Paolo talks with an energetic and super creative thinker applying his polymer chemistry talents to an impressively broad range of applications that span form wind turbine blade manufacturing to chemical mechanical planarization of semiconductors. Once again, you’ll get to learn about cutting-edge chemistry and the interesting person behind the science. If you’ve ever wondered how video games are related to chemistry, this is your episode!
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Alaaeddin is someone you can spend entire afternoons chatting with about life, experiences, and of course, science. His studies and career in chemistry brought him around the world, living, working, and studying in several countries, accumulating life learnings that made him the person and the scientist he is today.
Dr. Alsbaiee has worked in an industrial environment since his PhD and is not afraid of new challenges. His polymer chemistry background allowed him to work on some incredible applications, such as the materials of which turbine blades are made, or sophisticated methods to manufacture electronic microchips.
This is a textbook Bringing Chemistry to Life conversation, where you can see the person in their science, you’ll learn about Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP), polymer chemistry, and their role in our everyday life as well as the importance of imagination in chemical research.
Paolo 00:06
Like the video game, Tetris. Yeah?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 00:07
Exactly. So, you have to do that actually, same thing in chemistry, you need to do this reaction very rapidly. And you need to have these building blocks very rigid. They react randomly, then you don't give them time to really kind of reorganize into kind of a more thermodynamically, thermodynamically stable.
Paolo 00:24
Dr. Alaaeddin Aslbaiee's research really does sound like something out of a classic video game. But this work is more than just a fun challenge of polymer chemistry Tetris. It's the foundation for new green technologies that could soon help save our planet. In this season three episode of Bringing Chemistry to Life, we speak with another member of the Chemical and Engineering News 2021 Talented 12 about their work and trends in their field. I'm your host, Paolo Braiuca from Thermo Fisher Scientific. We began by asking Dr. Alsbaiee about how and where his scientific curiosity was first to grow.
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 01:04
So, when I was young, actually, I was very curious child. So, I used to really kind of open electronic devices, I try to see what's inside, I was really fascinated, you know, it was in the 80s, when we used to have the recording machines, you know, it was really fascinating to me, like, you know, how these devices work, like, what's the magic behind them. So sometimes I used to break some of the different devices. So, my, I think that the what really was helpful was my father was really very kind of supportive in that regard. So even if I broke some devices or something like that, like he was very tolerant to that, and he was even encouraging me to do more of that. So that really helped a lot. So that grew farther actually, until at a point that I was able to fix electronic devices without really taking any formal training or that. And then after that, I started getting more towards science in general, you know, kind of more interested to know kind of how matter is made of how, you know, the kind of like that that action will recommend the chemical reactions, while at the same time also, I had my uncle, he had a PhD in organic chemistry, actually from France. And he was the most successful, educated person in our family. So, I was also like, very inspired by him, he worked for Nestle. So that was, you know, all played a role. And then I would say the last piece of really kind of inspiration for me to choose chemistry was when Ahmed Zewail, Nobel Laureate in chemistry was, you know, he was in the US. He's originally from Egypt. So, he was the first kind of originally other person to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. So that was actually right in the high school, when I was at the high school. So right before I went to college, that was really kind of the last piece of inspiration that I got there. Yeah, I mean, I want to go to chemistry the next year.
Paolo 02:51
And obviously, as you as you grow older, you also, it's interesting. The way the way you comment, right from Syria to Saudi Arabia, it's a difference is, it was a challenge, you know, it was kind of an in between step and then going to Canada was it was a bigger step and a more challenging one. Perseverance, or the capacity to stick to challenges or to to approach them, right. Because when you, particularly in a science field, there's a lot of low days, right? There's a lot of times when your experiments don't work, as you expect, or you have a lot of unexpected results and a lot of disappointment. And you need to just carry through, do you think this is giving you an edge?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 03:32
Yeah. When so in my master's, for example, I had a master's advisor. And then in my PhD PhD, as far as I know, then I had another advisor for my postdoctoral studies. Each of these people really taught me something that’s extremely important. So, for example, when I was in my PhD, at some point, I had very low patience towards a certain research area, but my advisor really taught me how to be really patient. So, patience was, was something so for each of these people that I really learned something that kind of shaped me who I am now.
