Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Engineering Chair: Most People Should Not Go To College

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

The system that produces the world’s most important discoveries runs on metrics that nobody agrees on, odds that would stop most people, and mentorship that sometimes looks like cruelty in blue ink. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Lipomi is Professor and Chair of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester and the author of Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research. His lab works on organic electronics, materials science, recyclable polymers, and the science of human touch. He trained under George Whitesides at Harvard, one of the most cited chemists who has never won the Nobel Prize. The conversation covers the H-index, what elite mentorship actually looks like when your advisor writes “This is illiterate” in blue ink on your outline, and what the future of academic research versus industry careers looks like in an era of AI, demographic headwinds, and graduate school debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. We also get into homochirality, OLED displays, and why Lipomi thinks the nanotechnology revolution already happened, we just didn’t call it that. What you’ll hear: -Whether the academic system is designed to produce scientists or to filter them out -What is Baumol’s cost disease and why it explains rising tuition costs -Why the nanotechnology revolution already happened and nobody called it that -How nanotechnology is used in cancer drug delivery today versus what science fiction promised -What it actually takes to build a PhD career at the intersection of chemistry, mechanics, and neuroscience -Whether engineering students should be reading Plato — and what countries that skip it are getting right “Find a skill at the intersection of three or more interests that no one else is working on.” — Darren Lipomi CHAPTERS 00:00 He says don't go to college. He runs the department. 01:10 The H-index: imperfect, irreplaceable 02:04 1 in 20 PhDs gets the job 05:42 The meteorite and the origin of life 08:34 Did life's asymmetry come from space? 12:00 Who is an organic materials chemist at 3am? 13:52 The collaboration that started at a coffee shop 15:22 The nanobot revolution already happened 18:24 Nanotechnology inside your body right now 19:08 The $70 billion invention Kodak gave away 22:12 Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb: what Rochester built 26:06 Working under Whitesides at Harvard 28:54 What he wrote on the outline in blue ink 30:38 Who you work with matters more than what you work on 31:56 Department chair: hostage negotiator, not boss 34:36 Why the department changed its name after 110 years 36:00 The headwinds have never been stronger 38:44 Should engineers read Plato? 39:38 The debt you can't discharge in bankruptcy 40:06 Do you buy Baumol's cost disease? 43:14 Why he had to write the book 48:16 The Fisher-Price camcorder experiment 51:06 Teaching in one sentence. Research in one. 53:42 Losing Darren to Rochester: the Fernando Tatis analogy Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Perhaps the minority of individuals should be going to a four-year institution because the debt load is so high. My guest today is my good friend Darren Leponi, chair of chemical and sustainability engineering at the University of Rochester. In a school he's actively marketing to undergraduates. He's one of the best mentors and educators I've ever met. I was devastated when he left UC San Diego. And he just told me that most people shouldn't even be in this. program. I wanted to know if he meant it. Is academia like kind of an irredeemably clout chasing, you know, kind of money-grubbing pursuit of attention, maybe significance when we have importance?

What is academia, what does it become, and where do you think it can go? This is a tough nut to crack because when we have promotion and tenure cases, we want to be able to look at a metric that is reliable, that's standardized across fields, which is impossible, but at least sort of within field. So we look at H index, we look at number of citations, we look at number of grant dollars brought in per square foot of lab space that the individual has, but at the end of the day, you want to know what did that person do? What is the accomplishment? How have they made a deep and lasting impact in the field. And that accomplishment is quite difficult to judge. And oftentimes there's a time component too. It's a impact as a lagging indicator. What if a paper gets

one citation today, but then it gets a thousand citations 10 years from now because it became so important. And so just like capitalism takes, leverages the human competitive instinct, we're kind of stuck with these metrics in order to evaluate each other and to give each other raises and promotions. So it's an imperfect system, but it's what we have. Only one out of every 20 PhDs becomes a tenure track professor. The numbers are not very favorable for the median person who wants to go into the field. And it's just, I don't mean median in a pejorative sense. I just mean statistically. It's a very difficult path. No one knows that a grad student did the work,

that a grad student who made 35 grand a year and forwent retirement savings for their entire period of training and probably won't recover it by the time they retire, that the financial burden is probably more so on them than it is on the taxpayer. So I was trying to tell the story of the people who had to go to grad school because they couldn't do anything else. They went into research because they could not do anything else. Like an artist or a musician or a chef, that's what they had to do, knowing that the chances of getting an independent faculty position are, you know, one in 20 or lower.

What I have studied inorganic chemistry and space groups and oxidation potentials and the Schrodinger equation if I was not forced to, and I'm a highly motivated, really nerdy, really nerdy individual. Would I have done that for four years, 11 years after high school before I got my first job? I don't think I would have. I was lucky in the sense that I had scholarships and my debt load was not high. If you look at the net present value of my decision by the time I retire, was it a good decision? I don't know.

I probably would have done okay making $85,000 with a bachelor's degree. there are people for whom it does not make sense to go to college. I would say that perhaps the minority of individuals should be going to a four-year institution because the debt load is so high, because the prevalence of high-paying jobs for individuals who are willing to tolerate certain types of activities can be quite high. And I think that's where we need to, to focus on as educators in the area of building physical item. We need to re-materialize work and encourage people to work with their hands, to encourage the building and craftsmanship and artisanship that's informed by theory

because those jobs are going to be the hardest to replace. Physical AI is going to require an enormous amount of energy and also material science and mechanical engineering innovation, along with the enormous energy demands in server farms, for example. That's quite a long way off, in my opinion. Laundry folding robots notwithstanding. And so for the next several decades, there will be room for somebody who will be designed. who will be designing a telescope for somebody who's designing a satellite, somebody who's designing and building a reactor that can strip perflourinated alkyal substances from drinking water.

