Season 3 Episode 8 – Smell-o-vision?

[00:00:19] Bailey Tibbet: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Materials Universe podcast. I’m your host, Bailey Tibbet and I’m here with our co-host.

[00:00:27] Audrey Colgrove: Hello everyone. My name’s Audrey Colegrove.

[00:00:29] Bailey Tibbet: and today we’re here with Dr. Neha Kamat. She is an associate professor in the biomedical engineering department at Northwestern University.

She’s a member of the Center of Synthetic Biology and the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute. Hello, Dr. Kamat. How are you?

[00:00:44] Neha Kemat: I’m great. Thanks for

having me on the

[00:00:45] Audrey Colgrove: podcast

Totally.

starting by just explaining your research a little bit for us? Sure.

Sure.

[00:00:51] Neha Kemat: So I think a major question that drives me and my group is why do we have so many lipids? So we have, tens of thousands, maybe

close to 60,000 different kinds of lipids in our

[00:01:04] Audrey Colgrove: In

our body. In our body, yes. Okay.

[00:01:06] Neha Kemat: why, what are they doing? And so when you, when you’re told to eat Omega-3 fatty acids, for example, and they’re good for you, um, these are like the kind of lipids I’m talking about for, um, so they’re, they’re related to our health.

they’re controlling, a lot of cellular processes. And so my group is interested in what they’re doing and specifically the place you’ll find a lot of lipids are at the cell membrane. So a cell is our smallest unit of life. And the boundary of that cell is made out of lipids, that self-assemble into this like, beautiful, thin, structure we

call bilayer. , It’s very thin. it’s like 2.8 nanometers.

[00:01:45] Audrey Colgrove: So from my brief stint as a high school

biology teacher, I know lipids to be like

kind of fats.

Yeah Like fatty. Exactly, exactly. And so all of our cells have this like tiny, very thin layer of fat

[00:01:56] Neha Kemat: Exactly. Yep. And from an

origins of life perspective, which is sort of cool, we think these, these sort of sacks or, you know, bubbles of fat,

um, they spontaneously assemble. So we think they were just sort of floating around on a primitive earth and life like DNA and like RNA and DNA and proteins. They sort of evolved around those structures and benefited from.

Those structures. So I would say in the grand scheme of things, the lipid, she came first.

[00:02:25] Audrey Colgrove: interesting.

[00:02:26] Bailey Tibbet: like natural phase separation?

[00:02:28] Neha Kemat: exactly. Exactly.

[00:02:29] Audrey Colgrove: we see these lipids on like single cell organisms?

[00:02:34] Neha Kemat: So the lipids are, um, they’re just a hallmark of life. Every single living thing we know of, um, you know, has, is has this container that you know, or it’s either a single cell organism or multi-cell organism. It’ll have this shell of fat around it. It allows for transport of different molecules across it.

It also has a bunch of really important proteins that sit at that interface that are important for communication. Um, you know, if you have a hormone released, there’ll be a receptor sitting on a cell membrane that, that binds that molecule and then initiates a bunch of things inside the cell. So in our group, we’re.

We actually think all of those lipids and the diversity that we have is important because it leads to interesting like mechanical properties in that lipid environment. So it dictates how soft or how stiff or how thick or how curved it is, and then that those properties control the function of proteins.

and we’re interested in understanding that. we do two things. We build these membranes from scratch and study how a protein behaves in a membrane we’ve designed, and then we take what we learn and we try to build useful, tools. So things like biosensors, membrane based biosensors, or therapeutic drug delivery type vehicles.

But the common thread is always. Thinking really carefully about how we’re building that membrane and which lipids we’re using, measuring the properties of it, and then putting membrane proteins in that can function, in useful ways.

[00:03:59] Audrey Colgrove: I really wanna move on to your next, the next part of your research in a moment. But I, I had a question come up that I think I. Answered, but I wanted to like vocalize it. Uh, how different can lipids be from like, other lipids? because, uh, because then I started thinking about it and answering it, like thinking about the lipids that I like cook with and how they can be Yeah

[00:04:18] Neha Kemat: Yes.

