Meet reluctant professor turned passionate educator, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Izzy Lamb. Lamb, who teaches at Fort Lewis College shares his zig zag path from punk to professor, and tells us how it’s his mission to make scientists by teaching how to think and understand the relationship of chemistry to the world around them. When not teaching, Lamb conducts research on photocatalysis and photochemistry, with the aim of contributing to a sustainable, greener future. His passion is contagious and you’ll enjoy his candor over how uncertainty converts to clarity with the help of a few dedicated teachers.
With four seasons under our belt, we’ve heard some amazing stories about how our guests have found, or often “stumbled” into, their careers in science. We’ve also had many conversations where past guests have passionately discussed the importance of their early career teachers as well as what teaching does for them in their current careers. This conversation is squarely centered on these two topics, with a good dose of photochemistry mixed in too.
We meet Dr. Izzy Lamb, Assistant Professor at Fort Lewis College, which is a small liberal arts school in Colorado with a primarily undergraduate student population. Izzy is entertainingly forthright in admitting that he’s often a bit surprised by his success in chemistry given that he was failing the topic in high school and was later accepted to only one of the six graduate programs he applied to. However, our conversation quickly uncovers why Izzy has been successful in what matters most to him—exploring photochemistry and training the next generation of chemists.
Join us for this engaging look at how Izzy has built a thriving career in chemistry through perseverance, passion, and knowing what matters most to him. We learn about his career in photocatalysis and how he’s now adapting his research to better fit the resources and undergraduate students where he’s now working. A passion for teaching students in a way that gets them thinking and equipped to solve real-world problems is his priority, and we learn how he’s using a passion for understanding quantum yields of photochemical reactions to help inform more sustainable ways of doing chemistry.
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Izzy Lamb, PhD 00:00
I don't care if my students can get the right answer. What I care is that they understand what that means and that they can use that to understand the world. And that ideally, they can then use that to like go and do something.
Paolo 00:22
Dr. Izzy Lamb is an assistant professor of chemistry at Fort Lewis College. His research focuses on photo catalysis and photochemistry in the hopes of creating a sustainable green future for our planet. But his passion, he discovered, is teaching, and he's found a fantastic place to help students towards their own bright futures. Thanks for joining us for season five episode of Bringing Chemistry to Life. I'm your host Paolo Braiuca with Thermo Fisher Scientific. We began by asking Izzy about his own introduction to science, and the teachers who planted the seeds for his eventual career in chemistry.
Izzy Lamb, PhD 01:04
I can tell you like for a fact that the reason that I ended up going into chemistry happened in like senior year of high school. But I want to go back a little bit before that to sometime around, like, I think 9th or 10th grade, where I like, absolutely failed chemistry. It's because I wasn't paying attention. It's because me and my friends were, like, hanging out in the back of the classroom playing on our Nintendo DSs instead of instead of doing chemistry. So like, I don't know if that was necessarily like, a matter of capability, but it was certainly a matter of like interest and, and drive, which I just like, at the time I just didn't have, you know in 9th grade. So sometime around that time, I had a math teacher named Mr. Sweeney, who kind of pulled me aside. He basically was telling me like, you know, like, he, like he believed in me, but like, you know, I needed to stop the bad behavior. And he was right. I think that that was where it kind of pushed me into some a different direction. I started to get into sports, he actually ended up being my soccer coach. And I also started to get more interested in mathematics and, and science. So, I went to a school in Central Massachusetts, called the Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School. So, we were the first class through that, that school as it was founded. And so there was there was all sorts of like ups and downs, but it was a really, really awesome education that I got, because like, all the way from like, 7th grade through 12th grade, we were looking at, like chemistry and physics and biology. We get this every single year as opposed to a lot of times, it'll be like this year, you have chemistry this year, you have that. So, there's like a lot of repeated exposure. And right before I graduated high school, I was taking AP Chemistry and AP Calculus. And because oftentimes, my mom couldn't pick my brother and I up at the end of the school day, because she was working, my chemistry professor was actually like, very, very nice, in retrospect. And he would, while he was like, getting stuff ready for the next day, he would let me hang out and do my homework in the lab slash classroom. And the thing that really sticks in my mind that I mentioned before, was one day, we were setting up voltaic cells, copper zinc batteries. And so, he had me make the copper nitrate solution, the zinc nitrate solution, and then the ammonium nitrate solution for the, the, for the salt bridge. And then like putting that, that together, it's a simple thing. But like, you know, putting that together for the first time and seeing the voltage output and seeing that be exactly what it was like, this was like a such a cool experience to me. So, when I think back, I think that's really what made me say like, “I want to do this, I want to like, see where this goes.” And I applied to a few schools in Central Massachusetts. And the one I ended up going to was in Worcester, Mass. It's called Clark University. And that is where I started to, like, really, really seriously get into chemistry. The professor that I took general chemistry with, Professor Lee Smith, mentioned that he had spots open for paid research opportunities that summer, the summer after my first year. And he said, If anyone wants to, like, hear more about that to come and talk to him. And I just like went straight up to the front of the room after the class from the lecture hall and talk to him and he told me about this nanomaterials research that he had going in his lab. Some of them were like these, these perovskites and some of them were copper oxide nanoparticles and told me about the scanning electron microscopy, and like X-ray diffraction, and all of these methods that you could use to really like see things at nano scales. And so, I did my first research experience that summer, and I like kind of took off from there.