And it's the tolerance. It's the grit to be doing that with one's hands. Right. I gave you some materials, some extremely interesting engineering that may or may not contain life on it. And it brings a, you can touch it. Okay. That is your gift for coming on the podcast. It's a real live or dead meteorite, depending on how you look at it. And you can have it too guaranteed. I'll send you on. If you, like Darren and me, have a dot edu email address and like Darren and you live in the United States. So go to Brian Keating.com slash edu. And I love to send those out and connect to my beloved. I'm not going to get in trouble with TSA. No, they might ask you do for a living, which you describe in the book as well. So this material was, you're going to

delivered by outer space it has some interesting deformations material science compositions and stuff but it does have organic materials on it because I've touched it and you know sneezed on it and whatnot but you originally it seems like if I recall correctly you wanted to study sort of origin of life or get involved with that what was the kind of impetus for that wanting to say and how far have you strayed from that interest or have you I've always been a bit of a humanist I've read a lot of books my my mom had a lot of lefty novels all this Huxley and Jane Goodall, and I, although my parents were quite conservative, actually, this was,

you know, from her past, she had this box of dusty books, and I read quite a lot of them. And when I got to college at BU, I had a fantastic chemistry professor, John Straub, and I was working with him on an independent concentration. And when I started college, 9-11 had just happened. the second week of school. The second Tuesday of school was 9-11. And so I was originally biomedical engineering and then I suddenly said I wanted to learn how people behaved, how they interact with each other, what their life circumstances led them to their behavior. So I changed my major to anthropology. And then, but then I veered back and regressing to the mean and said, well, how can I combine my interest in people and psychology with chemistry?

And it took 20 years of an independent career to finally sort of arrive at where I am right now. But at the time, John Straub introduced me to Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, who were scientific humanists. And they wrote about the selfish gene theory and how life were lumbering robots built on self-replicating genes that would co-opt things in their environment in order to replicate them. Not because they wanted to, but because that's what they did. That's what they'd always done and what we're going to continue to do. And so I became, you know, the first thing I saw when I saw these micrometeorites is I wonder if there are any chiral amino acids on them because that is one, perhaps my favorite theory for the origin of biological homo-chirality.

Yeah. So what is chirality? Right. So every carbon atom has four bonds that points the vertices of a tetrahedron and there are are two different ways that you can arrange those bonds, the right-handed version and the left-handed version. They're non-superimposable mirror images. So this graphite in this pencil, it's carbon in it, right?

But it's about it to itself. It's not organic. That graphite is a different allotrop of carbon. So it's plainer, right? It's all SP2 hybridized, so it has to be saturated. My high school chemistry coming back. Thank you, Professor. That's why they gave me the chair job.

You just got me back to 10th grade. Thanks there. Yeah. So the graphite and carbon is not chiral. Some of the carbon and coal is, some of it is not. Because you're right. And you have a mixture of hybridization states. But most carbon atoms and DNA and proteins are going to be chiral.

And so all helices of the same type. So all keratin helices in your hair and fingernails, all DNA helices, they're all made of, they all twist the same direction because of this. Right-handed, right? Yes, it depends on. Okay, so I'm going to. So I haven't been nonic for remembering all these different things. In cosmology and particle physics, we only have left-handed neutrinos and right-handed

and I'm always like, how do I remember this? I just remember life may have originated from outer space, from neutrinos and cosmic rays and stuff, and those are left-handed, so they would only, you know, cause an interaction between something if that's right-handed, and that's how I remember that DNA also. So you can remember from Jurassic Park, you know, life is right, life finds a way. Anyway, that's how I remember it. But again, I got a three on the, no, four on the APs. So there aren't that many ways that you can create new chiral information from scratch, naproxin.

So a leave, homochiral. You only get one an antimer. That's one mirror image. Iroprofen is sold as a mixture of both. One of them is useless. One of them is biologically active. And so how do you create the homochyriality to begin with? In the pharmaceutical industry, you have a chiral catalyst, which is often an enzyme, which is biological in origin, and it catalyzes some reaction which then biases the formation of every other bond to form in the way you want it to.

Sometimes you might use tartaric acid, which is an anti-emerically pure, Louis Pasteur, who discovered an anti-emerical. excess, literally used to polarize microscope and tweezers to pick out the, just pick out the crystals by hand of tartaric acid. And so one of the ways in which homochirality is theorized to have arisen is because of polarized radiation in outer space. And so when you have meteorites that have, you know, we're pretty sure we're not contaminated by a biologically homochiral species, There's often an antiameric excess, an excess of one mirror image over the other, and it's conceivable, and there are people that know more about this than I do, that one in antimurreds more quickly in space because there is polarization. Have you ever had an experience you couldn't explain but also couldn't ignore? I'm a professional skeptic, and I build telescopes for a living.