Paolo 04:03
I was also kind of fascinated about how you catch you caught immediately the, you know, the the different approach between doing academic and industrial research. So, the, you know, the sort of exploration and sort of the intellectual challenge of the academic research on one hand and the pragmatism of, you know, looking for an actual application that you can sell in industry. And, you know, how have you looked at this thing? Did you realize this before deciding to move into industry, or is it something that you kind of learn after you started doing industrial work?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 04:44
Yeah, that's a good, very good question. So, I think, I would say to be honest, even when I was a PhD, I was not really interested that much in becoming a professor. Because I knew that I really wanted like, I like to work on the front end of the research, like you know, making things that are impact that have, like, you know, people would, you know, see the the result of what I'm doing, I don't want to be working on things that are very, very long term or just like so. So, I would say working with with Dichtel was really kind of like the amazing kind of experience that I had before, you know, I had to transition to industry because like, again, like the mentality of the group was really nice that perspective. And that's probably one of the reasons why I choose even working with Will Dichtel in the first place is because I saw also, most of his work was centered around covering organic frameworks, which are made in one or two steps maximum. So, I didn't like that you can, you can make quickly materials, but then you can see they're they're nice application, and then you can really see see see the influence or the impact of these materials. So then, when I went to industry, I was better prepared for it, there were some challenges there. And I really kind of like the way that I approached that is thinking somehow outside the box, and let's try to make some technologies that are not going to affect the mechanical properties of that particular, you know, composite material. And I really thought about immediately that the first thing I thought about is, I don't want to make new things like in the lab, I want to look at commercial kind of materials, leverage some some chemicals that are already in the market and try to see if we can have some of these chemicals, you know, solve these problems. That's so that's, that was very practical, because like, if you can do that you are you are already starting with commercial material, instead of really developing something new, making some new molecules, it's going to be higher hurdle hurdle to really kind of imply like, apply that type of research. Whereas if you start with something that's more kind of always available in the market, so for problem, and then you know that there's going to be gone to market much faster. So, I think that's really kind of I was already really ready for industrial setup, right after kind of Will Dichtel's lab. I think that really grew even more over time.
Paolo 06:56
How do you put all these pieces together? Right, the being imaginative, imaginative, and pragmatic at the same time, or, you know, being a problem solver, but you know, ensuring that that something is is is practical, it becomes something usable, you know, which which is which is key for any industrial researcher, you know. Can we discuss about some of these aspects?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 07:21
In terms of the imagination, I think that that what really helped, I'm a visual person. So, the way that I usually, so kind of look at things is more like, you know, I, I have a lot of imagination in terms of like looking at things and try to imagine things in the kind of like, really three dimensional space in my mind that I kind of think like, even when I used to study chemistry. The only way that I was able to understand equations is by imagining how molecules in the three dimensions, their structure, and they are reacting with each other. I can't really memorize things by just like, you know, looking at the other text, and just I can't do that imagination was, was a huge part of the way I think, in general. And I really think, to be like imagination is is really one of the most powerful skills that you need to have, if you are going to be a successful scientist, because knowledge is is amazing. But if you would like to make a step-up performance is something if you want to make to make a breakthrough in something you, knowledge is not is not enough. If you would like to make some like a breakthrough, you have to step out of the kind of current kind of knowledge barrier, that's, that's, you know, that's the field you know, you're working on. So it's, it's, you have to have imagination to be able to kind of step out like, you know, think outside the box and step out of that, that that barrier or boundary and then you can push that boundary even farther. And then come provide some kind of new perspective or new angle at looking at things you have to have imagination and then if you really couple that with with, as you said pragmatism and practicality, and you know, how they thinking about you know, things that are more applicable that can be more easily adopted by you know, like industry and then can be translated into products if you couple these two together I think that you can really make some something very powerful.
Paolo 09:13
It's refreshing to think that even in an industrial setting where there's a lot of data and a lot of control over experiments right this the still the human factor playing playing a role. I like I like to jump into some of the details of of your of your work because you've done a lot of different things right and maybe maybe we could we cannot touch touch them all but you know, probably discussing a bit more of you know, the problems and the chemistry, your polymers you would be working on in your career, we can get a glimpse of your creative process and it will be it will be really fascinating. So, I don't know, do you want to start from what you did that you know, with Dichtel, you know, with your cyclodextrin polymers and that seems like an interesting enough idea to discuss.
