CENtral Science

Profile: …cartoonist?

The guy that I’m profiling for the blog today isn’t a chemist. At all. But he’s Jorge Cham, so does it matter?

In case you’ve been living under something inorganic and heavy (or not a grad student), Cham is the creator of Piled Higher & Deeper, a comic strip about the…uniqueness… of  graduate student life. He gave his “Power of Procrastination” talk at ACS last week, and I managed to drag him into a quiet corner for an interview about his cartoony career and how he got there. What follows has been edited slightly for length and flow.

Jorge Cham, photo by Leigh Krietsch Boerner. I like to think this picture is slightly out of focus because Cham is such a warm and fuzzy guy.

LKB: So. How does it feel to be the patron saint of grad students?

JC: (laughs) A little weird, sometimes. Well, if you’ve seen my talk, the point of the talk is that there’s nothing that you should do. So I feel a little uncomfortable when people ask for advice and what to do.

LKB: Okay, but to someone looking at you and thinking, ‘hey, I want to be a cartoonist,’ erm, what would your advice be?

JC: My advice would be do not do it.

LKB: Why not?

JC: I don’t need the competition.

LKB: (laughs) Well, okay, not about graduate students, but maybe about chemistry or some other type of subject.

JC: I guess I would tell them my story, which is the best I can do. I did it as a hobby free for about 5-7 years. 7 years just for fun, a hobby on the website. Then I came out with the first book, and there was income from that. And then things kind of built up from there….I think that something that you should expect if you go on your own is to not really do it for an income for several years at least. And that’s sort of the experience I get from a lot of artists and independent people.

LKB: So your background is in engineering and post-doced as well, right?

JC: The post-doc I got was officially an instructor at Cal-Tech. So I was teaching classes, my ID said faculty, but really I was just a post-doc.

LKB: So you started that comic as a grad student at Stanford. But then about 5 years ago, you realized it could be a career?

JC: About 5 years ago, I saw the academic half-life of my degree start to decrease. At the same time, I saw the traffic on the website start to increase. So I just switched careers.

LKB: So you tour now, is that what you do most of the time?

JC: During the academic year, yeah I do a lot of touring. My primary thing is to come up with three comics a week. And then there’s the lectures and this running a publishing business, and then the website.

LKB: Are you worried that you’re going to run out of ideas eventually?

JC: (laughs) You mean how deep are the scars? You know, I don’t really worry about that, I just take it as it comes. I say that if I write a comic strip for every day I was in grad school, I’m only about halfway through. (laughs)

LKB: Really. Woah, you have a lot of material.

JC: And the other thing is that a long time ago, I realized that this comic strip was not really about me, about my experiences, it’s kind of about THE experience, all those people out there go through it.

The cartoonist cartooning. Photo by Leigh Krietsch Boerner.

LKB: How did you first first start? How did you get the idea of, ‘hey, I’m going to write a comic strip about grad school?’

JC: When I was very little, I got into comics. So I would naturally draw, try to copy the drawings that I saw in the comics, so I’ve always been doodling all my life. I made a t-shirt here and there for college. In grad school I was talking to my brother, who had already gone through grad school, and he had the idea of doing a comic about grad students, because all the ones in the Stanford newspaper were about undergrads. And don’t they know grad school is where the real pain begins? So he brought that up, and there was an ad in the newspaper calling for comics by students. And he thought, hey there should be one about graduate students. At the time I had been reading this book on Doonesbury, a perspective on Doonesbury, and the impact it had had over the years. Not so much now but back in the 80s and 90s, it was part of the culture. And so I don’t know, just to procrastinate really, I started doing it.

LKB: At least you got something productive out of your procrastination. The rest of us just read your website.

JC: (laughs) It’s worked out for me, well. But only after 12 years. (laughs)

LKB: What did your adviser think of the whole thing?

JC: He actually doesn’t know.

LKB: Oh really?

JC: So if you can keep that out of the…

LKB: Well, I’m not going to ask who your adviser is!

Yes, I totally geeked out and asked Cham to sign a comic for me. You would have done the same. Photo by Leigh Krietsch Boerner, image in the photo copyright Jorge Cham.

JC: (laughs, a lot) No, I’m just kidding. He knew from day one. He was a fan of the comic.

LKB: (I laughed too, I can’t believe I fell for that) So he never said, “don’t put this in the comic”?

JC: No, he never asked me not to put anything in there. Recently somebody interviewed him about me. The quote from him was, ‘yeah, Jorge’s comic is often funny.’ (laughs) That was a pretty good description.