Paolo 04:52
It's incredible, like how you know who you are and who you become in life depends on who you meet on your path. Right? And, but I can never put a finger on whether this is luck, or whether this is design in some ways, or whether, you know, in some ways, I like to think that you get opportunities all the time, and then you need to be able to catch them. What's your perspective?
Izzy Lamb, PhD 05:12
I think there's a lot of luck involved in it. I think that you certainly like, like, it's important to, you know, grab opportunities when you can, if you can, if you have the means and the energy to do so. But I think that a lot of times, there's a huge luck component to that. And a lot of being at the right place at the right time is being at a place in the first place. That sounds a little a little tautological, but I think you know what I mean, like, if you're not putting yourself in a position to have opportunities, then those opportunities don't come. Those opportunities don't come when you're just like, if I was just to sit in this room for the rest of my life, like, you know, you need to like go do something. Be out there. So, yeah.
Paolo 05:55
Yeah. It takes courage, right? Because you need to jump on those. And then you know, I mean, we all go through these phases. And it's really hard if you don't have like, the structure around you, support, you don't have an astral figure in the family or somebody you know, who can tell you how it goes. You know, you're a bit on your own and you rely on you know, who you meet on your path, as we said, and it's, you know. I think this is a fantastic story. You do grad school, at some point, you do a PhD at Boulder. Am I right?
06:27
That's correct. Yeah. So, I remember sitting next to my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, and deciding that I was going to apply to graduate school, and it was like, let's say today, like Friday, and the last GRE I could take was Tuesday. And so, I like made that decision, not have anyone should do this. but I made that decision, you should be. Yeah. But I made that decision. I went in, I took the GRE. I got all my stuff in. And I applied to, I think six programs. Five of them were material science programs, because I had sort of this, like material science research background, and I got rejected from all five of those material science programs. And I'm not sure why. And my hypothesis was because I didn't have enough math, I had only taken through calculus two. But I got into the physical chemistry program at CU Boulder. And CU Boulder has a really good physical chemistry program. And there's a lot of math. I say this a lot to people sort of in a tongue in cheek way, but I'm not really sure why they accepted me to that program. Because my first couple of years there were not smooth sailing. When I was taking the beginning graduate classes, I had to teach myself differential equations and linear algebra and multivariable calculus. Because these were things that I had brushed on them in classes, but I'd never like, I couldn't do the homework that we needed to do solving these various quantum mechanical problems. But I thought it was important to be doing the difficult thing to be doing the hard thing. It was like a challenge that I sought to overcome. And I got into physical chemistry because I was so like, interested, like when you take an undergraduate physical chemistry course, or any course where there's all these equations that get thrown at you, right? Where did they come from? How do you derive those equations from, like, I had no idea how you go from, like, whatever it is, I didn't really understand, like, what is the research that leads to you putting up equations like, you know, like, where does that come from? And so, so that's really why I wanted to go down the P-Chem route, because I felt like that was like, I wanted more depth to the to the world. And I felt like physical chemistry was a nice...
Paolo 08:44
Is that how you teach it these days? You know, trying to get a perspective of how you get to these equations. And then you know, what, what is the mathematics really means in the real world?