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 10:04
I totally agree because I'm very, like, you know, I can discuss everything about it, right, because it's published and it's so it's, I think it's a perfect stuff to talk about that. It's so when we're so we got a big grant actually from NSF at that time to work on, you know, making some sustainable polymers because I was part of also the Center for Sustainable Polymers in the University of Minnesota, which is funded by NSF. So, the, the motivation for that particular grant was really to kind of, you know, was given to Will Dichtel to really develop some sustainable materials for solving some big problems. It was just like an open thing, you know, it was, you know, up to us to think about, like, which kind of application or which area we should think about, but then I think it was kind of like, probably in about a month of time, constant discussion between me and and Will Dichtel that we, you know, we came to like, it was kind of, we thought about like cyclodextrin, because we know cyclodextrin is a very sustainable material. It has a huge application everywhere. And I think, also, we know that it's being used for water purification, but during the that kind of month of discussion, we found out that there is a there's, like a gap there, there has never been any high surface areas of extreme polymer before. And Will Dichtel lab is really specialized in making porous polymers, right. But the hurdle was that this is where you can't use cyclodextrin. And make covalent organic framework. When you can't do that, it doesn't have the geometry that allows you to do it. So, you just think about like a really randomly, kind of like, porous, high surface area polymers. And we haven't done that much like that, you know, in in Will Dichtel's lab. And that was actually, you know, that we develop a chemistry for it to develop a reaction, we think about crosslinker, what is the crosslinker that would enable us. So that's where I kind of really dig, dig into the kind of literature and kind of like really understanding what has been done in there. What are the linkages that have been to the kind of use with cyclodextrin was also the site of the crosslinkers? And I really realized that there's a gap in there that all of these either the crosslink or all the linkages are relatively long or flexible. So flexible, meaning that they have really kind of like a rotational kind of freedom around them. So, you can imagine when you have a network, where you have kind of the crosslinker or the the linkages are flexible, like the the monomer is freely kind of to rotate and adopt a different conformation. Then if you have your absorbent materials, like you think about beads, for example, they swell in water, right, so then you have a little bit of a porosity around them. But then if you try to dry them, they just collapse because your network is very flexible, right? Because they can monomers can really kind of like rotate, and they will adapt the more like they will try to reduce that free space inside them. Now the only way to be able to lock that is to have a very rigid network from inside. And that's actually where the bricks game came into my mind that you need to think about, like, you know, these types of non-complimentary shape pieces.
Paolo 13:08
And like, like Tetris, like the video game, Tetris. Yeah?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 13:12
Exactly, exactly. So basically, if you play with that game very quickly, and without really carefully kind of reorienting those pieces, they will just drop randomly, and then you will have lots of points to tell them, right. So you need to do that actually, the same thing in chemistry, you need to do this reaction very rapidly. And you need to have these building blocks very rigid. They react randomly, then you don't give them time to really kind of reorganize into kind of a more thermodynamically thermodynamically stable.
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 13:22
So, you approach your chemistry like a crappy Tetris player, like myself? It's a great, it's great.
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 13:45
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, exactly. That was really the the big inspiration behind that. And that's why I came, I started reading the literature on trying to find a crosslinker. I want to have a direct linkage with cyclodextrin. I don't want to have like, for example, if you have an ester, you have two bonds between the two monomers. If you have an ester, right? I want as not to one solid like two atoms, right? So, I want to have just one atom in between the two monomers, to to really minimize that kind of rotational freedom. And that's why tetrafluoride dinitride was really interesting to me. Because it can react, like if we can react to cyclodextrin, then the oxygen of like the hydroxyls, or the cyclodextrin, can attack that we do the nucleophilic aromatic substitution, kick off the fluorine, and you have a direct linkage in there with an aromatic link that's very rigid, that you actually then in this case, you have a very rigid network in that way.
Paolo 14:38
Let me do a step back just for someone who might not be familiar with the chemistry of cyclodextrin. So cyclodextrins are polymers of carbohydrates, right? They're a cyclic carbohydrate pretty much. So, they're basically full of hydroxyl groups around isn't it?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 14:51
Yes. That's true.