[00:04:19] Audrey Colgrove: fat or lard versus like olive oil or avocado oil.

[00:04:22] Bailey Tibbet: should look up lipid nomenclature.

[00:04:24] Audrey Colgrove: Lipid nomenclature.

Yeah, because because

[00:04:26] Neha Kemat: right, they’re very different in olive oil. I think you’ll have a lot of oleic acid. So there are the things that are sitting in your. Cell membranes as a mammal are, they have like two little fatty chains and then they have like a polar head group.

Um, so that’s kind of a classic structure, but a lot of diversity comes from like how, how many double bonds are in that lipid? So the more double bonds, the more, um, oil like it’s gonna become the more liquidy. Yeah. And then the more saturated. It can pack really tightly and you’re gonna get things like butter.

Yeah. There’s like so many different kinds you, the lipids that you’ll find will change based on the organism that you’re looking at. So, um, like archaea, like we’ll have like some crazy lipids. Um, our mitochondria actually, which we think evolved from bacteria, right? They’re not like they’re these cool things that now live inside us, but they have.

These sweet lipids that have four like chains called cardio lipins, cardiolipin lipids. There’s this really cool study, um, by, um, Itai Budin who’s out at UCSD, and he traveled down into like the deep sea and collected organisms and started looking at their lipids and they have.

Totally different lipids because they’re under really high pressure environments. So they have to have these lipids that bend in like almost an opposite way to ours, so that under pressure they look normal, um, and can do the self-assembly thing. It’s kind of trippy, but like organisms will change the lipids that they have based on their environment.

So if you, if you move them into a hot environment, they’ll change the lipids so that. their membranes won’t melt, you know? Um, and then if you put them down into deep sea environments, they’ll change the lipids they’re working with so that they can really maintain the structure.

[00:06:12] Audrey Colgrove: I feel like you predicted my question a little bit ’cause I was like, what different lip liquids would be in an aquatic animal because simply because

[00:06:19] Neha Kemat: right. Environment. Right,

[00:06:20] Audrey Colgrove: Right, But also I feel like we describe a lot of aquatic animals as like oily or slimy. So it kind of makes sense a little.

[00:06:26] Neha Kemat: Yeah. Oh yeah, you’re

right. Like, like salmon,

[00:06:28] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah,

[00:06:30] Bailey Tibbet: Yeah. This is actually probably the closest in terms of guests on the podcast that we’ve had to my research

[00:06:36] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah. Oh, cool.

[00:06:37] Neha Kemat: yeah. It was

[00:06:37] Bailey Tibbet: Oh, cool. Yeah, I’m studying. The effects of the fluidity of the membrane on, uh, my EET bacteria, Chanel and dens. So I actually know a fair amount about lipids, but I’m mostly restricted to the biology or the bacteria.

[00:06:54] Neha Kemat: okay.

[00:06:54] Audrey Colgrove: so then I’ll be asking the

[00:06:55] Bailey Tibbet: question.

[00:06:56] Audrey Colgrove: today

[00:06:56] Neha Kemat: No, but that’s, that’s

[00:06:57] Bailey Tibbet: Yeah, so

We like looking at like a membrane protein basically. So the hypothesis is kind of built on, you know, the fluidity of the membrane. The construction of it will affect this as protein’s ability to do things

[00:07:09] Neha Kemat: We’re very aligned in in our questions that we’re asking.

[00:07:11] Audrey Colgrove: But

To

I

[00:07:12] Bailey Tibbet: like I’m looking in a mirror

[00:07:14] Audrey Colgrove: to think about,

Sorry to go back. I’m thinking about the fact that the structure has to be fundamentally different to function under that kind of pressure. And I, I was aware generally that like fish structure is different the deeper in the ocean you go. But to think about it on like, not even just a cellular level, but like a material level of inside, it’s not just that the fish is shape as like a fish needs to be different.

