Collaborators and Friends

The three have worked together for more than a decade now, and their collaboration shows no signs of slowing down. White was instrumental is landing a large AFOSR MURI grant in 2005, while Moore was the principal investigator on another MURI grant this past year. Sottos describes herself as the person who looks to the details of the experiments, while Moore is referred to as the group's "rock star chemist." In a previous article, Moore said this about their collaborations: "None of us are trying to focus the spotlight on ourselves; it really is a group activity. We all know we can't do it alone. For me personally this is a level of science that I know I could never do myself but is incredibly enjoyable to be involved in. We all take different leads on different portions of it." He also described White as the team's "self-healing guru."

Sottos: (smiling) I believe in the article Scott White was referred to as a visionary. That is absolutely true.

White: That's what they say when you don't really do much (drawing big laughs).

Sottos: No, having the bigger picture of how everyone fits together is an important part. I tend to be the more detail-oriented person who is going to do the experiment. We all work on the microvascular composites, for example. Rather than bullets with one through five, I will think about how the experiment is going to demonstrate the healing and make sure that it is precise and that it's done correctly.

White: In any of those (research projects), along the way there were all kinds of times where any of us at one point would think 'forget it, this is too hard it's not going to work.' But you see multiple examples of a long process coming to fruition and being successful and it is extremely gratifying. It's really what motivates me to continue to do this.

Moore: I think part of the reason that we can make these long-term projects work is because it's hard to bail when you know you've got two other people who are still there going hard at it. Why would I walk away if they are going to hang in there. We sort of reinforce each other that way.

Sottos: When I started with this, the selfhealing and interdisciplinary research was such a small part of my research program. It would be hard to go backwards, I wouldn't want to.

Sottos: When we were joking about Jeff being a rock star chemist, which of course he is, one thing that is important about this collaboration is that often engineers are kind of itching to work with scientists but not all scientists want to get involved with technology and engineering because it is a different kind of field. The benefit to engineering is often pretty clear. Jeff is awfully good at working with us non-purists.

Moore: We all have a competitive spirit I would say. We're also pretty unselfish. I think that's a key thing too. It's for the good of the group as opposed to any one individual. People have asked (about our collaboration) because these papers and this topic have gotten a lot of press. There is a lot craziness associated with this topic. Normally when you work in a group it's hard to survive because everyone wants the spotlight. But that actually settles out very well for us.

White: It's very clear that this mode and the Beckman support and the space that we have and everything we utilize here is the model of how to do this. Others are looking at it and trying to catch up. I'm very grateful that we have this opportunity here and it's the way of the future and the way it should be done.

Group Dynamics, Student Interactions Produce Successful Research

Teaching and interacting with students on research projects are vital parts of their work at the University, say White, Sottos, and Moore. In bi-monthly meetings with the Autonomic Materials Systems sub-group that works on self-healing projects, students give power point presentations to 20 to 30 fellow students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty members, including White, Sottos, and Moore. During the meeting, probing questions about experiment choices, suggestions for improving results, and other contributions flow from the faculty and often from the students present. It's a process that both prods the research forward and gives the budding scientists a chance to test out their work in front of an interdisciplinary audience of mentors and peers. "I think the more chances that I get to present the work the better scientist I am going to be because people ask questions that I never would have thought about," said group member Mary Caruso, a Ph.D. candidate in Chemistry. Caruso was lead author with Moore, White, and Sottos on an important new paper that came out in Macromolecules describing an improved, more practical method for creating a self-healing microencapsulated system. Caruso said she came to Illinois to work with Moore but now "The three of them all play a role in our projects. It's very supportive. I absolutely love it because I was trained as a chemist but now I am doing more materials science. I'm still working on the Ph.D. in chemistry even though I don't really do chemistry every day. I think the collaborative efforts that we have (in the group) are fantastic."

Sottos: I think our approach to research and our academic lives are similar. Even though we are in different areas, we have a similar philosophy about our role in the University, University research, how you interact with students. That's an important part because we interact with students similarly. Getting good research done is more important than the fact that it's my research or Scott's research or Jeff's research. Achieving something new is important, and having students involved, training students in a certain way, building a collaborative group, are important.

White: I think we all subscribe to the belief that the students are the most important thing coming out of here. It doesn't matter if it's my student or Jeff's or Nancy's; in fact we co-advise almost all of the students. We don't claim ownership of a student; it's that person that we're trying to educate, get their feet on the ground and have them succeed.

Sottos: Definitely there is a lot of coadvising and of course they belong to their departments but the group has an important role for them. They do need to interact in the group in order to make progress on their projects. The group has a dynamic to itself. I think that's the unique part, that the combined group has a dynamic that is separate from the individual groups that each of us have. We had a couple of students, key students, who crossed boundaries. There is a graduate student chemist who was working with Jeff; he made a full transition to understanding a lot of engineering. He used to ask these amazing questions, really pertinent and insightful, at group meetings. This would lead Scott's engineering students to take a much harder look, dig deeper into the chemistry, and ask in-depth questions so that they can also talk the talk. It's been a nice process to see that happen. It used to be more of us questioning students.

White: This is symptomatic of interdisciplinary research. The questions that you might get from a chemistry student asking a mechanics student about their work opens up new thoughts for the mechanician, and the same goes both ways. It advances the level of everybody. That is key to the success that we have had. The group has grown and meshed so well.

Moore: An example of that is some recent progress (with the Macromolecules paper). One of my students, Mary Caruso, drew from something that Nancy's student had already made progress on. The two of them started talking and then, instead of us basically driving the research, it's safe to say that the two of them were driving it. The two of them would come and shows us results. Mary is so much in the group; at core she joined my group but I can't say that she is just a member of my group. She's lost her identity (he said with a laugh) and is no longer squarely chemistry, and for this work those are some of the best students. They're willing to give up their identity and do what the problem is demanding.