About

I’m an organometallic chemistry PhD student at a big research university.  Basically, I take organiccarbon-based molecules and figure out how to make them react in unique ways with a little bit of assistance from metals, especially my favorite – palladiumI <3 Pd.

But this blog is about other science, whatever happens to catch my interest.  I try to write in a way that my family can follow, and most of them – like Microsoft Word – don’t know what trifluoromethylation or nucleophilicity are. So if I absolutely have to use words like that, I try to explain them. On a related note, feel free to hover your cursor over sky blue words like thispuppies are the answer to all life's problems to read parentheticals or definitions without being redirected to a new page.

If you’re still reading, I’m going to go ahead and admit that I battle early-onset techno-impairment. Meaning, I’m young enough that I should be good with computers and stuff, but for whatever reason I am not. I have a tendency to always click “not now” when prompted to update software. I had my current laptop for 6 months before I discovered that it had an SD cardthat little removable chip that goes in cameras and the old Kindles reader built in.  And now I have a newly-activated Twitter account, so we’ll see how long it takes for me to get the hang of it.*

Thanks for reading : )

*Edit: Hmm OK it’s been a few weeks with Twitter. I am dutifully tweeting when I put up a new post, but otherwise I’m pretty sporadic. I’ve got to keep it closed while I’m in lab (i.e. almost always), or it would decimate my productivity. Still, it’s nice to have.