Interview „Embrace differences in research teams to achieve breakthrough results“

Interview series "Introducing People@BAM"
Dr Adam Michalchuk, Assistant Professor of Physical Chemistry in the School of Chemistry, University of Birmingham holds a Wilhelm-Ostwald-Fellowship at BAM’s Materials Chemistry Department

Adam, you work as an Assistant Professor of Physical Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham plus were awarded a Wilhelm-Ostwald-Fellowship at BAM. How does this impact your research and what are the advantages of such collaboration?

Towards the end of my PhD I met a prominent scientist from the BAM at a conference – Dr Franziska Emmerling. This very fortunate meeting led first to me becoming a post-doctoral researcher and then a staff scientist at the BAM. I had never (and still have not!) seen such remarkable research facilities as those at the BAM. When combined with the dynamic and collegiate atmosphere of BAM colleagues, my four years at the BAM were incredibly productive for my research. As a result of the opportunities provided by the BAM, I had the opportunity to advance my independent research career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Birmingham (UoB), a world Top-100 university.

As I begin my next step towards an independent scientific career, the BAM ‘family’ has continued to support me with the award of a prestigious Wilhelm-Ostwald Fellowship. Even though I now spend most of my time in the UK, this fellowship allows me to continue to be an active member of the vibrant BAM community. Not only does it mean I can continue to work very closely with the excellent scientists at the BAM and make use of its world-class research facilities, but it allows me to develop a diverse and ‘global’ research team. Thanks to both the strong UoB-BAM partnership and my fellowship, I have been able to host a number of my research group at the BAM, providing unique and international training and mentorship opportunities to the next generation of researchers coming through my team.

The ability to be a member of both the UoB and BAM communities as I begin my independent academic career is a dream come true. Working alongside the ‘best and brightest’ at a UK Top-100 university, alongside the state-of-the-art facilities and minds housed at the BAM provides research opportunities like no other. I look forward to many more years of dynamic and exciting, international research to come!

What is your research about?

We are taught in school that chemistry happens inside beakers that are filled with liquids. It turns out that this is not entirely true! We can make chemistry happen in powders, simply by hitting, squeezing, or stretching them in the right way and with the right amount of energy. This is a field called mechanochemistry. This is really exciting because it gives us the chance to eliminate solvents from chemistry, and in doing so eliminate one of the most harmful and expensive steps of both academic research and industrial processing. At the same time, the ability to manipulate molecules by hitting or squeezing them gives us the chance to design important technologies, including explosive materials, bending crystals for novel energy transduction systems, and piezo-responsive materials that generate energy in sustainable ways. Although this is really fascinating, the big challenge is that a lot of the existing ‘rules’ of chemistry do not translate very well into this emerging area of mechanochemistry. Our team is trying to fix this, by digging into the foundations of how mechanical energy causes chemistry to happen, and how we can use this knowledge to design better materials and better chemical processes. We do this by developing and using tools of quantum chemical modeling, coupled with experiments at large international facilities including synchrotrons and neutron sources.

What fascinates you about understanding the atomistic origins of mechanochemistry?

At the surface, mechanically drive transformations break a lot of the conventional concepts that we learn in chemistry. This leaves so much room to explore and play while developing a fundamentally new area of the physical sciences! At the same time, there is huge potential for practical applications of mechanochemistry. Mechanically driven chemistry has enormous untapped potential in the technology sector making new materials for energy generation, storage, and for innovations in communication technologies. This same chemistry also promises to transform how the chemical industry works, forging a way to more sustainable and green manufacturing practices. Working in this field thus not only gives us the chance to make advances in fundamental science, but also to contribute to solving real-world problems and ensuring a better and healthier future for society.

As a “scientific traveler”: what do you take away from the respective countries and institutes where you have done research?

I have had a really exciting time travelling over the course of my career so far. Though I’m originally from Canada, I did my studies in Scotland, before taking a joint PhD that had me travelling regularly between Scotland and Russia. After this I moved to Germany as a post-doc, before moving to England to start as an assistant professor. Between these moves, I’ve travelled all over for work, stretching from India and Malaysia through eastern and western Europe, across the USA, and even down to Brazil! This has taught me that there is no correct way to do research or to teach. There are only different strategies, each with their own strengths and their own weaknesses. Together, these experiences have instilled in me an appreciation for just how essential it is that we embrace these differences when building a research team. It is only by harnessing the difference in viewpoints that we are ever going to make the research culture that is capable of achieving the breakthrough results that we need to change the world.

Last year you received the Economic Impact Award for your research on safer energetic materials – what’s next?

First, I have to say that this award recognises the research done by a phenomenal interdisciplinary team of scientists, and really highlights the importance of strong collaborations for achieving impactful research. The recognised work combined neutron spectroscopy with quantum chemical modelling to develop a new framework to predict in a computer how reactive an explosive material can be. Our primary aim was to make energetic materials research safer for experimentalists, by being able to tell them how safe a given new material could be, before they go into the lab to make it. The tools we have made also give us an opportunity to design better and safer energetic materials, with an ability to point synthetic colleagues towards target compounds that are likely to meet the stringent safety criteria for real-world applications. Though we have made huge progress in this area, we of course still have lots to do! This continues to be a highly collaborative research project, with a growing team behind it as the problems become increasingly challenging (and exciting!). At the same time, though, we recognise that the physics that underpins this model is quite general, and can be extended to other types of mechanochemistry. We are therefore keen to see how far we can push these models to guide efforts in developing sustainable mechanochemical processes, for example.