Crystals, Comics, Calculations, Chemistry ft. Amber Lim

In Other Words

Her last published paper on the two temperature-dependent polymorphs of IrIn3: the cheap DFT chemical-pressure method hinted that atoms vibrate into void spaces in the high-temperature structure, and phonon calculations then predicted the phase-transition temperature at ~400 °C vs the experimental 350 °C.

Key Takeaways

Computational chemist (PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison) studying why complex intermetallic crystals, made purely of metals, with covalent, ionic and metallic bonding at once, adopt the structures they do.
Wanted to be a high-school chemistry teacher; a Welch high-school research program and then arc-melting/flux synthesis (samples occasionally exploding) led her to computation.
Predicting something close to experiment from basic, inexpensive calculations ‘was really amazing’.
Favourite non-research part: scientists are diverse and creative, a department zine, D&D, pottery, and her own anime and science-communication comics.
Three wishes: had learned computer science / documentation / data hygiene earlier, sought mentors outside her group sooner, and research funding that keeps up with inflation.