Saad's Stories

The idea for this post comes from Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self discovered here.

Dear Saad,

Take a break from that Ludacris song to read this. I’m going to tell you what the next ten years hold for you. I’ve got your attention? Good!

While you’re sitting pretty right now with first semester classes, you’ll find out the next five semesters aren’t any walk in park. Example: you’re going to take, suffer through, and then have to retake a class known as Intermediate Orgo. Luckily, you won’t go through these struggles alone. Some of the classmates going into these battles alongside you will end up becoming friends whom you have long after those classes, and college, are finished.

Next year, Mom will ask you to take passport photos and you’ll hate how you look like a goob in the picture. Let it go. That passport’s gonna accompany you to Canada and Mexico–okay okay, starting out slowly–and Japan, the Caribbean, Sweden, Scotland, Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany!!! 

You know how you were annoyed by English class in high school? Well, you’ll take some literature and writing classes soon and end up becoming a huge reader and a bit of a writer, too. Don’t worry about how you’ll take your books with you when you travel. In about 6 years, something called a “Kindle” will be invented–it’s like an iPod for books–and the parents will give you one as a present when you finish your PhD. That’s right, you’ll be Dr. Saad! I’m not telling you what you get the PhD in, because it’ll be a fun surprise for you. Right now, you’ve never even heard of the subject. I’ll say this much: you’ll go to an SEC school, get to watch the Gators in person many times, and become pretty good at science.

You won’t have your first kiss this year (sorry, dude) but you’ll come to meet, date, love–and be loved by–some remarkable women. Keep your eyes open to their good habits. You’ll grow and become a better person for it.

Love,

Saad

2011

Recently I was introduced to a blog called FutureDerm, where one Nicki Zevola reviews beauty products. And I want to recommend her blog to anyone who cares about hair and skin products. I will use three of her recent posts to illustrate why I’m recommending it.

1) In this post about SPF makeup, she explains why the SPF rating on the product label doesn’t match its performance in real life:

…scientists test facial powders to determine SPF in a manner mandated by the FDA, assuming that 2mg of product will be used per cm² of skin. The average face is about 600cm² (although that varies from person to person, of course), meaning that a person needs to apply about 1.2g of facial powder to get the SPF stated on the product’s label. However, most women only apply about 0.085g of powder at a time – fourteen times less than you need to get the SPF listed on the package!

2) On whether retinol creams are likely to break down over time:

Other studies, such as this 2004 study in the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, have shown retinol also becomes unstable in the presence of too much oxygen.  So both light and air cause retinol to break down into an oxidized species.

After a month of use, your retinol cream will undoubtedly have less potency than when it is first opened.  That’s just the nature of the beast, sorry.  However, if your retinol cream contains other antioxidants, is encapsulated in liposomes, or packaged in a light-protective container, then your retinol will have degraded far less than otherwise. … I would also add that an airtight pump, like in Green Cream or Skinceuticals Retinol Creams, are excellent choices.

3) In this review of a Proactiv mask, she addresses the ingredients and why they might be effective at improving skin:

Kaolin, a hydrated silicate of aluminum, has been established as an effective adsorbent for hundreds of years.  Kaolin has long been used to treat skin erythema, eczema, and inflammatory skin disorders.  It is an adsorbent ingredient that has been proven to absorb excess oil on the skin, as mentioned in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.  In fact, kaolin is so adsorbent makes me hesitant to recommend this to anyone with dry skin!

Sulfur is an important mineral component of vitamin B, collagen, keratin, and several amino acids.  According to The Encyclopedia of Skin and Skin Disorders, sulfur is thought to slow bacterial growth as it dissolves the top layer of the skin and slows oil-gland activity within the skin.

What I like about her content is that she doesn’t limit it to reviewing her experience with a product. She cites a fair amount of scientific research that ties a product’s performance to its ingredients and method of formulation. And in #2, she proposes products that address an unavoidable issue with a key ingredient. This appeals to the scientist in me, and for anyone, this makes her blog a useful repository to predict how other products with similar ingredients might function. As far as how compounds like retinol degrade, I’m familiar with that from my line of work. I love being able to read stuff like this because it expands my thinking on how the science can be extended toward designing cool and useful products. Yes, even cosmetics.

And she keeps the FutureDerm blog going while handling the little side gig of being a medical student at Pitt. Well done.

(Picture from UK’s Telegraph)

I visited one of my scientific mentors last week and she gave me this advice: Become an expert in two areas. We did not pursue the topic further, discussing particular areas of materials research, for example, but her words remained in my thoughts after the visit.

Being knowledgeable in two areas certainly gives me more options when selecting research projects, but the real power of knowing two areas is the potential to combine them and discover something worthwhile in a third area.  One of my favorite books, The Medici Effect, calls this phenomenon “being in the Intersection.” The book relates the tales of a diverse collection of innovators, past and present (examples: Charles Darwin, Richard Branson, and the guy who invented the card game Magic The Gathering) and how they connected concepts from two seemingly unrelated wells of knowledge to make an astounding discovery and/or a huge pile of money. The book is a great read, and I’m glad my mentor’s words reminded me of it, because I know I should spend more time brainstorming intersectional ideas along with directional ideas (ones that seem to naturally evolve from a previous finding).

In my still-evolving scientific career, I have been fortunate to experience the Intersection once already. By combining electrophoretic deposition—an efficient technique for depositing nanoparticles into solid films from a suspension—with the use of a sacrificial layer—a concept from MEMS fabrication that allows thin sections of material to be suspended freely—we invented a new technique for creating standalone nanoparticle films. Our lab was already using electrophoretic deposition, but because I had previously studied MEMS and done some microfabrication work, I was able to draw from this second well of knowledge. This experience shows the value of collaborating with scientists outside of my field and even taking steps to branch out on my own from the confines of what I’m already comfortable with studying.

In any creative work, most of the ideas put forward end up unused or turn out to be ho-hum. The Medici Effect even points out that past success in finding an Intersection is no guarantee that someone will find it again. So the conclusion here would be: never stop thinking, never stop visiting new places and soaking up new concepts, and never stop trying out new (and seemingly crazy) ideas.