Izzy Lamb, PhD 08:54
As much as possible, I'd have a lot of trouble putting an equation on the board and not spending time really talking about that and trying to find as many analogies as possible to explain like, what it means. So, it's not just “Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla,” and like, stick numbers in there and get the right answer. Like I don't, I don't care if my students can get the right answer. What I care is that they understand what that means, and that they can use that to understand the world. And that ideally, they could then that and use that to like go and do something. Because of the ways in which I've struggled with math a lot I think I really have an appreciation for like, the students will be hitting that wall. And so, like even in general chemistry, I really, really always try to make it something physical, make it something like real.
Paolo 09:45
It feels like a new generation of scientists are getting much, much better at communicating and hence probably at teaching. Would you agree with that, or am I generalizing too much here?
Izzy Lamb, PhD 09:56
I'm not sure. I mean, I have other friends that are professors that have you know, that I was friends with in graduate school that have gone to different schools. And I think that they feel a similar way about this. So maybe it's an, it's a more modern approach to it. The professor who was my advisor for the last four years of graduate school, Neils Damrauer at CU Boulder, the reason why I joined his group, so I was originally in another group, and I got kicked out after I failed my orals. We’ll talk about that. But the reason I wanted to be in Neils' group and the reason he was actually on the committee that failed me, and the reason I asked him to be on the committee was because I taught a general chemistry for majors lab with him for two years. And I had never seen the laboratory Professor come into the lab. And Niels came into every single lab section and interacted with the students that were doing experiments and ask them questions. And he was so excited about science. And he and he'd just like pass that on to the students. And I was like, “I want to be like this.” I graded a TA graded grading. So, I TA'd in a grading capacity for him for physical chemistry, for quantum. And that, when I was sitting in that class, that's when I was like, “I want to be a professor.” Because like, I just love the way that he described quantum mechanics. And at this point, I'd taken quantum three ways in graduate school. I'd taken it in the chemistry department, I'd taken in the physics, like their intro quantum. And then I'd also taken a computational course in the chemistry department that was very quantum based. And so like, at this point, I really felt like I had this nice perspective of it. And I was starting to really like understand this. Um, and then it was his class that really cemented it. His undergraduate level, junior level quantum mechanics class where I was just like, “This is so clear and like, so well done,” and I was like, “This is like a level of clarity that I want to be able to,” like, provide, like, at some point, I'd like to be standing in that position.
Paolo 12:10
Yeah. And you feel how powerful that is on you, right? It says that, hey, if I can do for other people, what he's able to do for me, you know, that's really powerful. Exemplary. Exemplify those role models. What were you working on research wise? You know, at CU Boulder, what was your sort of science based on?
Izzy Lamb, PhD 12:31
The project that I ended up working on, the real reason that I wanted to go in there, the thing that really excited me about that was that I was going to have the opportunity to collaborate with a friend of mine from undergrad. So, two of us went to CU Boulder, the other person who went to CU Boulder is Blaine McCarthy. And she was working in, she got a PhD in Dr. Garret Miyake's lab, and knew that I would have the opportunity to collaborate with her, she was the one making the molecules. And she was the one that was using these photocatalysts doing the organic catalyzed atom transfer radical polymerization on them. So, there were a couple things that were really interesting to me about this. One of them was that I was going to, I was going back full circle to this method, this controlled radical polymerization method, atom transfer radical polymerization, where now I was going to be able to look in on the mechanistic side of it from this like photocatalyzed organocatalyzed atom transfer radical polymerization. And I was looking in from like, the mechanistic and photo physical side of things. Characterizing the photocatalyst. But an important part of that, to me, was that I was going to be able to work with Blaine because she's, like, easily one of the smartest and most driven scientists I've ever met. So, I was like, “IF I get to work with her, like, I'm totally on board.” So that was really huge for me. And that was an excellent collaboration all throughout.
Paolo 13:50
And I understand what your sort of current research interests, you know, start from. So you're basically worked photocatalysis in some way since your years at CU Boulder?