LKB: So, advice for newly starting out cartoonists–expect to not get paid for awhile and have to wait a long time before getting anything back from it?

JC: I guess the message is to have low expectations. My motto is always aim high, but have low expectations.

LKB: So prepare for the best and expect the worst?

JC: Yeah. There you go. You probably stole that from somebody, didn’t you?

Yup. Super thanks to Jorge for the interview! His latest book, Academic Stimulus Package, is now available both through the PHD website and Amazon.com.

Profile: Conservation Scientist

Gregory Dale Smith has his dream job.

Late last year, the Indianapolis Museum of Art hired the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Conservation Science at Buffalo State College as the new Senior Conservation Scientist. The position was created by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and with the help of another $2.6 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, Smith will create a new conservation science lab. From the ground up.

“I’ve been given a blank slate, essentially. Here’s a whole wing of the museum, build a science lab,” he told me.

Hoods in the soon-to-be-finished conservation science lab at the IMA. You wish the ones in your lab were this pretty. Photo by Leigh Krietsch Boerner.

And it’s going to be very cool. I went to visit Smith at the IMA in late July and got to see the lab in its half-finished loveliness. It’s an open, airy space, being decorated in the arts and crafts style, with two-toned green walls and dark trim. Two large windows frame a view onto the expansive wooded grounds, and are fitted with UV filtered glass to screen out potentially artwork-damaging high energy light.

My pictures don’t do it justice. Really, it’s going to be gorgeous. It’s scheduled to be up and running sometime in October.

Out of the space, Smith will operate what he calls service lab to the museum, “working to answer materials analysis questions for curators and conservators (people who directly treat damaged artwork).”

In addition, his job as a conservation scientist involves technical analysis of artworks in the collection. “This is a materials approach to art history, either to provide evidence of an artist’s materials or working methods, to authenticate an artwork, or to assist in attribution of an artwork,” Smith said.

That part of the job sounds pretty cool. Smith concurs. “Peering at van Gogh brushstrokes while sampling a painting will always raise the hair on the back of your neck,” he said.

Another responsibility is to research artists’ materials. That is, investigate how certain materials degrade, what the best conditions for preservation are, and find new ways to treat damaged artwork and new methods of analysis.

On top of all this, Smith also acts as an intermediary between conservation and the mainstream sciences and industry.

“With hundreds of new polymers, dyes, and material being patented every day, the conservation scientist serves to vet these for possible use as artists’ materials or for use in the conservation of artwork,” he said.

Gregory Dale Smith in the painting conservation lab at the IMA. Photo by Leigh Krietsch Boerner.

For example, Smith might test a material for light fastness, or put it under high heat and humidity to see how it stands up over time. This is important when you consider that a piece will potentially be exhibited hundreds of years into the future. They want to make sure that protective layer applied to the surface keep protecting (as well as being easily removable, in case it needs to come off).

Although it’s been growing in the last ten years or so, conservation science is still a very small field, Smith said. And it’s very competitive, simply because there just aren’t that many positions for scientists at museums.

“There will always be a need for conservation scientists,” Smith said, “but it is never going to be as large a field as say environmental or forensic chemistry.”

Still, a few opportunities are out there. For a student just finishing a PhD, it’s absolutely critical to post-doc.

“You certainly need an introduction to the museum world if you are coming from the mainstream sciences. This is the typical path—postdocing at major institutions like the Getty, National Gallery of Art, and hopefully soon, the IMA.”

That new space that’s being built has room for a few visiting graduate students, plus a post-doc or two. Jie Liu, from Purdue University in nearby Lafayette, will be their first post-doctoral appointee.

Smith said a key desired quality in a would-be post-doc is a broad analytical training.

“Although we all have certain long term research interests or particular strengths in a certain type of analysis, you pretty much have to be a generalist in an encyclopedic collection. It could be African basketry one day and neo-impressionist paintings the next, chromatography in the morning and x-ray fluorescence after lunch.”

Sample for the periodic table that will go in the new conservation science lab at the IMA. Photo by Leigh Krietsch Boerner.

It also helps to be a good problem solver and to think creatively. Often, if conservation scientists are analyzing a painting or artifact, they only have a tiny sample to work with. Which makes sense—you wouldn’t want to cut a six inch square out of the Mona Lisa. Smith also looks for someone with strong ties to a local university or research center, to facilitate collaboration and perhaps occasional use of their equipment.

And you need to know at least a little bit about art.

“I would hesitate if someone came in and couldn’t pick out a Renaissance painting from an abstract expressionist painting,” Smith said.