Paolo 14:51
Is this what makes for their highly, high absorption capabilities abilities? Is it like hydrogen bonding type of things with the with the OH?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 15:01
it's actually yeah. So, in terms of the chemical structure itself, right? The the similar to cellulose, right? But if you compare cellulose, for example, with or glucose with beta cyclodextrin, the cyclodextrin is way better, so it doesn't take uptake. So, the reason for that is because the beta cyclodextrin has kind of a cup like structure that you know, so it has a large kind of like, you know, diameter, kind of like, right, so, so it has. It's really like a cup, that's kind of a now it goes like a cone kind of type of structure. So, they kind of have the larger kind of like diameter, I would say a cup side of it enables a 3D kind of houseguest complex with organic molecules, because the inside that cup is hydrophobic outside that cup is hydrophilic. Right. So that's why the or the many of the organic pollutants have loads that kind of hydrophobic parts on them that does not like water. And that's why they go inside this cup because they like it. So, it forms this kind of complex because of it's like structure. That's what makes it really amazing for sequestering organic materials.
Paolo 16:14
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Paolo 16:39
You were looking at cross linking together these these monomers of cyclodextrins and make up a more orderly, more or less, three-dimensional structure with it. So, the idea was from from the chemical perspective, doing a cross linking between whatever was at all OH groups you had on the surface of that, isn't it? Exactly. Okay, exactly. Perfect. Yeah. Now we can go back to your chemistry for the cross linking that was interesting.
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 17:03
Sure. Sure. Yeah. So yeah, so we decided about tetrafluoride type cyanide trial, the hard part was actually that there has never been any reaction or like the the nucleophilic aromatic substitution reaction between aliphatic hydroxyls, and the aromatic flourides. There is no had that like, there were some polymers with chemical type of like, like where you have like phenolic, kind of like oxygens on fenedrin. This, you can imagine this is more nucleophilic, right? Because like it's it's the acidity is much is much higher. Basically, for the hydroxyls, acidity is much lower. So, it's very, it's not easy to provide a nucleophilic oxygen to really be able to do the nucleophilic aromatic substitution reaction. So that was a new kind of, that was a challenge for us. And that's why I spent a little bit of like some time to develop this reaction to try to find what are the base that I can really kind of drive this reaction where I can remove that proton from the hydroxyl on the cyclodextrin, and then allow the cyclodextrin to attack the the the aromatic, aromatic fluoride, and they kick off the fluoride from that. And then you need to do to stabilize also the fluoride anions that are result of that reaction. So that's kind of, you know, even thinking about like, what, what's the medium that you need to have, because like, if you do this reaction in water, you cannot do it, right, because water can interfere in the reaction. You need to have aprotic solvent that does not participate in the reaction. So, I, you know, they think about THF was was was good in that regard. But cyclodextrin is not solvent in THF that's another problem. And that's why actually, the very first we kind of type of material we made was the yield was lower than 20%. It was very low yield. But because the material was extremely interested, interesting, that paper got into Nature, because like it was, it was just something really like very new reaction, very type of material that solved the problem, but then in the later papers that we had, we improve that we added a binary mix, like solvent of THF with DMF, so that we improve the solubility a little bit of cyclodextrin. And so that's why, you know, you were able to do that actually more in homogeneous conditions where you can have a higher yield, we were able to push that yield up a little bit. So.
Paolo 19:17
So, this this is applied for remediation, right?Removing pollutants from water or even air I suppose. So how, how stable are these materials in the sort of even potentially harsh conditions right of a real life application?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 19:34
That was one of the difficulties is how to characterize that right? It's the solid like it's an insolvent in anything, even if you heat it in DMSO, so it does not break. So, so that was really highly stable material and on the most of the NMR characterization is all done in the solid state NMR even floating NMR that we've done, you know, carbon NMR whatever all the solid state you got, you got There's no way you can really get that into solution. And then you can characterize it. So, it's highly stable.
Paolo 20:05
It must be an amazing feeling to know that you basically invented the material that as a real life application and could could could really be valuable and life changing. That must be an amazing feeling. This is a great story, but you've done actually more, you know, at Arkema you work on the material that he used to, to make this wind turbines blades, which is, which is kind of amazing. Can you can you tell us anything about that?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 20:29
My work at Arkema is that I worked in a team that was really aiming to develop the very first recyclable wind turbine, you know, like thermoplastic way you can thermal shape it and you know, you can even not only thermal-formable, but so basically you can heat it, and then you can make different shapes. So that's kind of part of kind of recyclability, but also Arkema did beyond that, that they were able to find a way to depolymerize that, so that you can heat that yeah, like you can, you can heat that composite, you can really break the break the polymer back to the monomer level. That that's really fascinating. I'm really happy to have been part of that, that big project, and it really works very well. And the that material got commercialized the year, almost a year after I left Arkema in 2018, at the end of 2018, almost.
