Look Who's at the Lab: Young scientists-in-training

In Look Who's at the Lab, we profile some of the hundreds of scientists who visit our lab every year.

The Basics

Who: Tatiana Brinzari, Brian Holinsworth, Ken O’Neal, all graduate students in chemistry at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville

Mentor: Chemistry Professor Jan Musfeldt

Experiment date: April 2012

Distance traveled: About 500 miles

MagLab experience: Holinsworth and O’Neal are first-time users; Brinzari has been to the lab more than a dozen times.

E-mail: Brian Holinsworth, Ken O’Neal, Tatiana Brinzari

Research interests: Molecular magnets and polar oxides

Title of MagLab research: “Spectroscopic investigations of complex electronic and magnetic materials.”
The team used magnetic fields to manipulate and probe different synthetic materials and examine how the molecular structure of the material changed and transitioned. They also did a lot of troubleshooting. The goal was to get a good set of data. “I think we learned as much from troubleshooting as from the data,” says Holinsworth.

Other participants: Zhiqiang Li, MagLab senior investigator; Prof. Jan Musfeldt

Facility: Resistive Magnet Wing, lab cell 8

Equipment: 35 Tesla Bruker IFS-66V

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Quick Q & A

Q: What have you liked most about coming to the lab?

Holinsworth, 27: “I really like just sitting here knowing how much power is within a few inches of my sample and thinking, ‘Wow! That’s absolutely cool!’ If I got more sleep, I would love to be here all the time!”

(The students spent 16 to 18 hours each day at the lab. They even made a makeshift bed out of lab chairs so team members could catch a few zzzs.)

O’Neal, 23: “The highlight for me was actually seeing what all you can do here, all the possibilities, and gaining an understanding of what’s available. I didn’t realize the wide variety of applications for magnets.”

Brinzari, 30 (the most experienced user): “What I really like is turning our scientific intuition and curiosity into facts in a place where you can push the science to the limit.”

Q: What you miss most about home when you’re here:

Brinzari: “My husband!”

Holinsworth: “My two dogs — and my girlfriend!”

O’Neal: “Being able to work at my own pace. When you’re here, you’re really under a time crunch.”

Q: What’s the most unscientific thing about you?

Holinsworth: Dancing. He likes ballroom, Western, you name it.

O’Neal: Video games, especially role-playing games such as Final Fantasy.

Brinzari: Volleyball. She plays with family and friends.

Q: What are you reading now?

Holinsworth: Two books from this avid reader.
“A Game of Thrones” by George R. R. Martin. It’s the first in Martin’s popular medieval fantasy series, “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The series made it to No. 1 on the 2011 New York Times bestseller list and spawned an HBO television series, “Game of Thrones.” The stories have multiple plot lines and offer various points of view.
“Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. It’s a classic self-help book first published in 1937 and inspired by businessman Andrew Carnegie. “This book inspires me in some way just about every day,” Holinsworth says. “It’s changed the way I view things when it comes to my future and where I want to go.”

O’Neal: “The Sin Wars” by New York Times best-selling author Richard Knaak. While at the MagLab, O’Neal was reading this fantasy trilogy on his phone. It’s the saga of a secret war fought by the forces of good and evil, with the outcome sure to change humanity’s destiny.

Brinzari: “Nicholas II” by Edvard Radzinsky. A fan of Russian history, Brinzari — who is from the Republic of Moldova in Eastern Europe (between Romania and the Ukraine, formerly part of the now-dissolved Soviet Union) — has been reading (in Russian) several books about Nicholas II. He ruled from 1894 to 1917; during his reign, Russia transitioned from a great power into economic and military collapse.

Q: What type of music do you like to listen to?

O’Neal: “Music I can sing along to.” His favorite group is Maroon 5, led by rock singer Adam Levine (who’s also a judge on the reality television program “The Voice”).

Holinsworth: “I like music you can’t sing along to.” He prefers trance and electronic music; his favorite selections are “whatever D.J. Tiësto’s (of the Netherlands) latest tracks happen to be.”

Brinzari: Listens to a variety of music, but is a fan of classical music, especially Tchaikovsky.

Q: Was there a turning point when you decided to study science?

O’Neal: “I had a really amazing teacher for my first chemistry class in high school. He was really jazzed about it, and he explained things very clearly and very well. We did fun experiments and I thought, ‘Well this is it, this is what I like.’ The following year, I took the AP (advanced placement) chemistry course and again it was really enjoyable. I liked the material, the experiments, everything. I thought, ‘OK, chemistry it is.’ ”

Brinzari: “I was inspired by my older cousin while I was still in high school. By that time he was already deeply involved in chemistry, and he showed me how many answers you can find in science. It changed my attitude to science and ignited my curiosity and desire to learn more.”

Holinsworth: “For me, until I got to high school, I wasn’t being challenged and I just wanted to get out.” But in his junior year, he enrolled in — you guessed it — chemistry. “The teacher challenged me on a few things … . She got me to try, and I responded.”

Q: Describe how you and your peers make decisions during an experiment. What happens when people disagree?

Brinzari: “Communication is the key. If both of us disagree, you cannot say, ‘This is right and you are wrong.’ That’s not how it should work. The best way is, each of us explains his perspective and his way of solving the problem. Eventually, we all have something in common: We can combine ideas.”

Sometimes, though, the team may just try someone’s proposed solution — even if the others don’t think it will work.

Brinzari: “If there is a quick way to test it, why not? It’s sometimes easier instead of to keep arguing and arguing. If it doesn’t work, we switch to another idea, and if that doesn’t work, we try a third idea. And sometimes, none of them work and you have to come up with something else.”

During the team’s April trip to the MagLab, however, O’Neal and Holinsworth agreed that the decision-making process was pretty clear-cut.

O’Neal: “As first-time users, we were working with instruments we had never seen or used before.”

Holinsworth: “We made simple oversights, just because we didn’t know.”

O’Neal: “We looked to Tanya (Brinzari’s nickname) because she’s been here many times. She would explain in a way that it seemed logical. If there was an option we hadn’t considered, she would say, ‘Well, you could do this because of this, this and this.’ And we would be, ‘Oh, well, duh.’ That was actually a common theme: ‘Well, duh.’ ”

Q: Finish this sentence: We could make great strides in science, if we could just figure out … .

Holinsworth: “ … how to inspire more people to get into science, and how to truly work together to better humanity.”

O’Neal: “ … how to get enough money to do what we want. A lot of times, money limits what you can do versus what you want to do. I wish we could figure out how to make money not such a big factor.”

Brinzari: “ … how to use what Mother Nature gives us to its full potential, starting from human body and brain to the natural resources that form the world around us.”

Q: If you didn’t pursue science as a career, what would you do instead?

O’Neal: “Medicine. That was actually my original intent: to do biology and save lives.”

Holinsworth: “I would probably be an entrepreneur. That’s actually still my goal, but now I will combine the two with a greater vision for both.”

Brinzari: “I would probably go into history and be an archaeologist.”

Posted April 2012

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