Challenge! Am I the only one on Mastodon that uses crystallography? Are there more then two chemists? Can anyone help me find them if they exist?
@candle Cool! (Why are the cool people always on Witches.town?)
@Canageek I was a geology major with lots of interest in mineralogy but it's been a long time since I used XRD
@And_Zoidberg Cool, do you still work in geology?
@Canageek Not at the moment. Still on the fence as to whether to go to grad school for mineralogy (which is fascinating and a huge part of why I got into Geo in the first place, but has practically no jobs) or materials science, which is at least tangentially related enough to Geology that I won't need to take extra classes to catch up
@And_Zoidberg Isn't materials basically applied chemistry? Thought you'd need lots of chemistry to catch up there?
@Canageek As far as inorganic chemistry goes, I'm pretty well-covered
Now organic chem, that's unknown territory for me
@And_Zoidberg My school has an entire materials department known as 4D labs, lot of battery research and such.
@Canageek Tell me the name of this wondrous place
@And_Zoidberg Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Well, technically Burnaby, but no one outside BC has heard of that.)
@Canageek *adds to list of schools to apply to*
@And_Zoidberg If you are applying with a specific professor toss me a message first, I might know them and can give you insight into their group culture. Not SUPER likely, but I know a few)
@Canageek I'm a geologist but crystallography is awesome.
@icefox You and @And_Zoidberg ! (I don't suppose either of you want to pay me to run samples for you? ;) )
@And_Zoidberg @Canageek I'd love to if I actually did any geology these days... 😢
@Canageek I'm a theoretical physicist, but one of my research topics is kind of like crystallography in eight dimensions....
@Canageek I use crystals to measure time, does that count?
@Efi Only if you use xrays to do so ^^
@Canageek Inorganic chemist PhD --> industrial hygiene postdoc --> materials engineer in industry and now IP/licensing/tech transfer/startups guy at a big public U.
Sadly, my XRD/crystallography days are nearly a decade gone at this point.
@fobo Nice to see someone else with an inorg background who has made it. (Leaving grad school these days is terrifying, nice to see others who managed to find work)
@Canageek oh yeah! There's life after grad school for sure. It's just not always what you'd expect.
NMR was more my jam, but I solved a couple of structures using Patterson methods back in the day.
@deejoe well I've never successfully solved home with Patterson methods. Only intrinsic and direct methods.
Thus are the advantages of doing inorganic and organometallic crystallography: A heavy atom is not too hard to come by.
@Canageek
OTOH best we had at the time was 4-circle diffractometers--just a counter, no imaging plate--and VAXen, so we could use every advaantage we could get.
@deejoe we have a nonius but we don't even know if it will turn on these days
@deejoe you think compounds Laden with gold and uranium would be easy to solve with Patterson, and I'm sure if I were doing it back with our nonius then I'd probably be using them, but intrinsic is just so good these days that it really replace is pretty much everything else in most circumstances.
@Canageek i'm not a chemist but i do molecular visualisation at work with data i think comes from crystallography! we work with the local uni's computational chemistry group