Science
After coming home from church today, V, N, and I stopped by the community garden where we have a small plot available. This got me thinking again about a long-time dream/hobby/thought of mine related to having a robot garden. I don’t mean a garden of robots 🤖🤖🤖, but rather a garden tended to in an automated fashion. This might look like installing moisture sensors into the soil, placing light sensors nearby the plants, monitoring current weather,setting up a time-lapse video feed to extract “how well the plants are doing”, and using that data to control garden conditions. An automated garden is pretty much the pinnacle hobby for me. The idea was born out of a passion for automation and efficiency as I’ve researched various scientific topics, both experimental and computational, over the last ~7 years.
Backtracking to 7 years ago (2015), I became involved in scientific undergraduate research in the physics department at BYU studying the potential use of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for battery applications. Over the summer, I helped a master’s student to collect the data he needed for his thesis. As the graduation deadline fast-approached, we saw each other more often in the evenings in the labs near the CNT furnaces. After his successful thesis defense, I had the opportunity to transition to another project. At some point I had become aware of lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries and this seemed like an exciting next direction. With the blessing of Dr. Davis, my research advisor at the time, I began a literature study to scope out a next project involving Li-S batteries and became quite absorbed in the process. I was in one of the physics computer labs, absolutely fascinated by one research article after another. “Wow! They incorporated that kind of nanomaterial and achieved that level of performance?” At one point, I exclaimed aloud “science is so cool!” As I sheepishly looked around the lab, I was relieved to see that I was alone.
From there, research has been a whirlwind of adventure and struggle. As I learned that publications are the currency of the field, or as my current advisor, Dr. Taylor Sparks describes it, “the coin of the realm”, from very early my goal was to write my own first author paper. Publications are the primary means by which researchers make an impact on the field (if you discover something new, it doesn’t matter if no one knows or can understand it). As another Taylor Sparks adage, “if it doesn’t have a DOI A digital object identifier (DOI) provides a unique, persistent link to the location of an object on the internet, in my case an academic publication for example.1 , it didn’t happen.” My primary career vision was and is to make a positive impact on society through materials innovation. Publishing in research is a stepping stone to that vision.
Little did I know at the time, it would take me six years before my first, first-author paper was accepted and published, with six co-authored manuscripts and several rejected submissions along the way. What did I learn from those experiences? How to optimize. I optimized my time, learning tools and skills that would help me to be more efficient and more effective. I learned to plan, to communicate scientific ideas, and how to “get others on board” with ideas that I had. I learned persistence. During my mechanical engineering master’s defense at BYU, Dr. Oliver Johnson, my advisor, said that if he were to describe me with a single word it would be “tenacious” tending to keep a firm hold of something; clinging or adhering closely … not readily relinquishing a position, principle, or course of action; determined … persisting in existence; not easily dispelled. (Definitions from Oxford Languages via Google). This description rang true with me. While he was describing interactions with me over the course of several years, the feeling of “keeping firm hold … clinging or ahdering closely”2. I took a deep dive into complex topics (eight-dimensional hyperspheres, anyone?) after transferring from an experimental to a computational project late into the program. By the end of the project, I had written upwards of 40,000 lines of code, utilized thousands of hours of compute time on the BYU supercomputer, produced hundreds of figures, and wrote several manuscripts.
As I transitioned from my master’s to my PhD, I also transitioned from scuba diving to kayaking My introduction to modern physics professor used this phrasing (i.e. kayaking) to describe our study of the various topics of modern physics during that semester. At any given time, I’m collaborating on upwards of 10-20 projects across a wide variety of materials science topics, any computational and some experimental. I’ve opened hundreds of GitHub issues GitHub issues are used “to track ideas, feedback, tasks, or bugs for work on GitHub” where GitHub is “a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration” <a href=https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/hello-world>source</a>) 3 , looked at thousands of stack overflow posts, and written tens of thousands of lines of code (mostly Python and some Mathematica and MATLAB). Collaborative experiences, often virtual, have given me the opportunity to work with, teach, and learn from many bright and stellar individuals. I’m excited to see what new, challenging tasks we can tackle together. One such challenge that keeps me awake at night is the idea of a “lights-out” Factories that employ “lights-out manufacturing” are fully automated and require no human presence on-site. These factories are considered to be able to run “with the lights off.” (source) research laboratory, also referred to as a “self-driving lab”:
Self-driving laboratories combine artificial intelligence with automated robotic platforms for the autonomous discovery of new materials. (source)
This brings me back to where I started: the autonomous garden. Perhaps this is the year I start out with some basic garden automation in our apartment (a moisture sensor and a water pump) and take it to the next level in the community gardens next year, though I will probably keep it fixed to a single location, as I might run into issues with it roaming around the neighborhood (see below).
A nomadic, self-driving and self-cultivating garden (Hortum machina, B). Image clipped from Vimeo.