And even I run into questions that just sit past the edge of what science can actually touch. That's why I want to tell you about my friend Mayambiolik's breakdown. It's a podcast where science and spirituality stop competing and start talking to one another. It's hosted by neuroscientist and actress Dr. Mayam Biolic and spiritual explorer Jonathan Cohen. Every week, they sit down with scientists, experts, and experiencers, covering everything from the mind's ability to heal the body, to telepathy, to government alien disclosure. And when I joined them, we went straight for the biggest picture topics imaginable. God, the Big Bang, consciousness, simulation theory. Mayam grilled me and wondered whether physics leaves room for the divine.

I gave her the most honest answer a cosmologist can give. So if you spent your life wondering what's really out there, you're not alone. And knowing you, my brilliant audience, I know you're going to love to add Miami-Biolix breakdown to your rotation. Listen to new episodes every week, follow the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this. Watch full episodes of Mayambiolics breakdown on YouTube.com slash myambiolic. An alien wakes you up at 3 in the morning. You know, who are you? Are you a scientist?

Are you an engineer? Are you an academician? Are you a chair in your work life? I assume you're a father, I know, and a husband, and very devoted. But let's leave that aside. What are you? I've been organic materials chemist. So materials that are grass-fed and pesticide, materials that are carbon-based.

So polymers, you know, everything in this room, everything outside is covered in an organic medium or made of composed of organic media. Anytime you look at something that's nominally abiotic, like a piece of glass, a metal fork, it's all covered in adventitiously absorbed organic media. So all of our interaction with the everyday world is mediated by structures that are composed of carbon-carbon bonds. And so what I try to do is to understand and manipulate these materials so that we can make better products so that we can understand how our senses gain information from the world. I think if I were ever elected to the National Academy of Engineering, I would want my

citation to be for contributions in using human subjects to understand the physical world. And by that, I mean, we study the tactile sense quite often. And we were very interested in how the skin deforms when it touches a textile or a material, how the thermal conductivity draws heat away from it, how it interacts with the afferent nerve fibers in the skin and creates a sensation that's perceived in the brain. We didn't have a relationship before our students met at Bird Rock Coffee. And so one of my students was a one was a part-time barista. And another one was a frequent, you know, order.

How low we pay our students, come on. Draw us under the bus a little more. Yeah, well, you know, they're unionized, so they're fighting a good fight. And so they got together and they were talking in line at Bird Rock about what they work on. And one of them was interested in haptics and the other did biostatistics for psychophysical experiments, primarily for vision. And so they got together and they started designing experiments on the, way in which we perceived materials to be soft versus hard, sticky versus slimy, moist versus dry. There's a multifactorial analysis that you can probe if you have access to material synthesis

in a clean room, but also have access to a lab with the expertise of Ramachandran. And so you can analyze what characteristics of the surface and bulk of primarily, organic media that allow it to be perceived in a certain way by touch. So seven peer-reviewed publications later, we have a better understanding of that now than I think the field did. Another thing that our friend just getting back to my childhood mentor from the dead, I was dead at the time, Isaac Asimov and your BU connections, we're the laws of robotics. And now we hear so much about robotics. We hear less about, you know, kind of the Eric Drexler, nanobot than we did previously.

We're now hearing about macrobots that are going to fold my laundry and probably grade papers in the future. They can never replace professors. I mean, come on. Never. Our job security. I mean, if we survive COVID, AI, the point being these nanobots, kind of, they were the hot thing.

As I said, Eric Drexler's thing, you know, Feynman, one of my heroes, right? There's plenty of room at the bottom. What's happening in nanoscience right now? Besides the, not chemistry. I'm talking about actual mini-robots. Going into your blood and doing stuff or building stuff in the meat world. What's the latest in that? Sure.

So the funny thing about Drexler and the nanobots, and he and Rick Smalley, who was the discoverer of C-60-Fullerine and various other carbon alitropes, they had this long-standing debate about sticky fingers and how Vanderval's forces were going to prevent nanobots from actually working. But I think they ignored the whole field of chemical catalysis, which are nanomaterials and molecules. and molecular materials that are literally forming bonds by the moleful and metric tonful

in the chemical manufacturing. Bio-reactors. Yeah. So that's been happening and that is, you know, it's never been called, well, it's rarely called nanotechnology, but that is, to be honest, one of nanotechnology's biggest accomplishments. In terms of inner space and the magic school bus and the fantastic voyage. I have a colleague Joseph Wong in the nanoengineering department here,

who has been doing work for decades on self-propelled micro and nanomotors that can swim around in the bloodstream. And so that, I think it's going to be a combination of active control, of programmed chemical reactions in these nanobots that are actually. able to accomplish something that looks like, you know, intelligent behavior. But the other big impact of nano has been in cancer therapeutics and drug delivery for vaccines, for evasion of the immune system, for targeting in tumor cells. And you don't just inject taxol or cisplatin in the bloodstream anymore. You know, that those.

are all encapsulated in some kind of smart nanomaterial that has a specifically programmed degradation profile, some kinetics that have been influenced by the ligands that are on the outside sphere, and who could forget microelectronics too, although usually you try to avoid quantum effects in microprocessors, but there is nano as anything. We met in 2018, maybe, it was 2019. I can't remember for the Kyoto Prize, which was awarded to a University of Rochester kind of a law. Ching Tong.

Ching Tong, who invented the organic LED. Now, to the extent that any of the public knows about organic chemistry and organic nanochemistry and nanotechnology, it's through the OED. What's coming down the pipeline? Excite people about the future of organic, especially organic chemistry, as one of your many fields of expertise, what are some of the next great breakthroughs? You talked about sustainability, power batteries, you know, what's coming down the pipeline?