It’s also that like it’s chemical makeup, maybe not chemical

[00:07:41] Neha Kemat: Yeah, no,

[00:07:41] Bailey Tibbet: No, it’s

[00:07:42] Neha Kemat: the internal structure is down to the small subunit has to be different.

[00:07:46] Audrey Colgrove: so we can’t just go live underwater.

[00:07:48] Neha Kemat: You and, and these fish. Um, I remember hearing a talk by eai, like, when they would bring them up to the surface, they would dissolve, like,

[00:07:55] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah, the blob fish that just like Yes. Deflates

[00:07:58] Bailey Tibbet: really sad

[00:07:59] Neha Kemat: it’s,

[00:08:00] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah. Underwater. It looks completely different. So what are y’all doing with your lipids?

[00:08:04] Neha Kemat: So one of the things, so we ask these questions like, okay, what are the, the composition in properties doing to a protein? But then what we’ll do is, for example, we’re trying to take really useful membrane proteins, and then. Build things like biosensors out of them. So I’ll talk a little bit about this in my seminar today, but we’ve been interested in this class of proteins called two component systems.

Um, they’re like the GPCRs, if we can talk about what GPCRs are, um, but of bacteria. So basically bacteria have all these different proteins that sit at on their surface that are designed to detect like hormones, light, different chemicals. I think it’s just a library of things that help the bacteria survive.

And what we’d love to do is like take that protein system and then take it out of the bacteria and put it into something more, you know, bottom up that we’ve designed. And the goal there is like, can we harness that function of sensing a chemical and then reporting that that chemical’s been sensed without having to keep anything alive.

Oh,

[00:09:07] Audrey Colgrove: Oh,

[00:09:08] Neha Kemat: and, we think there’s a lot of utility there going forward where you might be able to swap out the protein you’re interested in. It might be easier manufacturing wise where you’re like, oh, I just need the protein and the membrane and I don’t need anything to live.

[00:09:23] Audrey Colgrove: So for like a really crude example, would it make sense to say y’all are essentially attempting to make really tiny versions of like pH testing strips? Yes.

[00:09:34] Neha Kemat: to totally, yes. But, and like with the potential capability of not just saying, Hey, this pH is here. what we do is we’ll take the guts of a cell, like all the protein, biosynthesis, machinery, so that we can couple like sensing to, let’s actually like, make something useful. So let’s say I sensed.

A pH change, but I actually wanted to then produce, um, an enzyme that’s going to convert the pH back. Like I can do that with all of these cellular parts in a way that I maybe wouldn’t be able to do with like a super simple system, but that could be overly complicated with like a whole cell.

[00:10:11] Audrey Colgrove: we’ve been talking about cells a lot on the podcast recently, and I think we recently had a conversation with someone where they were also essentially frankensteining a cell, kind of together, like

taking the pieces to make something that can function.

Yeah.

[00:10:24] Neha Kemat: Dr. Belardi?

[00:10:25] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah

[00:10:25] Neha Kemat: Yes. I’m excited. Yes. Yeah. I’m gonna meet with him today and then I, I know all about the Belardi uh, group ’cause they’re, they’re awesome. And, and I think I would describe it totally that way. It’s like you’re making a Frankenstein sell. Um, but hopefully it’ll only. Do what you want. Yeah. Because there’s a lot of concerns. People like don’t wanna deploy cells in a lot of environments. Like they might escape, So there’s always that.

[00:10:48] Bailey: You don’t want an actual Frankenstein’s monster yeah,

[00:10:50] Neha Kemat: yeah. Right,

[00:10:50] Bailey: right.

[00:10:51] Neha Kemat: With the capability of reproducing and making more,

[00:10:53] Audrey Colgrove: That was like a big question when we were a talking to Dr. Belardi, an ethical kinda concern when it comes to developing cells that do things that they weren’t like originally like naturally built for.

