Chemical Communications Blog

Welcome to a new entry on our series of interviews in the ChemComm blog! We want you to know more about some of the early career investigators who choose to publish their exciting work with us.

Next in this series is Dr Kamil Godula, from the University of California San Diego. Read the full interview below.

———-

What inspired you to become a scientist?

For me, it was my curiosity in finding out how the world around me works. My science teachers seemed to be the ones that had the answers to many of my questions and that had inspired me to pursue a scientific path.

I’ve always been intrigued by the ability of biologists, physicists and mathematicians to describe our world and try to pinpoint its fundamental principles. But ultimately, it was chemistry that captured my imagination for being a transformative science rather than a descriptive one. Becoming a chemist has allowed me to unleash my creativity and imagination.

How did you find out about ChemComm?

I became familiar with ChemComm as a new graduate student. Ever since, I’ve enjoyed the high quality of the research papers and the broad scope of topics that appear in the journal. Reading ChemComm is always a great way to gain a fresh perspective on and a new inspiration for my research.

What was the motivation behind the work described in your article? What interested you in this area?

My research team is interested in studying the role of carbohydrates in modulating biological events at the boundary between cells and their surrounding environment. The structures of these glycans, as they are called, can be recognized by protein receptors and many pathogens have evolved to target glycans to gain entry into their hosts.

What is interesting is the fact that the interactions of individual glycans and proteins are typically rather weak to be specific in a biological setting. To compensate for that, multiple copies of glycans are typically displayed by lipids and proteins found on cell membranes. My lab is interested in understanding how the three dimensional presentation of glycans on our cells affects the ability of influenza viruses to bind and initiate infection.

Once we gain a better understanding of these higher-order binding interactions between the virus and our cells, we may be able to design better drugs to fight influenza.

We are proud to introduce a new series of interviews in our ChemComm blog. We want you to know more about some of the early career investigators who choose to publish their exciting work with us.

The first in this series is Dr Ruth Webster, from the University of Bath. Read the full interview below.

———-

What inspired you to become a scientist?

As a second year undergraduate, I did a summer placement at GSK in Harlow and absolutely loved being in the lab. Until that point, I really didn’t enjoy the labs as an undergraduate, but this showed me a different side to chemistry. I was working with some people that were brilliant lab chemists and seemed to love what they did. They were also immensely knowledgeable, which made me want to do a PhD.

Then, my fourth year of the five year MSci in Scotland was spent at the Rutherford Appleton Lab near Oxford, helping set-up lasers for visiting academics. Working with so many academics who were so passionate about what they did, working at the boundaries of what we know as scientists, made me realise that a) I was an awful laser chemist (!) and that I should stick to synthetic chemistry and b) I wanted to be an academic.

How did you find out about ChemComm?

I remember publishing my first ChemComm article during my PhD. This was the point when my supervisor said (words to the effect of): “That’s it, you’ve made it”, i.e. I had managed to get really good quality work that was going to get noticed and highly cited.

What was the motivation behind the work described in your article? What interested you in this area?

I originally started investigating metal interactions with bulky amides when I got my independent position at Bath, but unfortunately they weren’t behaving how I wanted them to behave, so I decided, having put a lot of effort into the bulky amides, to change tack slightly and look at turning some bulky analogues into polymers.

I’m not a polymer chemist, but did a little bit as a postdoc (also published in ChemComm!) and I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what I had made. Most of the polymers in this paper are completely novel, so analysing them was not trivial, but when I had figured them out it was awesome! I also had some help from Dr Mark Wyatt at the EPSRC NMSF, whose expertise with MALDI-ToF analysis was invaluable.