What can we get excited about? What can we invest in through your hedge fund that you're undoubtedly starting at Rochester right now? The organic LED is a great example. It was invented by Ching Tong at Kodak Research Labs about four miles from University of Rochester. He's actually in America, after he invented it, he was hired by my department, his office is down the hall for mine. There is a good chance. He's a mensch. This guy's an incredible mensch.

There is a good chance that your audience is watching this video through an OLED display. So if you have an iPhone or almost any screen, chances are it's organic components that are creating the image. And it's now a $70 billion a year industry. Kodak got almost none of the value from that invention added to the list. But anyway. Watch you have our done. So if you look at organics and carbon. nanaceous material carbon alatropes, they are ubiquitous and ubiquitously exciting.

So the intercalation compounds, anodes and batteries, if you look at the next generation of thin film cheap solar panels, you have electron and hole blocking layers that are principally organic. The materials in perovskite solar cells, you have the entire history of microelect while we think of it as an inorganic technology, as in silicon, gallim arsenide, other materials. The only way that those are manufactured has ever been manufactured is because we have these light sensitive organic polymer films called photo resists that you etch an image in. So you're looking now at materials in drug delivery in electronics and energy technologies that really require organic materials engineering. We have another project right now that I've,

we have a proposal under review by the Air Force and Space Force on the use of reconfigurable polymers to suck up space junk in low Earth orbit. And so it's anti-micromedureyroid. Inspired by the space amoeba in the original Star Trek episode. And so the sky is the limit, because if you can put carbon atoms together and almost any combination, you can make almost any functionality. We should acknowledge the mastodon in the room. You used to be my treasured colleague here at UC San Diego. And it was, you know, joke. It was a big blow when you left.

I mean, I was, you know, I was consolable, but, you know, losing a top ranked, you know, faculty member to any university is a rival. I mean, it's just no, there's no, you get a grad student or you get a top professor. means we're not going to get that student or that professor, right? So we're in a zero-sum game. I always say academia and science are made up our infinite games because you can't win science. You can't win engineering, but you can get the Nobel Prize.

You can get the NASE and you can get all sorts of cool things. And that sometimes means, often means, you don't get it from somewhere else, right? So one of the things that, you know, I most associate with Rochester, having a good friend Charlie Freeman, who's out there as a professor now Geneseo and went there. It was Kodak.

And, you know, I just love. and, you know, I still have, you know, Kodak printed out on film, you know, film, you know, photographs from my childhood, right? So, and this was this huge success story. I mean, it built the town, Bouchon Lom was there too, right? So two, optics. Optical, yeah, three huge companies that all involved optics and imaging and printing. And at some level, you know, at some point lost ground, market share from 99% to low, I mean, you could still buy, you can actually buy a Kodak digital camera, you know, for $99.9. It's not the same quality as the, you know, as maybe it used to be, but, and it probably is licensed to somebody else for the name, right? But talk about the kind of

parallel side, the academic, you know, industrial complex, I call it. So, so what is that like, what is the landscape like for, that you see right now? Is it an exciting time? Is it, you know, AI is just dominating everything. The physical world is no more. I mean, you're in the nanomechanical world. What do you see is the kind of future of academic, industrial partner? partnerships and trying to make Rochester too attractive. We still need students here, Darren. Sure. University of Rochester is the largest private employer in New York State outside of New York City.

And so how I describe it is a Hogwarts attached to a massive medical services company. And so we are in the $5, $6 billion a year range talking about academic industrial complex. The undergraduate population is only 6,000 or 12,000 total students and about 500 million in research expenditures per year. Most of that is in the medical school. So there are a lot of medical device, medical optics companies in the region. A lot of that, the vein of optics has still persisted in Rochester, even though Kodak, Xerox, and Bauchan have a much smaller presence than they did in the 70s and 80s in the heyday. So we have shifted in the economy from primarily imaging base to primarily biomedical and biomedical services upstream of these consumer and patient facing.

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Industries, we do a lot of things that are super important to the economy, but a lot of people would find boring.

For example, making machines that make other machines. We have 60,000 engineers employed in Monroe County. And so, for example, optimization technologies, they're a design build firm that made all of the equipment that made all of the MRNA vaccine vials during the COVID pandemic. Javelin Process Systems makes all of the equipment or the vast majority of the equipment that cooks and produces Tostito salsa and Phil's Heinz ketchup bottles.

So these are B2B companies, right? And so we have a very strong relationship with companies like that, with L3 Harris, Cooper Vision, with Bowshon, which still manufactures contact lenses and refractive optics. We send a lot of students there. We have research contracts with them. So there's still a strong industrial connection, but the flavor has changed over time.

But indeed, if you walk around U of R, You've got Bash and Lam Hall. You have the Eastman as an Eastman Kodak quadrangle, and then the Eastman School of Music. Joseph C. Wilson, the founder of Xerox is the main boulevard that runs through campus. So going from BU to then going to study at Harvard with White Sides, was he interested in kind of origin of life? I mean, he's, you know, a thousand site, a thousand is, what is it, Agent X is a 400 now? Few hundred. Yeah.