Paolo 21:20
And then now you work on yet a completely different application right now. Now you're working on these, these technology, which is called chemical mechanical planarization, which is used in the manufacturing of microchips. And by the way, this is something that we have discussed in I think it was episode four of series one, so I invite the audience to go and check, but we, we actually put the attention back then to the slurries, but you actually work on the pad, part of the technology, and also chemically is completely different. So, these are polyurethane type polymers, aren't they? So, it's an incredibly diverse career. And, you know, like, I'd love if you could tell us a bit more about that maybe starting from a bit of a description of what chemical mechanical planarization is.
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 22:09
Yeah, I would love to do it. So, CMP is a process used throughout the chip fabrication process. So, as we know that the chips are made on kind of a silicon wafer, so, it's kind of like you know, the type of disks, right. They can be like 200 millimeter wide and or in diameter. Each wafer contains really hundreds, hundreds of chips in it, that are built in it. So, you kind of use you know, you build the chip, or you know, in terms of the fabrication on that wafer, and then after that you dice the the the kind of you know the chips from the wafer and that you get your chips and then you can you can you can package whatever you can do with it. So, throughout this chip propagation, so, when you usually like you know, the the if you look at the cross section of the chip, you will see really kind of layers of like different different metals, they could be tungsten, it could be copper, they could be you know, like a lot of different materials that are kind of built into the into the chip itself. And then you have the semiconductor also layers in it. These layers are built sequentially. When you deposit the kind of the layers you need to all like all the time, you need to really planarize the surface because you always like you cannot easily control the position of the of the kind of like materials, either the metal or the semiconductor, on the, on the chip on the kind of after the lithography, right after you make the pattern that you would like to have. So then, so after you deposit the the new layer, let's say you always have excess material in areas that you don't want this material to be in, that's why you need to planarize, you need to kind of really remove the excess material from the kind of like areas that you don't want these excess like you want, you want basically to have really fine tuning over the control over the kind of the patterns that you have in there. You can't do that without you know with any methods that you have to use CMP in there to really planarize and have the feature kind of like the fine tuning or the fine control of the feature shape or dimensions on the on the chip itself.
Paolo 24:06
And so, you you develop you work on the materials use for these pads, which is which is basically the the, the material that creates the friction, right and between basically about you got your wafer the microchip, you have your slurry in between and then you have your pads that they probably rotate in some way and that's that's the way you create this mechanical friction. So, I suppose you work on controlling a huge number of variables during the polymerization process and and probably you need to create different materials depending on the type of slurry or the type of microchip that has to be worked in in the application. So.
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 24:47
That's the nice thing about polyurethanes. The formation space is huge. Polyurethanes are like not only thermal mechanical properties, the viscoelastic properties of polyurethane as the first separation phenomenon or face mixing that that happened is amazing, it adds like a lot of different kinds of like, sometimes you can have the property similar between two materials. But we have completely different because they have like some standard kind of similar mechanical product like, you know, a different temperature that we have definitely, even though they have similar except the temperature, but other temperature that we have differently, completely different. Yeah.
Paolo 25:22
So, polyurethanes are more of a family of polymers, rather than being a specific. So, do you have a lot of freedom in the choice of monomers that you use there?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 25:31
Huge, huge polyurethanes. It's just like, I can't really emphasize how huge the formation space is. I just love working in that space. Because it's just like, like, I told you, like, some sometimes, like, you'll have some bulk properties, like, what really fascinates me more is sometimes you make certain properties, you think that they will behave in a certain way, right? Because from previous experience, you know that similar paths have that particular properties behave in a certain way. But you discover that new material behaves completely different. So, there's something else that you need to dig more in there. And sometimes the microstructure, there's something in the microstructure mix, it's completely different. It's just like, amazing. It's just like imagination is really a huge part of what we do in CMP.
Paolo 26:13
And I suppose in DuPont upon you have the sort of richness of competencies and access to different types of expertise. So, this is truly multidisciplinary, isn't it?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 26:22
It's huge. So, we I mean, we have a lot of synergy between the different groups in terms of like, you know, the, the, the slurry, and the pads, we have lots of modeling as well, we have, like, it's a like, there is no way one scientist can think from all perspective. We all all the time talk, like different expertise, talk about different, like the same problem, everybody, you know, like everyone brings kind of like the solution or the idea, from his perspective, from his experience, because like, it's highly collaborative area.