Izzy Lamb, PhD 14:03
Yeah. My PhD thesis is called like Mechanistic photochemical, and sorry, "Mechanistic Photochemistry and Photophysics of Phenoxazine Photocatalysts." That's basically what I did is. I investigated the photophysics of a variety of these phenoxazine catalysts where there's different N-Aryl and core substituents. Because just making those small changes, this architecture this like this molecular architecture actually has like these, this really, really rich photophysics. Where like, there's different like singlet excited states you need to worry about, there's different triplet excited states you need to worry about. They live in deoxygenated dimethyl acetonide. The triplets live for like a millisecond or longer and see and they're really, really highly reducing. And so, they're really, really excellent molecules really, really excellent catalysts to do visible light-driven reducing chemistry. And so, like the substrate that I was looking at there was an atom transfer radical polymerization initiator, diethyl-2 bromo-2 methyl malonate. It's a tertiary alkyl bromide, that that you can reductively cleave that alkyl bromide bond by hitting it with a reducing enough species. And so, before I could go in and start looking at what we call activation, that that step of creating a radical by cleaving that alkyl halide bond. Before we could go and do that, we really needed to understand the photophysics of the molecules that we're going to be doing that because really, what you want to have is like, or like what I wanted to have, what I think all of us working on this project wanted to have is a holistic picture of like, once a photon gets absorbed, where does that energy go? How does it partition? And like, where, yeah, where does it go? But also, how does it get there, and how you, and how molecular structure considerations and environmental effects impact the efficiency of let's say, just this this homolytic bond cleavage process?
Paolo 16:21
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Paolo 16:59
It's a very exciting and hectic field. Right? I mean, this looks like the future to me philosophically, I'm particularly fascinated because if I think about chemistry, you know nature does photochemically, starting from fully oxidized species in a sort of reduction direction. The way chemistry you know, wet chemistry, lab chemistry, you know was born, has developed over the last few decades, few, more than few right, is kind of the opposite. We are starting from full, fully reduced, oil-derived starting points, right? We kind of oxidize to make the more complex, and then use heat as a sort of source of energy. Right? This is we're kind of coming back to a more efficient way of doing it right? Because that's, there's a reason why nature does it this way. And I know it's just getting into philosophy is always a bit of a slippery slope here. But I, you know, do you ever think about these things?
Izzy Lamb, PhD 17:53
Yeah, constantly. Because like so now that I've moved to my current position, and, you know, I don't have an ultrafast spectroscopy lab, I don't have a nanosecond transient absorption setup. I'd really like to. I've got my sights set on that one. But but um, because I'm now less able to access those kinds of resources and less able to access some of those excited state mechanistic parts. There's a portion of the work I was describing before that I got interested in at the end, at the end of my PhD, which was like the quantum yield of a photo reaction. So that is just you know, the efficiency with which one photon in and one photo product out. That would be 100% quantum yield. And then there's so many ways in which that energy can get lost along the way and might not go into an electron transfer reaction. Like, you know, there's the photophysical aspects like where the, you know, the excesses can deactivate. But then there's also like different types of non-productive quenching processes. There's back electron transfer, even if you do the electron transfer. So, there's all these things that go into whether or not you efficiently do the reaction you want to, even if you absorb a photon. And so for the system I was looking at, I developed an instrument to study this and that sounds complicated. But basically, I shined a well-tempered LED into an HP 8452 UV-Vis that was signed off on its quality control inspection that year I was born and like and I just took, I set up the sample in a certain way with my photocatalyst in there, and then just watched spectral features change while it was being irradiated by that LED, by that steady state light. The reason that this was useful is because of these phenoxazines, they, once they've reduced something they're radical cations are actually very visibly absorptive too. And so you can watch that radical cation signal just grow in and basically just if you know the light intensity, and you know how to get the concentration of the radical cations, you need like a molar absorptivity of that species, then you can figure out the rate at which photoproducts being generated. And you know, the rate at which light is going in, and you can back out a quantum yield of that. And this is something that like, actually has not been done that much in the past. And part of this is because photoredox catalysis is sort of a new thing. Like, last 15 years, it's, you know, it's really exploded since then. But a lot of photochemistry before that was sticking a bunch of reactants in a pot and shining UV light on it. And so, you couldn't do these kinds of studies where you were just looking at it with like a UV-Vis spectrometer because there's all sorts of like starting materials and products, and stuff in really high concentrations, just being blasted with light, and everything