated into the plasma inside the machine - lead and thallium have overlapping mass ranges, so if you *know* the composition of lead you've put in, you can compare that to what you're measuring and see how big these mass bias effects are in this mass range, then correct the thallium accordingly)
- retune, repeatedly
- run a sequence of standards, to make sure I'm getting the right numbers out for standards (so that I don't waste samples by putting them through a machine that's spitting out the wrong numbers)
- finally finally FINALLY get a sequence of samples on. I try quite hard to get an overnight sequence on at the end of my first day, but my first mass-spec day is frequently >14 hours long.
- if the machine is behaving itself, at this point it settles into a fairly manageable routine of "hit go, make up more samples as necessary, get the data off". If it isn't. I end up using the "babysitting a very expensive vacuum leak" tag and needing to retune the machine every 90 minutes or so (taking about 15 minutes each time) in order not to lose sensitivity/accuracy -- in contrast, I just had a three-day run where I didn't have to touch the tuning even once, not even when the torch went out because we ran out of argon.
- ... and once my machine time's done, I have to tidy up, and then I have to take the several hundred data files and turn them into something useful, but that's back to deskwork :-)
Quite a lot of these jobs are bitty - do 90 minutes of something, then leave it for three days - meaning that my experimental work is often scattered pleasantly through my days in a low-grade way, interspersed with epic sprints like the one this week, or during column chemistry weeks; our lab organises room/machine bookings via google calendar, so I've ended up being the Terrible Poly Stereotype of everyone has shared google calendars (and all my partners - and for that matter my housemate - have write access to mine), and I take care to put in partner-visible ones the times when I'm actually doing lab sprints, because I kind of turn terrible at being a friend/housemate/partner/etc during them; working 12-16 hour days does that, and letting people know in advance how much of a state I'm likely to be in when is polite...
If you'd like the even more detailed and technical version, I can send you my transfer report, which has all of this written up in the form of Proper Scientific Procedure (which contains more details about volumes and less about how long everything takes and how it fits into my days); equally if you have follow-up questions, I'd love to answer :-)
(And the best thing of all? Is that both laboratories - the machine room, and the clean lab in which the column chemistry happens - are bright and high-ceilinged and have constant, consistent background white noise and solitude; it's lovely.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 07:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 07:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 05:07 pm (UTC)That said, what's the most interesting thing you've learned so far in your thallium measuring, if it's not academically secret until papers?
If it is, talk lovely to me about volcanoes and wonderful rocks, because I love that always. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 07:55 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I've definitively learned anything yet, but there is definitely Weird Shit Going Down; we're tentatively on the edge of A Legit Discovery but I have another batch of samples to run before I can be more definite about it! But it's more of the "processes are weird and might be making a mess of what we thought ought to happen" variety than the "yep, definitely sediments" one...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 07:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-22 10:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-21 07:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-22 08:22 pm (UTC)An uplifting experience
Date: 2014-06-22 10:32 am (UTC)So...
Will we ever observe conditions in the Mantle directly, or even in the lab with tiny samples under (say) a diamond anvil?
Also, from a previous reply: I *get* your sense of geology and the landscape. I'm no geologist, I'm a Civil Engineer by training, and I read the engineered landscape; it's always an amazing thing, out in a landscape that's there to be read, always more than mere scenery.
Re: An uplifting experience
Date: 2014-06-22 09:52 pm (UTC)Regarding your main question -- that's more about tech than about geology, exactly, and as such means that the answer is slippery around what counts as "observe" and "directly". Laser-heated diamond-anvil cells are a thing (26GPa & 900K were already being achieved in 1996); beyond that... enh. Talk to the engineers :-p
:-)
this is perhaps less Serious than you were thinking
Date: 2014-06-25 03:29 pm (UTC)Re: this is perhaps less Serious than you were thinking
Date: 2014-06-26 09:56 pm (UTC)Re: this is perhaps less Serious than you were thinking
Date: 2014-06-26 10:16 pm (UTC)