If you’re still an undergrad and are thinking about this career path, Smith suggests taking some art history or humanities classes before you graduate. For grad students, you might try contacting a local museum to see if you can do some collaborative research.

Smith is preaching what he practiced. He double majored in Chemistry and Anthropology/Sociology at Center College in Danville, KY. He went on to grad school at Duke, where he analyzed soils at an archaeological dig in Israel during the summers, and researched solar energy conversion complexes during the school year.

From there, Smith did multiple post-docs. He developed Raman techniques for studying artwork at University College London, worked on an infrared beamline at Brookhaven researching conservation of modern artists’ paints, and spent five years teaching conservation science at Buffalo State College.

I asked Smith if doing that many post-docs was normal. He said in conservation science, there is no normal. Since it’s a relatively new field, there aren’t any specific training programs. You just have to broadly prepare yourself as much as possible.

“However, there is so much to become familiar with that you can never be totally prepared.  It is another exciting aspect of the job that you are constantly learning new things about art, about science, and about humanity’s creativity.”

Below is a two-part video tour of the conservation labs. (Sorry for the Saving Private Ryan type wobbliness at times. I guess I need a dolly.)

Profile: Technology Transfer

Okay. So Brian Kraft, technology licensing associate at Washington State University gave me a very detailed explanation of what exactly technology transfer is, but I think I can sum it up pretty succinctly.

Technology transfer: legally transferring the rights from things/products discovered in a university lab to an outside, for-profit company.

Technology transfer: NOT kids running off with cell phones. Image by flickr user unifiedphoto.

So, as I’m sure you can imagine, universities hire people to act as liaisons, or agents, between the researcher and the company wanting to sell and/or develop their invention. Kraft is one of these people. (I wonder if he introduces himself to people as Agent Kraft?)

Besides keeping the world safe for the matrix, Kraft has a pretty diverse job, he said. His goal is to find markets for university inventions. He also serves as an intellectual property expert and contracting expert for the university, which involves talking to graduate students and community members or dealing with faculty ownership disputes or research contract negotiations.

Kraft’s day to day life can be really variable, he said. For example:

“This morning I was reading about treated tree bark and its potential use as a peat moss substitute for growing plants in order to settle an intellectual property ownership dispute between a faculty member and a local small business. I was interrupted from this by a call from one of our attorneys, informing me that a patent had just been allowed on a hydrogen storage technology and that we needed to draft an additional claim set for the commercially relevant implementation. I knocked that out then pivoted to begin reading about the emerging market for scheduling software that builds crew rosters based on fatigue models for a meeting tomorrow morning focused on the financial terms of a license agreement for a patent in the area that WSU has filed. I then received an email from a faculty member in civil engineering who has developed a method to enhance the post demolition CO2 uptake of concrete…now I get to read about cap and trade and how that would affect the concrete industry. (Notice how I never got back to the tree bark.)”

Whew. He said if he really needs to focus on one thing, he has to close his email and unplug the phone.

Kraft knew he wanted to do something besides academia near the end of his PhD work at Indiana University. (From the same group that I work in, actually. I think I sit at his old desk.) He took a post-doc position at Los Alamos just to try out the national lab thing, but didn’t really get into that either. He picked up a copy of Alternative Careers in Science (sound familiar?), and found out technology transfer as a career.

Agent Kraft. Courtesy photo.

When Kraft’s wife Aurora Clark (also a chemist and also from the same research group at IU) got hired at Washington State as a professor, they happened to be re-vamping their technology transfer the department and were hiring. So Kraft got a job. And he’s quite happy with the way things have worked out.

“It was the right move for me,” he said. “I still consider my path as evolving, but I do not regret leaving the lab.”

For others looking to get into the technology transfer business, Kraft suggests trying an internship in your university’s technology transfer office.

“Another direction is to ask if your adviser is working on any patents or commercially valuable projects and ask to serve as their liaison to the technology transfer office. I work with a lot of graduate students,” he said.

But he also warns that the job is not for everyone.

“This job has a pretty high turnover rate. The turnover rate in part, reflects the difficulty of the job,” Kraft said. “You have to be a good communicator, have a thick skin and a willingness to navigate these disparate motivators to find common ground.”

And even though there is high turnover, there aren’t that many jobs available.

“Technology transfer offices are chronically under-resourced. It’s my view that it is a function that does not fit particularly well within the traditional university and as a result there is a limited investment,” he said.

Still he said, there are good parts to the job.

“The upside is that the work is varied, both in topic and action. You’re close to the research and you get to directly participate in the emergence of new technology,” Kraft said. “It’s pretty satisfying when you get to see products launched and companies funded.”