would have been in like a probably like a, maybe not a solvent window, but like the super absorptive sample. And that's not to say that you can't do that. But it wasn't something like if you look through the literature, like just looking at, like visible products of electron photochemical processes, has only been done a few times, and it's become a little bit more popular. But this is an easy thing to do, you need a UV-Vis, and you need a light source, right? This is an inexpensive thing to do. And, you know, at an institution where you have, you don't have like R1 levels of resources, you need to be really smart about the kinds of projects and then also because you're working with, you don't have graduate students, you need to be doubly smart about how to set up projects, where they're tractable. Setting up a photo reaction in a cuvette, you know, micropipettes and sparging, or preparing something in the glove box, that's all something that's fairly easy to do, you need to do it carefully, and then sticking that in the UV-Vis and irradiating it and taking time points. That's all something that's definitely tractable. But importantly, it's sort of working backwards from where I had worked previously. Now I'm going to start by looking at the quantum yields of processes. I can say, “Hey, here's the efficiency of this process, why is it that?” So, then like either looking at existing processes. A lot of a lot of papers, they look a lot more like classic synthetic papers. A lot of the photoredox papers where they're like, “Here, we set this up in a certain way we shine this light on it and this was the yield of the reaction.” That's not talking about, this is going back to your question, that's not talking about the actual quantum yield. And the quantum yield is an actual energetic efficiency of the process. So just because you got 100% yield after irradiating it for 10 hours with a, with a Kessel lamp, doesn't mean that each one of those photons was used efficiently. There is a huge amount of promise for this methodology for actually truly green chemistry. Because you can drive these reactions in principle with the sun. You could actually do solar photochemistry with this. That's the ultimate source of energy. And that's our best chance of really reducing energetic expenditure in the chemical industry. And in the United States, the chemical, the bulk chemical industry accounts for 1/9 of our expenditure. So, it's a huge, huge field where we're like, if you could cut some of those processes cost, their energetic cost down, that's, that's massive. Something that you need to understand for those processes is how efficiently you're harvesting energy to do what you want to do. The kind of research that I'd really like to do is to take a process, to carefully measure its quantum yield, right? Where I really understand all the energy in to products out, and then to do an analogous reaction thermally. Because that's when you could really make those kinds of judgments that you're talking about. Or, like let's say like electrocatalysis is another field that's really taking off. What about an electro-driven catalytic process versus a photo driven catalytic process? Because in that case, you can imagine driving both of those with a solar cell. Which one of them is more efficient, and why?
Paolo 24:12
Do you think chemistry will look fundamentally different in maybe one or two decades?
Izzy Lamb, PhD 24:15
I think it already looks fundamentally different. And I'm going to kind of like cop out on this by talking about my collaborator’s work. So, Garret Miyake at Colorado State University. So, the last project I worked on in graduate school was related to this organic catalyzed Birch reduction that his group has developed. And so, a typical Birch reduction is done in liquid nitrogen temperatures, right? With liquid ammonia, which is you get that by cooling it down that far. So, you're in cryogenic temperatures with liquid ammonia, and then you have sodium, lithium, potassium, so it's gnarly. And it takes a lot of energy.
Paolo 24:54
Nobody wants to scale up this stuff. Obviously.
Izzy Lamb, PhD 24:57
Yeah, and it's a terrifying prospect to scale up something like that, right? Like, but the reason that's necessary is if you have, if you have a target that you need to reduce, like, benzene for instance, or fluorinated molecules, right CF bonds, you need a solvated electron. So far as we know. Or you need to be really, really tricky. There are ways to get around some of this stuff, if you're really, really tricky with certain excited state processes. And Oliver Vangruber’s group does a lot of really cool stuff in that regard. But liquid ammonia, cryogenic temperatures, lithium, versus room temperature, methanol, benzoperylene, organic photocatalyst, and visible light. And so, so like, that is transformative. And they've published some papers on this, and there's a couple others coming up that are really showing just how transformative that is.
Paolo 25:55
It is exciting, right? And you're able to work on exciting research in, you know, it's kind of difficult circumstances, you know, where, you know, you said to yourself, you, when you don't get big money, you need to get massively creative, right? And, you know, the way the still, you know, even in a smaller institution like for you is, you can still be at the forefront of research and, you know, you have very good publications, and you're working on extremely interesting piece of work, which is, which is fantastic. Do you ever miss, you know, being in a fancier institution or a bigger name with more resources available? Was it more of a, something that happened to you, you know, finding yourself doing research for you is, was the proper choice that, you know, you're, you're happy?
