Crystals, Comics, Calculations, Chemistry ft. Amber Lim

In this episode

• What intermetallic crystals are, and why crystals made only of metals can form such complicated structures
• Why Amber’s group studies metallic bonding and leaves organic compounds aside
• How a high school research programme in Texas and a few exploding samples in an undergraduate lab turned her from experiments to computational chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
• The project she picked: predicting the temperature at which iridium indium 3 switches between two crystal structures, close to the value measured in experiments
• Why the people, from comic artists to D&D players, are her favourite part of science, and how she uses comics to explain her research
• Her three wishes: learning computer science and good documentation earlier, finding mentors outside her group sooner, and research funding that keeps up with inflation

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.

Listen on

About the guest

Amber Lim is a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, using first-principles calculations to understand the structure and stability of intermetallic crystals, towards predicting and designing new materials. Her work showed how entropy stabilises the high-temperature polymorph of IrIn3. She is also certified to teach K-12 science in Texas.

Amber Lim curated the Real Scientists Nano Twitter account (@RealSci_Nano) from December 18 to December 26 2023. Read all of Amber’s tweets from that week.