[00:11:06] Neha Kemat: Right. And like, Are we introducing something that will, ruin that habitat or environment? So I actually think the artificial cell approach like addresses that. Mm-hmm. Concern by saying like, Hey, this isn’t gonna reproduce, um, what I also like is that there’s, an ongoing, um, discussion among, I think the artificial cell community and synthetic biology community in general about like, you know,

where are the ethical lines and just being really thoughtful about just even asking the questions about what, when does something become dangerous?

[00:11:37] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah. There was some kind of thing that Dr. Belardi was talking about it was like a cell, like, group of people that were all talking about the ethics of cells.

[00:11:45] Neha Kemat: Oh, is it like the build a cell group?

[00:11:47] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah. It was build a cell because it reminded me of Build-A-Bear

[00:11:49] Neha Kemat: Yes. Build, yes. Okay. So I, and i’m part of this, community as well. We have this, um, great. Group of people like labs scattered across like the us um, focused on this idea of like building an artificial cell there’s like groups like this in Europe and denmark, um, like Denmark, I’m thinking like in Germany, London. They also have their own build to cell initiatives. Some of the goals are, um, can we have some like reproducible procedures that, that like between one group to another actually works. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. Um, defining some of our goals, like right now a big goal is energy. Um, you can. One of the problems when you like make a Frankenstein cell is how do you keep it running? And that’s a huge limitation because, it has like the resources, the a TP that you put in it, and right now we don’t have ways to sort of replenish it. Effectively there are like, you know, theoretical ways to do it, but there’s a shelf life.

[00:12:47] Audrey Colgrove: Ah, oh, interesting. Yeah. So,

[00:12:49] Neha Kemat: one of those, like, this is good and is it like, it’s a safety feature, but it’s also, it can be. Become a problem if you, when we start thinking about like cost effectiveness and like how long these are gonna run.

[00:13:01] Audrey Colgrove: interesting, so to kind of go back, would you mind expanding, what was it? The, the GPCR?

[00:13:08] Neha Kemat: So G-protein coupled receptors, they’re a really important class of proteins that sit in our, in mammalian cells and they will sense things anywhere from like hormones, um, to various different chemicals. And they’re. Really, you know, serotonin I think is detected by A-G-P-C-R.

People have really wanted to understand and sort of, um, leverage them, I guess, in like taking them out the cells and put them into synthetic sort of membranes to try to design sensors that, that function the way our cells do. So it’s, it’s just a really like important class of proteins is, is what I would say.

[00:13:45] Bailey Tibbet: They’re like really tiny noses,

[00:13:47] Neha Kemat: Yes. There you go. There you go. Which is a question that I’m also interested in is like, how do you like, and a lot of people are, which is how do you like create a tiny nose, an

[00:13:59] Bailey Tibbet: Like an effective tiny nose. Yeah. Such a simple structure, but,

[00:14:02] Neha Kemat: but it’s one that would require basically these membrane proteins. So that’s one of the compelling reasons to figure out how to work with membrane proteins outside of their native environment.

It’s like those are the things that are detecting all the volatile chemicals

[00:14:15] Bailey Tibbet: Is there like a biofeedback system that your lab is currently super interested in,

or just like a specific, I guess, like sensing mechanism that you really want to kind of

[00:14:25] Neha Kemat: Oh yeah. Scent. Scent for sure. I think, um, if I had to choose any, it would be smell. It’s just this, it’s like, it’s just useful scent and it. It’s really remarkable how we can take in this like complex mixture and it connects to our brain and we know exactly what that smell is, but it’s, it’s like an array of chemicals.

It’s never just one. Um, and so how are we going to, how would we replicate that? Um, I’ve been interested in this idea of like, how might we smell under water? Like, how could you take that sense, right? Like how can we take a sense and then do something really unusual with it, like have it happen in a new environment?

Um, and, and what would that look

[00:15:09] Audrey Colgrove: To to rewind a bit, do we even have technology that sense smells currently?

[00:15:14] Neha Kemat: We have really, we, we have mass spec.

