CCB Q&A: Visiting Professor Asem Abdulahad
In this interview, Asem Abdulahad, FAS Dean’s Visiting Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, reflects on his journey in science. What began with a tentative interest in chemistry—fostered by an academic advisor who spotted his potential—has evolved into a career exploring some of sciences’ most pressing challenges.
As a professor at XULA, Abdulahad's lab develops, synthesizes, and characterizes new materials for lithium metal batteries, small analyte sensing, and carbon dioxide capture technologies. Currently, their primary research thrust is on (1) the synthesis and characterization of solid polymer electrolytes for use in lithium metal batteries and (2) the development of flexible and microporous polymers for carbon dioxide adsorption.
Abdulahad will deliver a lecture entitled "Engineering polymer-based materials for carbon dioxide capture and lithium battery applications" on Monday, November 4 at 4:15PM in Pfizer Lecture Hall.
YC: How did you get interested in chemistry?
AA: It turns out I was good at chemistry; that's why I got interested in it in the first place. When I was an undergrad, I was initially a psychology major, but I had an academic advisor who noticed that I did better in my quantitative math and science courses than the social science and humanities courses, so I ended up switching my major. Then I fell into a research opportunity, an undergrad project using biopolymers trying to clean wastewater. It was this research experience that really got me hooked.
YC: Could you explain your career trajectory?
AA: By the time I was finishing my undergrad studies, I didn't exactly have plans to go to graduate school. I applied for a bunch of things, regular jobs in industry and graduate programs. The undergraduate research project that I did was in collaboration with a professor at RPI. I had gone to RPI for a summer and got introduced to higher level research and then fell in love with polymer solution dynamics; that's what I decided to pursue. Eventually I went to graduate school at RPI, in Troy, New York, 15-20 min away from Albany.
When I was in grad school, I TA’d for a year and a half at the beginning, and it turned out that I really liked teaching, but I wasn't sold on being a professor at that point. My research advisor was encouraging me to expand my horizons. He just kind of grabbed me and said, “Hey, it's time for you to look for jobs.” So, at that point, I was in my last year in graduate school, and I still had plans to go into industry. It just didn't feel right going to the industry interviews, so I ended up turning down two offers to take a postdoc position at Virginia Tech, which was monetarily probably not a good idea. There’s a big difference in the compensation for being a postdoc compared to a job in industry. The postdoc position I got was half research and half teaching, so I had a chance to do some curriculum design, and in terms of research, I worked with Professor Timothy Long, a great guy, great mentor, who I still love to death. He has a synthesis background, which is different from my polymer solution and polymer physics background. It was a nice opportunity to learn new skills and come up with different research ideas. By then, I knew I wanted to teach, and I figured it would be at a primarily undergraduate institution. I took my first teaching position at a nursing college, and I was there for almost two years before the position at Xavier popped up. I applied for the position and ended up moving down there in 2017, and I guess the rest is history. What I enjoy most is interacting with undergrads, working with undergraduates in the lab, and the opportunity to go to Xavier was appealing for me because I graduated from HBCU. Overall, I wanted to bring research opportunities to the students at Xavier like those that had so much impact on my career.
YC: Could you explain a bit about your interest in new materials for lithium metal batteries and carbon dioxide capture?
AA: So, I'm a structure-property relationships person. For polymers, that means we try to find out how we can control material properties through chemical structure, architecture of the polymer chain, cross linking density, or by adding fillers or plasticizers if we're making composites.
Developing solid-state lithium batteries is an intriguing problem. Current lithium-ion batteries work by having a liquid electrolyte that transports ions between electrodes. Liquids are used because liquids have higher ion transport properties, but there are some fundamental issues with these liquids, namely, heat dissipation and flammability make them dangerous to use. Solid-state lithium batteries use a solid polymer electrolyte instead of the liquid and they offer a much higher theoretical energy density if solid lithium can be used at the anode. This project presents an interesting polymer chemistry and materials engineering problem. As it turns out, the things that we would normally do synthetically to engineer a polymer with high ion transport properties diminishes the mechanical properties. Mechanical integrity of the solid polymer electrolyte is important because it also has to provide a barrier and mechanical support between the battery electrodes. So, there's an interesting interplay between having sufficient mechanical toughness to separate electrodes and high ion transport because the polymer electrolyte is replacing both the liquid electrolyte the electrode separator. Also, there are some interesting phenomena occurring at the interface between both battery electrodes and the solid polymer electrolyte.
For the carbon capture work, I hired a postdoc about 2 and a half years ago, and she had interest in using biopolymers for practical applications. We read about carbon dioxide capture and found another interesting materials engineering problem to try and solve. In our materials, the polymer itself does not capture CO2, but it acts as the holder for the stuff that captures the CO2. So, our materials are composites of a polymer and an ionic liquid; and the ionic liquid is doing the work to capture CO2. Our current goal is to manipulate the polymer chemistry and architecture to encapsulate as much of that ionic liquid as possible, and also increase overall porosity of the material so that we can capture as much CO2 as possible. This project is relatively new for us, but we are currently looking into coupling our CO2 absorption with electrochemical CO2 conversion to produce other building block molecules.
YC: what are some challenges you faced in your research or in your teaching?
AA: Xavier's a unique school. Most of our population are Black women majoring in STEM fields, which is completely not common for most schools. Because we're a primarily teaching institution, we don't have enough faculty who are research active. The problem is trying to get research opportunities for more students. We've done a few things to make some progress, and that includes writing grants proposals and fundraising to increase our institutional research capacity (i.e. purchasing instrumentation and renovating research spaces). The number one thing that keeps me up at night is how to creatively get as many research opportunities for students as possible. Because, at least in my case, a research opportunity led me graduate school and pursuing career in STEM.
YC: Is there any advice that you would have to students?
AA: My advice is to learn programming. Do some computer programming early while you have time. You might think you don't have time now, but it gets a lot worse. You get way busier when you enter the real world. Besides that, don't be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and do something that you might have no expertise in. For example, for my postdoc, I went to a group that was significantly different from the one I came from, and that was based on my PhD advisor’s advice. He said, “don't do the same thing; you're going to get pigeonholed and stuck, and you won't have any scientific imagination.” Do something new and you’ll learn something new.
YC: What are your goals for your visiting professorship at CCB?
AA: Even though I love to teach and I love interacting with my students, I'm looking forward to some quiet time so I can get work done. It's been a while since I've been the person that's actively engaged in the research; most of my students do the work. I came up here with a box full of their samples, so that I can use the instrumentation up here in the core facilities to get the last pieces of data that we need to get some papers out. So, I'm looking forward to being anonymous, not teaching, and being able to focus on just doing my job and getting some work done.