So I just want to have the logarithm of his Asian X base E. So talk about George and working in the lab of one of the most famous academics in all of history and how little time you got, but it does seem like you got enough quality time that he really influenced your philosophy as a mentor. So talk about George and just the many, I mean, quite frankly, you had merit, but you had a lot of luck too. And to work with him is part of that. But it's not all that's cracked up. When I was an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to get the Beckman Scholars Program, which is an undergraduate research scholarship, and I went to the Beckman headquarters in Irvine

and George White Tides is one of the speakers. And he talked about multivalency and protein ligand or protein drug interactions and how you got much more, much stronger binding if you had cooperativity and binding. I thought that sounded really cool and interesting. And he had such a... Humanistic.

Right. And he had such a presence, has such a presence about him. He speaks with a booming baritone voice. He's 6.1 or 6.2. He looks a bit like Captain Picard. And he has a very powerful handshake, even though even at the time he was quite senior. And I asked him, what do you look for in mentees? He said, I look for somebody who's, I look for somebody who's very strong in thermodynamics and organic synthesis.

And I thought that that was very precise. That was very precise. And so I said, I want to work with George Whitesides. And so I was at BU, and I did a lot of running around the Charles River, and I would pass by the Harvard chemistry building and look at it in awe. And when I applied and I got in, which was just out of the question for somebody who came from the beginnings that I did. And I got in. And what was ironic is that as famous as George is probably the most famous chemist who's never won the Nobel Prize or who hasn't yet,

and more famous than most chemists who have won the Nobel Prize, is that once you got into Harvard, it wasn't hard to get into his lab. And in part that was because he trusted the system. In part, it was because he didn't have time to interview all the candidates. And in part, it's because, and I don't want to, I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, although take it as you will. But he was pretty sure that people who couldn't cut the mustard would just drop out the lab. And so there was a lot of attrition in the lab.

He, most of the mentoring that I received from George came in the form of written comments on outline. So he would write in blue ink on the pilot. roller ball blue ink pen. He would say things that no good human being we should ever say to any other good human being like this is a pig's breakfast I saw on someone. He wrote this is illiterate on mine. He would say things that that looked that that maybe even looked meaner than it actually was like one time my colleague and I were sure that he had written I know you want to f*** it in in blue Inc. My colleague and I were looking at it and I'm like it, it there's nothing else it could say, but obviously it didn't say that, but there was no literally there was nothing else it could say.

It was a doctor after all. And so the in-person mentoring was sparse, but he had such a presence. He has such a presence in our lives, everybody who worked in his lab, that we have internalized his direction, his sense of scientific strategy, and how to choose an important problem, and that has followed me in my career since then. Yeah, and even at one point it comes across as somewhat tender, you know, as you're graduating, he says, I'm going to be devastated when Darren leaves. I mean, that, you know, could bring tears to a non-organic, an actual organic physicist. That was a touching thing to read and to hear. And I must have brought. you great pride. You had the thousand publication from his lab or something like that, right?

I was in the lab at the time. At the time. Okay. When that came about and soon thereafter, you have a first author paper with him as your co-author. It's incredible. But, you know, a lot of us don't have that benefit. And a lot of times you hear things, I often tell students in general it's more important who you work with than what you work on. And yet, you know, at the same time, you know, science is a game of credit and attribution and citation. I mean, literally our currency of citations, right? And that's why we get so kind of upset when people say things like, oh, peer review is the scam and it's kind of undermine, you know, science isn't about peer review and it's just gatekeeping. And I'm like, you know, once I gave a podcast here

with a couple of podcasters that I won't name because I was a very disappointed the way they've kind of turned their podcast into. But they said something like, we need gates, right? We need a gate. We have a gate around this campus. And the gate keeps people out and it keeps things in. They're like, you want to trap people here? I'm like, well, I've got a very expensive dilution refrigerator costs about a half million dollars. I don't want that walking off or a cup of liquid helium three is going to set you back, you know, a quarter million dollars, right?

So, yeah, I quite frankly like to have a gate around things. In academia, I have a gate around my pool. You used to have a pool. I don't think you have a pool. Maybe you have an ice rink. Sabres, you have a creek. You have a creek. The sabers are practicing nearby.

But it's, you know, we do need gates around certain things. So, and I think that's why academics got so upset. You know, the joke is academics fight somewhat. because the stakes are so low. As a chair, you know, you're kind of in this position, my colleague and friend and past guest in Navishek at UC Davis, you know, said a department chair is not a boss of a professor, right? It's kind of a negotiator that negotiates with hostage takers on behalf of the kidnap, right? So how do you view being, you know, kind of at a top school and having, you know, a phenomenal reputation there? But, you know, you can't please everybody all the time or you're not a leader.

So walk me through the navigatory, you know, kind of the shoals of being a chair. Because it's not a job I really want. Sure. So my last job at UC San Diego was as Associate Dean for Students in Engineering. I had that role for two years. Prior to that, I was the director of the Idea Engineering Student Center. And in the Associate Dean role, I was basically playing, running interference for the dean. So I would be doing town halls with students.

There is a lot of work that I did that I'm still very proud of and still working on, actually, at UCSD and garnering scholarship money with former colleagues and trying to enhance the student experience. I'd really like to keep that as a legacy that I have here. The department chair role is completely different. Number one, it's an executive role. You're the one who has the final say on teaching and service assignments. Also, allocation of lab space. You and the dean have to agree on it, but the chair is the first responder there. And also the first person in line for promotion and tenure decisions.

