Sciographies is a radio show and podcast about the people who make science happen, presented by The Faculty of Science and campus-community radio station CKDU. This article is the fourth in a series that will feature excerpts from each new episode released this fall.
One could say Mark Stradiotto鈥檚 career as an inorganic chemist who studies the properties and behaviour of metal and other inorganic compounds isn鈥檛 all that surprising considering his past. After all, the Guelph, Ontario native spent many years as a drummer in hair bands that idolized Van Halen. But now his interest in metal is more scientific than musical, and if it weren鈥檛 for a chemistry course about organometallic compounds in his third year of university, he might have never made the switch.
Today, the professor and Arthur B. McDonald Chair of Research Excellence leads the Stradiotto Research Group in the Department of Chemistry. Dr. Stradiotto specializes in the study and design of ligands. Ligands are ions or molecules that bind to metals, allowing the metals to react in ways that otherwise wouldn鈥檛 be possible. They鈥檙e incredibly useful in pharmaceutical chemistry, and some of the innovations out of Dr. Stradiotto鈥檚 lab 鈥� like DalPhos 鈥� have been patented and licensed to industry partners.
In this episode of Sciographies, Dr. Stradiotto talks to host David Barclay about his upbringing, his participation in the commercialization of research, and his approach to teaching chemistry to undergrads.聽
Listen to a preview of Dr. Stradiotto鈥檚 episode.
Here are some excerpts from the interview, edited for clarity and length.
Overcoming a stressful post-doc position鈥�
Barclay: It sounds like you had a great professor who took you under his wing as an undergrad for summer research. And then you ended up doing your PhD with him 鈥� he took you the whole way.
Stradiotto: He definitely did. That was a very protected, nurtured, and small research group. I could sit in his office and have a conversation for two hours. It was just spectacular. It was everything a student would hope for鈥� Then I went to the University of California, Berkeley [for a post-doc]. I had a very tough time at Berkeley, and I mean that from a mental health and confidence point-of- view. It was not the experience I had hoped it would be and it was a very tumultuous time. But I made it through, published some good work, and established myself. And in a way, that was almost its own gift. If you feel that sort of burden and you can make your way through it鈥� it gave me a sense, when I arrived here at Dal, that I could do anything. The things holding me back at Berkley were now gone, and I could just go for it.
Bridging the gap between academia and industry through commercialization鈥�
Stradiotto: Around 2007, we developed some really cool chemistry that we thought was going to be useful and exciting. There were some really nice papers and congratulations that came out of it. But then we realized those methods lacked the practicality that was needed to then translate to end-users. From that moment, I said if