[00:15:17] Audrey Colgrove: Mass spec. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:18] Neha Kemat: And that’s the way we’re doing

[00:15:20] Audrey Colgrove: it. Yeah.

But we don’t have, like when you get like a Lego robot hit, there’s a light sensor. Yeah. But there’s not like a smell sensor because that technology is not easily accessible

[00:15:29] Neha Kemat: exactly. And it relies on this like ligand two receptor binding interaction and how do you get a receptor, which loves to live in this fat environment to actually function on the surface of like hardware. So that’s, um, there’s there like we’re working on this problem, other people are working on it.

Um, but I think there’s some cool applications

[00:15:50] Audrey Colgrove: Well, and to, to go back to the tiny noses comment, are the GPCRs, are they like independent noses? Because when I think about my nose, without it being connected to like my brain, for example, it can’t really function

[00:16:04] Neha Kemat: you have to have the function of these channels Yeah. Connect to an electronic interface. And so the way that like. You might think about doing that is you have an eye, like an ion channel. Yeah. Um, there, there are a lot of ligated ion channels where you bind the ligand and then an ion moves through it.

That ion is like the thing that’s going to interface with the electronic. Yeah. System and then it can record it. Yeah. Um, and then you would have to start doing some like really crazy cool like machine learning training of like, here’s a, here’s a bunch of chemicals, this is what it means. Yeah.

You know, this

[00:16:40] Audrey Colgrove: is,

[00:16:40] Neha Kemat: is vanilla and like this is, uh, I don’t know.

[00:16:43] Bailey Tibbet: Each

a nose, fingerprint.

[00:16:45] Neha Kemat: Yeah. No, it, it’s kind of

[00:16:46] Audrey Colgrove: It’s kind of like training those like scent dogs

[00:16:48] Neha Kemat: that

[00:16:48] Audrey Colgrove: like Oh yeah detect cancer and stuff. Interesting. So you have to train yourself. Yeah.

[00:16:52] Neha Kemat: Yes.

[00:16:52] Bailey Tibbet: you still need an actuator that functions. Yeah.

[00:16:54] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:56] Neha Kemat: And dogs smells so much better than us. So it’d be nice to like design things that smell better than dogs.

I

[00:17:01] Audrey Colgrove: You are making single cell dogs. Sorry, that’s such an oversimplification. I, well now I’m just thinking about tiny dogs, unfortunately, so what is the, like, ultimate goal or desired impact of this work?

[00:17:17] Neha Kemat: You know, you could, you could have the, the impact move in different directions. So like, if it was sense it was smelling or sensing, could we detect chemical threats underwater? Yeah. Um, you know, like fuel from, from a submarine or a neurotoxin in a, in a different location.

So there’s, there’s always that. That angle, um, which the US government loves, you know? Um, but then, but then I think we could get more creative with it. Like, like, you know, what’s around us that we can’t detect currently? How are we, we perceive our world based on these limited five senses. And if we could start designing devices that could see more and smell more mm-hmm.

Maybe we could interact with our world in a very different

[00:18:07] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah. And also I think you’d mentioned it earlier, like monitoring the environment in general is something that we could do with

[00:18:14] Neha Kemat: Yes. Especially with, you know, like our growing, food problems. You know, we’re, we’re losing land mass. We have growing population. I think, um, one of the projects that. Our rsec is actually involved in, is trying to sense, um, plant stress signals in soil and then like, can we, you know, design some sort of fertilizer or like hydrogel material that senses that stress and then releases maybe, you know, food for the, the plant.

[00:18:42] Audrey Colgrove: That sounds like a miracle because I accidentally killed my zinnias this, uh, last week by over fertilizing.

[00:18:49] Neha Kemat: Ah, there you go. You can over. Yes. And then I

[00:18:51] Audrey Colgrove: know you could over fertilize. And then I put too many worm castings on and my flowers are gone.