And so the number of incoming emails is lower, not just because U of R is a smaller school than UCSD, but also because my constituency is 14 faculty members instead of 10,000 students and the dean's office. My primary constituency being the faculty is I have to represent them at the dean's leadership meetings. I have to represent their interests when I'm talking to students who have an issue with grading policy or I missed a final exam and the professor won't give me a break and whatever, every situation has to be dealt with, like that. You're kind of giving an answer by way of the description of the duties and not necessarily

making it something that I'm now more appealing to me. But that's fine because I need a new assignment. I need a whole of it. I think what it allows you to do, so for instance, we changed the name of the department recently. It was chemical engineering for 110 years, and as of this fall, it became, the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering. The reason being that the faculty portfolios, research portfolios, all had something to do with battery separation membranes,

water purification and environmental remediation. I do a lot of work in recyclable polymers for e-waste. I do a lot of work in solar cell manufacturing. And so in this period in which we're facing a demographic cliff where there aren't as many high school kids as there used to be, and universities are not quite, or the American immigration system is not quite as friendly to international students as it was a few years ago, we need to do something to differentiate the product we're offering. I wrote the other day, I did a poll on the most important scientific medium of all time, Twitter. And I did a poll that said, which is older, Oxford University or the Aztec Empire.

And it was like 50-50 split. It's like obviously Oxford's older, right? But, you know, people have been scratching on a piece of rock with another piece of rock, you know, for literally a thousand years. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. What is sort of the future of academia? Like, again, not like, who wants to be department chair? Like, okay, fine. That's a very select set at the apex predators of academia, right? The Hunger Games. But, you know, the kind of the entry to the funnel, what kind of product are we delivering to our students nowadays? Just generally. Not in your field, my field, but generally speaking, academia as a whole, higher education.

It is the perfect time to be thinking about that question because academia has, the critics have never been louder. The societal, the external societal forces and economics have never been stronger. Headwinds have never been stronger. The traditional reason to get a bachelor's degree is to be an important to have something to contribute to civic society, to know the great works, to be familiar with music and art and literature, to know a little bit about, have some skills in numeracy. But then comes the more vocational professional certification, professionalization. And I would put the natural sciences in that category, but certainly engineering. And what kinds of, do we treat those groups of individuals differently? Should we? should somebody who is sure they want to work in mechanical engineering, should they be reading Plato in a freshman or sophomore or a seminar?

I would argue, yes, they ought to be. But to be fair, in other countries, they don't, right? In other countries, you're going to be a physician. You don't take Plato. You don't read Plato, right? You go straight from A-levels in your profession as early as, you know, the end of your undergraduate, so to speak, right? So other countries doing it worse than us because they have that model?

It may be that academia is not the right place to instill a love of wisdom, of past wisdom. It may be that the person in one of the countries of which you speak find that dusty old box of books, or maybe they're already inclined to go to the library. Or maybe you need somebody who's probably not an engineer, you know, in the ethics department of the company or someone who has a leadership role who is, you know, interested in humanism, that is that is a tough question. The other issue is what the students and the parents expect to get out of their tuition dollars and the debt that they're going to be in.

Deccan debt, we can't discharge in bankruptcy. It's the only form of debt. You can't. Tuitions are, you know, rising faster than inflation. in most private institutions like yours, right? So what kind of product are they getting? I mean, do we think of them as customers? And if so, to what level do you cater to the company? Apple, you go down to the Apple store, the genius bar, you know, and you look at their nanoglass tech now.

I'm sure that's what you do when you go to Apple. But in all reality, they don't say, like, you know, we're going to monitor you, we're going to make sure you're not using certain tools. We're going to grade you. We're going to judge you. We're going to write these, you know, things that determine your future outcome. And oh, by the way, we're going to charge you, as I said, two quarter million dollars or half a million dollars if you're at a private school. And it's going up faster than inflation

by a factor of three or something like that. And you can't discharge a debt in bankruptcy, guys. So, you know, take that on when you go to the Apple store. You never do that, right? You never even set foot in there as much as you might like the product. Do you buy into Ball's Cost Disease Theory of why? I'm not familiar with it. Yeah. So in sectors of the economy that don't scale. So health care and education are the, are the two quintessential examples where we can, if you produce widgets and you get more efficient, you can produce 10, one year, and a million a few years later. Right. But your class isn't going to go from 10 students to a million students, but you need to survive in that economy where productivity

is increasing elsewhere. And so there is an economist, Baumol, someone in the comments is going to, you know, correct me exactly, you know, the specifics of the, this, but it basically says that that's responsible for the increase in healthcare and education cost because we don't scale. Just to push back on whoever this scholar is, in certain sectors of both academia, you know, higher education, say, and in health care, costs don't go up. Cosmetic surgery has gone down. LASIC has gone down, you know, the very lasers that Bouchon law makes, you know, contacts for,

and part of their profits because people have LASIC surgery. So that's all gone down because it's elective surgery. It's not paid for by health insurance and covered by our, you know, a lugubrious health sciences professional. So how would this bowel mall or, you know, it sounds like a James Bond, you know, mansion or fortress somewhere, right? So how would they reverse, I mean, it's not your theory, but how do they react to it? And there's private educational institutions too that are, you know,

providing services or even state, you know, University of Florida is a very different model than University of California. So, yeah, I mean, how do you react in that as a purveyor as the supplier of some of the product and so it is being commodities? Yeah, and I think it is, there are some who would argue that faculty and, that, one, there are too many faculty and staff and two, that they get paid too much. I think there's way too few faculty. I think there's way too many bureaucracies, administrators, department. No, I'm just kidding.