Izzy Lamb, PhD 26:48
Yes, I miss some of like the, what I would call like high-tier research. The philosophy of research at a primarily undergraduate institution, like Fort Lewis is fundamentally different, though, because I don't care about writing 50 papers in the next 30 years, or whatever. My purpose here is to make scientists. and I think that that is what I do well. Mentoring those students, onboarding them, getting them excited about some of these things, and preparing them to then go on and, and be much better scientists than I am, basically. The research is really part of the teaching. I can like take on essentially apprentices and have this like close instruction. I can really, really, like, cultivate their understanding of certain things. And so like, I would love to be able to imbue students with the kinds of knowledge that would allow them to very easily be able to move into a lab that does like photoredox catalysis for graduate school, or like solar cell photophysical stuff or, you know, like dye sensitized solar cell design, and all that kind of stuff. But in order to do that, I have to kind of fundamentally change curriculum of what's typically taught. Like in my general chemistry class, I end with electro cyclic ring closures, because it's actually like a really, really awesome combination of everything we talked about in general chemistry. When you talk about orbital, molecular orbital theory, then you go and you look at the Hoople theory stuff, and it all actually just falls perfectly in place. But it's usually not something you talk about until like organic chemistry or like an advanced organic course. But it's but it's it just uses principles of general chemistry, and it really gives students like a principle of that. So, like the photo chemistry gets in there, the photo chemistry is in my analytical course we're talking about fluorescence quenching, talking about triplet-triplet annihilation up conversion. So, like, I think the modern chemist should know about this. Sorry, that was a bit of a circuitous.
Paolo 28:56
No, it was a great answer. And it is amazing to see how in depth you have thought about this, you know, and it's incredible, the passion, you speak about it. Right? And it's and it's great, I'm sure your students are delighted, then you know, you will play such an important role in you know, forming, you know, the next generation of chemists and scientists and the you know. We need lots of people like yourself, because you can really make a difference in the students life and all this is really fantastic. And I think I've never had anybody in this podcast, you know, better position than yourself to ask my usual final question, which is always the same. Which is, what piece of advice you would give to somebody who's just starting in their careers, just maybe a young student or just getting in out of school, and sort of try and decide where you want to be.
Izzy Lamb, PhD 29:51
I don't think you're going to like the answer because, you know, I interact with a lot of young students first years and so on. And when they come to me with these kinds of questions, I tell them that, “I'm not in a position to tell them what to do, to give them advice because I'm still figuring it out myself.” And I tell them my story. I try to give them some perspective. But the main message, I think that I get, that I hope to get across to them, is that they need to follow what interests them, and they need to follow what excites them and what gives them joy to engage in. For instance, there's a lot of times like if you go on to graduate school, for the last project I was doing, when I was putting together my paper for looking at the mechanism of organic catalyzed ATRP. There were days when I was coming in at like four o'clock in the morning to get some spectroscopic measurements going. And leaving at like, eight o'clock at night. And because I was so, like, interested in that, and so I had so much like buy in to that project and so much connection to it, I didn't mind doing that. It was like, I had to do it. It needs to get done. There were questions I needed to answer. And so like, you kind of need to have something that excites you to the point, it doesn't feel like it's sapping energy from you. Because anything that feels like, like if you're going in every day, and the thing that you're doing is a slog, and it feels like it's just draining you and you're just don't want to be there. It's just like, it's just toxic. I've had those experiences also. And so, identifying like, things that excite you and things that bring you energy is really, really what it needs to be. And so, like a lot of students will, or sometimes students will come to me, and they'll be like, hey, I'm interested in this. But like, maybe they don't, maybe they have like a misconception about it, or they have like a preconception about it. And I just tell them to just follow their heart and do what makes them happy.
Paolo 32:00
That was Dr. Izzy Lamb, assistant professor of chemistry at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. If you enjoyed this conversation, you're sure to enjoy Dr. Lamb's book, video, podcasts, and other content recommendations. Look in the Episode Notes for a URL where you can access these recommendations and register for a free Bringing Chemistry to Life t-shirt. And if you haven't yet this season, please consider leaving us a positive rating or review wherever you listen to your podcast, it helps more people find our show. This episode was produced by Sarah Briganti, Matt Ferris, and Matthew Stock.