[00:18:55] Neha Kemat: I under fertilize chronically. So I, so

[00:18:58] Audrey Colgrove: That’s so interesting though. Like, basically like biomechanics in

[00:19:02] Neha Kemat: In the

[00:19:03] Audrey Colgrove: in

the soil. In the soil. In the Soil, yeah. And because

[00:19:04] Neha Kemat: And because a lot of farmers don’t, you know, fertilizer’s so precious and they don’t wanna waste it. Yeah. And we actually waste a ton of fertilizer. It just gets like washed away. So how can we, um, be more cost effective? Yeah.

[00:19:17] Audrey Colgrove: Although to, to take the segue that you very generously gave us, we’d love to talk to you about your time at the Northwestern Merc Ec. Oh

Oh yeah.

[00:19:23] Neha Kemat: yeah. we’ll start by advertising the Northwestern ME EC is one of, I think, the, one of the longest continuous running me ecs, which puts the pressure very high least to, to keep it going. We have, uh, you know, two igs like most, and then the group that I’m involved.

Is, um, has been focused on bringing artificial cells, I would say like biological capabilities, but into materials. So how do we think about. Programming living materials, which has, that concept of like a living material has been mostly approached with living cells. So can we like, you know, build a material out of living cells or embed them in living cells, but we would like to try to make these materials more modular.

Um, and so. And, and living cells are so hard to control. So can we design an artificial cell that goes in and kind of does some of these like sensing and response activities, but within a material with applications ranging from like soft robotics, like you could imagine having chemical sensing capabilities in a soft robot or, um, like the soil Yeah.

Um, idea.

[00:20:27] Audrey Colgrove: It’s really interesting to hear about the kind of, uh, the very, like the work that you guys are doing at the Northwestern Merc Ec, because I’m hearing a lot of similar words to the work we do.

Mm-hmm.

Like for example, soft robotics, I hear that pretty frequently in a couple of our labs, but ours are working on ways to like essentially make the knee of the robot that might

[00:20:46] Neha Kemat: Ooh, yes.

[00:20:47] Audrey Colgrove: you’re working on the senses for this theoretical mers EC robot all of the

[00:20:51] Neha Kemat: Yeah. We could put it together.

[00:20:54] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah

[00:20:54] Bailey Tibbet: that’s actually the secret purpose of every single meek.

[00:20:57] Audrey Colgrove: We’re all coming together to build like a new robot.

[00:21:00] Neha Kemat: Yes. Yeah, I think there, I think that we should probably collaborate

[00:21:04] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah. Well, and going back to Bailey’s famous quote on the podcast, the C in Meek is for collaboration. Well,

[00:21:12] Bailey Tibbet: I was just thinking I have so many, so I

[00:21:14] Audrey Colgrove: many, you do have so many

[00:21:15] Bailey Tibbet: many

[00:21:15] Audrey Colgrove: but that that’s one we keep but that that’s one we keep coming back to.

[00:21:17] Neha Kemat: that. Um, we, we get that emphasized a lot too. I, I like the Merc Ec for that reason, you’re expected to co-publish and work together. Um, so that has been, that’s been fun. We have a great group of people who are doing things from like 3D printing materials for the soft robotics applications to machine learning people and um, artificial cell people, which is me.

And then, um. And we’ve been trying to teach everyone we can about, about those and then, and sort of cell-free systems, which, um, when I talked about the guts of the cell, that’s the self, like we call those cell-free systems.

[00:21:50] Audrey Colgrove: Oh

[00:21:50] Neha Kemat: Oh. And how to engineer those, um, to sense and respond to the things you want. Yeah.

[00:21:54] Audrey Colgrove: yeah. Interesting. So what is the. Coming from someone who’s in a part of a different Mers ec, what does the kind of collaborative spirit look like for you guys, I guess?

[00:22:07] Neha Kemat: Yeah, we, um, you kinda have to like each other. Yeah, that’s what I, that’s what I’ve discovered in my 10 years of doing this. Um, and we do, uh, so we, we meet on a weekly basis. Um, finding times for a bunch of professors and students

[00:22:23] Audrey Colgrove: believe me, it’s hard to find time where everyone’s available at the same time.