There aren't too many. There are too many department chairs. Everyone should be shared. That's what everybody thinks they are. That's what everybody thinks they are, right? I watch your show, right? I learn a lot more about, you know, chemistry than I think I would do if I sat in and, you know, some of your. other, so yeah, so where is this going? I mean, when you could go to AI, you can go to

YouTube, you can watch molecular podcasts, you could do, you know, a whole university education in your pajamas for free with no non-dischargeable student debt. Like make the argument, I mean, I'm kind of like grasping for a lifeline here, Darren, help me out here. I mean, we've got to save our industry. What's going to happen? I think our industry is in me. COVID didn't kill us, you know, nothing's going to kill us. AI is not going to kill. Well, UCSD is still the second most applied to school in America. And the country, that's right, yeah. So there's the human capital argument and there's the sheepskin effect argument

that if companies are outsourcing certification to UCSD and University of Rochester, could they have, could the students have learned the same thing? I would argue that in physics and engineering, because it would be very difficult to do that. I have a sad obligation. I have to point out an egregious typo and error in your book, which I missed the first time, and I'm really ashamed and humiliated, quite frankly. And it's hard for me to do this to someone who I like, quite frankly. But you got your H index wrong in the book.

It's not 60. It's 63. So, Darren, you're going to have to issue second edition. We didn't do the patented judging books by their cover segment. So we got to do that now. Hey, book lovers. We're judging books by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it. But it's the impossible.

There's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge some books. So talk us through the title, the subtitle, cover art such as it is. And what was, you know, I always say you shouldn't, and I think I told you this, don't write a book unless you can't not write a book. It's kind of like going to grad school. Like you shouldn't go to grad school. That should be your first default up. Don't go to ground school, you know.

But if you can't not go to grad school, and we have a lot of non-traditional people that, you know, go back to grad school late. And I love it. But that was because they couldn't not go there. Talk about the book. Why couldn't you not write this book? Science Nonfiction is the sub-traditional. title is behind the scenes at university research. I can't tell you how often I heard an incorrect definition of indirect cost recovery. And that's why I...

Thank God, Darren. Oh my God, if you couldn't write about IDC, who would? Think of the children. Think of the children. That is a microcosm of the misunderstanding of how science is actually done. And so there are fantastic fantastic resources on PBS and YouTube about the wonderful things that science produces. I'm a big fan of Anthony Bourdain and his book, his first book that made him famous Kitchen Confidential. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if somebody wrote Kitchen Confidential but about labs instead of about kitchens. I was a working title for my first book, which became losing the Nobel Prize, but it was going to be cosmic confidential. It was filling this lacuna in our kind of understanding in the public, but also, kind of, you know, a Jeremiah, but also a warning, but also an invitation. Because it is a great job. Look, I say, you know, I joked before. It's the hardest three-hour a week job in the world. But I also say, you know, who's going to be a professor?

Like, who's going to pay me to be a professor? You grew up, you know, working class, maybe lower, lower middle class. I grew up fairly poor. Even though my father, a late father, was an academician. He was a professor. He was the youngest full professor at Cornell in the math department at age 26. He was a full professor. I mean, you can't do that nowadays. But he was, I didn't think you could be a professor. I'm like, who's going to pay me to taste ice cream? And, you know, like ride the roller coaster at SeaWorld all the. No one's going to pay me to do that.

Take it back to where you got your start, at least, in the scientific world, which is in Boston. And one of my kind of greatest heroes, in fact, was from Boston. I think he was at Boston College. You were at Boston University. His name was Isaac Asimov. And he not only wrote some of the greatest works of fiction ever written, science fiction, but he wrote a lot of nonfiction science. And I actually got me my deepest interest as a teenager in science, his nonfiction, his books,

particularly about chemistry, which, you know, is the worst possible, you know, field for me. Biology was bad for me. I took AP Bio and we had to dissect a frog. And I was fine with dissecting it, but I kind of heard it scream. Like, I might have brought it back to life just to cause it more. No, I'm just kidding. Pita folks out there. But I love chemistry, but I was horrible.

I mean, I couldn't remember all these different reactions and the memorization and just, you know, it just seemed so formulaic. It was like, I could just go to law school and memorize a bunch of laws. I wanted to be a scientist. Asimov inspired me. What inspired you? What were some of the influences before you kind of became who you are, you know, the famous professor that you are now and in your, you know, just phenomenal career? What influenced you at a curiosity-based level?

Asimov, was it be you? You were right the first time. Oh, I was. Okay, great. And I have read his brief history. of chemistry cover to cover. He has all these little nuggets of science non-nonfiction. I was always of the belief that science and magic were synonymous. When I would watch 321 contact and nature on PBS, I would just, I just conflated the two. Science, that was the only legitimate route to magic. Maybe science

even was magic. And when I didn't know what I wanted to do in science, but I had a fantastic high school teacher. This is a very common story. We have people who inspire us in the classroom, and it was no different for me. I had a teacher in high school. I took the regular 10th grade chemistry and then AP chemistry from him the following year. And he had a way of imbuing atoms and molecules with human-like characteristics. And that is where somebody like me who wasn't maybe so great at thinking about equations and things that were very abstract, but also not somebody who wanted to memorize a biology textbook because there's a lot of memorization in biology.