Paolo 26:52
It's amazing, right? Because, you know, this is such an important part of a process to make some of the things that are disrupting the world as we know it, right. So, every one of us, that is the product of your world pretty much every day, right? You know, how many electronic devices do we have around? It's amazing. So, thinking that you have a role to play in that that must be, you know, very exciting. By the way, the enthusiasm and what you speak about that makes me reluctant about asking the next question I had in mind, because I wanted to ask you, whether you are always missing the sort of freedom that a more academic type of career or research might give you? Because usually in the industry, you tend to be more constrained, you know, you have the commercial parameters that you don't necessarily have it in, in academia. In academia, you need to show that you can get your next funding, but it's a different type of things. Right. But from the way you're describing what you do, it doesn't seem that you miss that at all.
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 27:51
Yeah, yeah. So, I would say so maybe, I mean, different people from different industries have different experiences with at least in my situation in Arkema, and DuPont, I did not have this problem. To be honest, there's lots of freedom around what research we do. I mean, at least the people, the managers I worked with are very open minded. And probably I mean, this is the nice thing about big companies is they have like, you know, if you have some ideas, and if you'd like to, like, they also have a lot of programs have like programs that aren't fundamentals. Like most of my work has really focused on fundamental structure property relationship of polyurethanes. It's because, you know, like, they have the capacity, the capacity for that, and they would like to build on knowledge. And they would like to really improve their kind of understanding and the ability to tune the structure and the properties. So that that gives you a lot of freedom in terms of the science that you can do. And I really, I had, like, even a couple of years, I was working just on really expanding the material toolkit of you know, some of the parts we have on. I had tremendous freedom in there a lot of resources, no, no issues at all with that. And that that was was really amazing, the same thing at Arkema. They have a lot of like tolerance, they even actually encourage their scientists to even more think about like how, you know, you can dive deep into the research problem, not just like, you know, solve it on the surface and then not understand really what's how you solve that. They would like you to understand why it's because like, when you understand more, you can do more, and you can have more like better. So, so I in at least in my experience in these two companies, I haven't had this problem. It's like It's like a mix between academic and industrial usage together at that I really enjoyed it.
Paolo 29:32
And you probably come with the right mindset right? Because we spoke about your pragmatism and how you like things that make sense. You don't need to you don't want to be too Byzantine in your research. So, you want to be to the point, you care about the applications. This This has been a really fun chat, Alaaeddin, and the time it is flying by and if it was for me, I would keep going. But but the usual final questions, all my interviews and and with the same one. So obviously you're still young. You know, an enthusiastic researcher and I'm sure you're, you're, you know, you'll face a number of new challenges and, and you know, you will, you will have a lot of satisfaction for your career, but you have already achieved a lot. So, you might be in a position to actually give advice to someone who is just starting in their career. What would that be?
Dr. Alaaeddin Alsbaiee 30:19
The two main advice I would give is the first one is patience. So, science is not easy. It takes long time; patience is extremely important. The second is also trying to be more courageous, try to step out of the comfort zone as much as you can, especially in the graduate studies. Don't be afraid of that. So, if you can build up that knowledge in terms of different areas, I would I really strongly encourage on that, because this type of skill, like the courage and being able to step easily out of the comfort zone is very, very important in scientific research in general, and especially in industry. If you'd like to go into industry as a career, you have to be able to step out of comfort zone much, much more easily. You need to be ready to do that. And you need to have the mindset to do it. So, I think the courage and also step out of the comfort zone is a really strong advice that I give to everyone. Don't be afraid of that and try to even if you don't have this type of like mindset, try to build it and try to learn that skill, because it's really helpful.
Paolo 31:25
That was Dr. Alaaedin Alsbaiee, a research scientist and project leader at DuPont, and one of the Chemical and Engineering News' Talented 12. Thanks for joining us for this season three episode of Bringing Chemistry to Life and keep an ear out for more. If you enjoyed this conversation, you're sure to enjoy Dr. Alsbaiee's book, video, podcasts and other content recommendations. In the episode notes that you can find wherever you listen to your podcast, you will see a URL where you can access these recommendations and register for a free Bringing Chemistry to Life T-shirt. And finally, if you liked this podcast, it would be really important for us if you share it with your friends and colleagues. Help us spread the love for chemistry. This episode was produced by Sarah Briganti, Matt Ferris and Matthew Stock.