[00:22:29] Neha Kemat: I missed all the winter ones ’cause I was teaching, you know, but, we meet on a weekly basis and we have the students present.

Mm-hmm. Um, so typically like two students are presenting. We only ever get through one presentation and then, and um, and then we’re at the stage where we’re trying to. Like really get our papers out. Um, so we, from the beginning we had these like, collaborative projects, but we’re we’re, um, starting to feel the pressure of like, okay, let’s, let’s deliver.

[00:22:56] Audrey Colgrove: it’s a cycle thing with the me ec. Yeah. You do have to like, there are like kind of like it’s a life cycle of a me ec from when you’re funded to like the six years to the end. And there’s definitely like a year or two where it’s just like, let me get the papers out. We gotta have, we gotta get them on the website.

[00:23:10] Bailey Tibbet: We,

[00:23:10] Neha Kemat: we gotta get ’em out. But it’s, it’s a unique mechanism. Like other grant agencies are like, here,

[00:23:15] Audrey Colgrove: you know,

[00:23:16] Neha Kemat: group, here’s some money, do this thing. But I think it’s this, this mechanism is so collaborative that you have the potential to do some really cool stuff. And I see more grants like moving towards that more multidisciplinary multi-group approach, which is nice.

Yeah.

[00:23:33] Audrey Colgrove: Uh, I wanted to hit one more thing before we have to, um, let you go today. You, um, you did research as a high schooler under someone who’s now here at ut, Dr. Joan Benicky. Yeah, that’s right. Awesome. How did that impact your career? Because obviously you’re still doing

[00:23:49] Neha Kemat: Ah, it was, I think, a critical experience. So when I was in high school, um, I went to John Adams High School, a public high school, very nice. Uh, and they had a science research program, um, and they would pair us with different labs, um, or different, you know, places to do experiments. And I got the opportunity to go and work with Joan Brecky, who, um, was at Notre Dame at the time in the chemical engineering department.

And I had this little project studying the toxicity of ionic liquids, um, which are like a, a special kind of chemical. I decided after reading like the, the way to do it was to look at their toxicity, um, on Daphne Magna, which is like this like interesting aquatic organism.

Um, so I had to go like set up. Um, these aquatic tanks, and that was fun and new. But I would say that process taught me a lot about the research. Just experience and process, which is like, you just have to figure stuff out. Like people will give you a task and you have to have enough agency, and guts, fearlessness.

Like you have to go talk to random people. Like, can I have that aquarium that’s sitting over there? You know? Or, and, and, um, and I, I liked the freedom that was there, um, to kind of run with a project, but I think. Um, what also I really benefited from was seeing how awesome, you know, Joan Brenke was. And I’ve been fortunate to have a couple really strong female role, role models in my career, especially at the early, like, early stages.

I worked with, um, Dr. Renick in high school and Jennifer West. I was another, um, professor I worked with at Rice, and so I just got to see like, it was just like all the amazing things they were doing and it, it made it seem like I could too, so.

[00:25:43] Audrey Colgrove: I love that. Are there any, um, are there any lessons you’ve kind of taken with you through your career from some of these mentors?

[00:25:50] Neha Kemat: Oh, that’s a great question. There’s so much resilience. I, I find in the people I admire and respect most, they’re, they tend to be like kind and respectful people. Like, you know, they’re, they have their goals, but they tend to be, um, happy about what they’re doing.

Um, they work pretty hard. Like, I think you see that with people you admire. Like, oh, they’re working really hard, I’m gonna have to work hard to

[00:26:16] Audrey Colgrove: do, um,

[00:26:19] Neha Kemat: I have to think about that more. There’s, there’s a lot of lessons. Um,

[00:26:24] Audrey Colgrove: The, the role of mentors has also been kind of a through line on the podcast

[00:26:28] Neha Kemat: for us.

Yeah.