And so for me, chemistry was the center of the bullseye, but I can understand how other natural scientists gravitate toward physics or biologists. biology. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. You had this really cool experience as a kid. I had a cool experience with a telescope as a kid that got me into the career that we have today, which, you know, as I often say, is the hardest three hour a week job in the world. You had an experience with a type of observational telescopic device or televistic device. Talk about your exposure, you know, this kind of chance exposure that got you into the important career that you have. But the most important thing that, you know, two white guys with a microphone can do podcasting. So talk about this Fisher,

Bryce, you know, video camera and how, really, what should parents do? If they want to create a young Darren Lepomi, you know, a young Brian Keating, God forbid. Tell me, what are some of your piece of advice as a parent who's also a professor? In the late 80s, Fisher Price came out with this PXL 2000 camcorder. It was a black and white camcorder that would take high fidelity audio tape, run it really fast, like as fast as a fast forward to get all of the, you know, to get the data rate. enough and it would record 10 minutes of black and white video on each side of an audio cassette. The images were terrible, it sucked up light like nobody's business you needed.

So my dad had an early cartridge video camera like film video camera and we used these halogen lamps that he had just to get enough so that it wasn't a black screen. Right. And so I had my stuffed animals act out scenes. from Star Wars, and that was my earliest exposure to video and audio production. The other ancient piece of technology that I had was a 1980 desktop computer that a family friend absconded with from Kodak. So they used to dump their old equipment in the river, the Genesee River. And so we ended up with this thing, and when you turned it on, it would go, blah, blah, bo, bo, bo, bo,

but it would sound like the Millennium Falcon taking off. You needed a five-and-a-quarter disk to boot it up. So, you know, what do I do with my own child? You know, she's seven, and we are interested in creativity and science. So we have a sewing machine, a 3D printer is on its way. We watch a lot of builder videos. She wants to make animatronics from Poppy Playtime and other things. that I shouldn't be letting her play.

But that's, I don't know if that's the right answer, but that's what we're doing as scientist parents. One of the last organic chemists that I talked to was Tom Chek, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on RNA, and it's a book The Catalyst, which is a phenomenal book, very much kind of Asimov spirit, but in the conversation we had on the podcast, he spoke about, you know, kind of his philosophy,

at least as a scientist, was, you know, basically if you're going to do one thing, do it extremely well. Do it better than anyone can. What's your one-sentence teaching philosophy, and maybe one sentence on research, too? I'll give you two sentences. In teaching, one wants to get the students to do their own work. When I was in school, I would go to the lecture.

I would not have read the chapter ahead of time, and 60% of it would just straight over my head. Then when I would go home or back to my dorm room, I would do the problems in the back of the book, and I would transfer them to note cards, and that's when I would do their real learning, right? But I wouldn't have done that if I didn't care. And maybe so the effective professors were the ones that I wanted to, I wanted to, I viewed them as a role model. I wanted to please them.

I didn't want to get an embarrassing grade on an exam. I was excited by their passion for the material, and that made me want to do it myself. I've never been somebody who could just absorb something from a lecture and take a test on it. Right. Research. Find a skill at the intersection of three or more interests that no one else is working on. And no one else is working on will come automatically.

So I am a decent organic chemist. Let's say out of physical scientists, I'm one in ten. say I know something about mechanics, but I'm not as good. Maybe I'm one in five. So now I'm one in 50. But I really am interested in neuroscience. And so I don't even have to be that good at neuroscience. I just have to have read a couple textbooks and be willing to talk to neuroscientists. So maybe I'm one in two. Now I'm one at 100 at the intersection of mechanics, organic chemistry, in neuroscience. Shohei Otani of this amalgam that you made.

Yeah, and that's exactly what my last four research grants have been on is perception of the mechanical, the organic media is mediated by mechanical forces. I had a guest here sitting in that chairnikalika Kukushkin at NYU. Said in Russian, like carbon has a name or an analyst, it's like, the aggressor, you know, and then oxygen is like, the devil. Devastator. Or no, I mean, carbon's the assembler, and they're like, oxygen's a devastating. And you put them together with a little hydrogen, you get the, just the malefluous world that we're, you know, kind of just so privileged to be a part of and we're so privileged that you came back on the, on the show and came back to San Diego. Congratulations on all your success. It's, it's just wonderful to watch you, you know, develop and grow. And, you know, it's kind of like you recruited, you know, Fernando Tatis from the White Sox and you get to watch them play for the Padres as I did last night. You know, you know, you know, you're just He still hasn't gotten a home run. But Darren Lepomey, Professor Chair, Lopoma, it's so great to have you back.

Congrats on all your success. I wish you continued success. And hopefully you'll come and visit. Maybe I'll come back to Rochester and get some beef on whack with you. Probably in the winter. I really like to go there in the winter. That's my dream. Snowshoeing and cross-country skating.

Exactly. All right, we've got to get you on a flight. Thank you so much for coming out. Welcome back to San Diego and have a great trip back. Thanks, Darren just told us that most people shouldn't even go to college while he's running the department that recruits them. If that changes how you see a degree, subscribe, and turn on notifications. And leave a comment.

Would you tell your own kid to skip college? For the flip side, Nobel laureate Tom Check told me why RNA might be more important than your diploma. It's link right here. Thanks for watching. See you next time. And please don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. It really does help me out.

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