[00:26:28] Audrey Colgrove: Uh, we, we love asking people about it because you kind of see people’s faces change. Yes. When you, when you ask about their mentor and, and the same thing kind of happened to you.

It’s like a very, like wholesome and fond kind of feeling to think about the people who’ve impacted you and how, and in, in this specific journey,

[00:26:45] Neha Kemat: right?

It’s an important experience to see somebody often that looks in some way, like you doing something that you might wanna do. It, it opens the door to it. Um, but also they kind of show you what’s needed to do it, you know, how they, how they approach their job, how they approach people,

[00:27:02] Audrey Colgrove: yeah.

[00:27:02] Neha Kemat: so.

[00:27:03] Bailey Tibbet: Yeah, we like to talk a lot about like people’s pathways to academia

here or like, was this what you thought you were gonna do 10 years ago? Like that kind of thing.

[00:27:12] Neha Kemat: Yeah, I, yeah, that’s, and I, I, I went to grad school thinking I was gonna be going to

[00:27:17] Audrey Colgrove: Industry really.

And so,

[00:27:19] Neha Kemat: but I just, um. I really liked it. I liked the research. There’s so much freedom. I don’t think you’re allowed to do whatever you want in industry.

You can’t be like, I’m gonna study lipids. And, um, but I also had a really terrific PhD mentor who, who sort of was like, you can do this. And sometimes you just need to hear that.

[00:27:37] Audrey Colgrove: That’s amazing. Yeah. Support is so necessary.

[00:27:42] Neha Kemat: Yeah. I try to remember that like, now being on the other side, you sometimes you just need really someone to say like, you’re doing okay.

[00:27:48] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah. Well, so, um, we are almost out of time. We have one question that we ask, um, all of our guests on the podcast, um, just ’cause we’re, we’re trying to learn something new every day. Um, and so we, we wanted to ask if there were any emerging like trends or technologies or anything in the kind of field of material science that you think is gonna be really impactful or really cool in the next decade.

[00:28:13] Neha Kemat: Ooh, this is a great one. I think. I think this interface between the artificial cell and materials is where I’m really kind of digging in and interested. Um, if we wanna deploy them as coatings, you know, put them in, in new environments, we’re gonna have to figure out. How to embed them into different materials.

Maybe even, like, you can think about fibers and textiles, like are what are our clothes gonna look like, um, in the future when we have, when they have like, biological sensing capabilities. Um, right. I don’t know. So

[00:28:46] Audrey Colgrove: I’m a little horrified, but also really intrigued.

[00:28:49] Bailey Tibbet: I,

[00:28:49] Neha Kemat: actually think there, I mean there was a company that started, I thought.

Chris Voight, who out at MIT had tried to start this with Lululemon. Um, really? Yeah. I don’t think you need to see where there are bacteria growing on

[00:29:01] Audrey Colgrove: oh, no.

[00:29:02] Neha Kemat: your workout clothes. But, there, I think there could be, you know, maybe other cool directions for that. But yeah. How do we embed. these biological capabilities into different types of materials.

I think neuromorphic is like this other emerging area, where when we think about computing, we have like a really classic like hardware, approach to computing, but that’s not how our brain works. And our brain operates at an astoundingly low. Like energy consumption rate. If you think about like how much food we eat and like how much thinking we do.

Yeah, it’s amazing. And, how do we think about designing computers like that? It’s gonna have to take this sort of, again, bio, materials interface question into account that’s.

[00:29:42] Audrey Colgrove: That is so interesting and also a little

[00:29:45] Neha Kemat: Yeah, I

[00:29:46] Audrey Colgrove: Yeah.

[00:29:46] Neha Kemat: I think so. I think computers will look different and I think, um, our clothes will look different.

[00:29:50] Audrey Colgrove: Well, society always loves to progress on clothes.

[00:29:55] Neha Kemat: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:56] Audrey Colgrove: Well, thank you so much for joining

[00:29:58] Neha Kemat: us. Thank

[00:29:58] Audrey Colgrove: It’s been really wonderful. ​