Cora Lind-Kovacs

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ORAL HISTORIES
Interviewed by
Jon Phillips
Interview date
Location
Baltimore, Maryland
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Interview of Cora Lind-Kovacs by Jon Phillips on July 10, 2023,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/48320

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Abstract

In this interview conducted at the 2023 ACA meeting, Cora Lind-Kovacs, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Toledo, discusses her life and career in crystallography. She describes her early life and education in Germany, and her arrival in the United States to pursue graduate work on a Rotary Club fellowship. She recounts her graduate studies on inorganic materials, particularly negative thermal expansion (NTE) materials, working at the National Synchrotron Light Source. She discusses structural work conducted in collaboration with industrial partners, including an notable digression on the history of battery technology. Finally, she reflects on her teaching career, her involvement with the ACA, including her service as Vice President and President of the Society, and her highly successful sideline as an amateur martial artist.

Transcript

Phillips:

Today is July 10th, 2023. I'm here at the ACA meeting in Baltimore. I'm talking with Dr. Cora Lind-Kovacs. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. As I mentioned a moment ago, I'd like to start off with just some biographical information. Can you tell me about your family, growing up, where you were born, what your parents did, that sort of thing?

Lind-Kovacs:

I was actually born and raised in Germany. I was born close to the Alsace border. But when I was 3, we moved to Wuppertal, which is about an hour from Cologne, which is a city most people are more familiar [laugh] with than Wuppertal, because my dad got a job there at the university. My parents both studied math, and they met studying math. My dad then became a professor in math education, actually, and so he had a temporary position in the place where my sister and I both were born. I have one sister who is two years younger. Then we moved to Wuppertal, where he took a permanent position. That is where I lived until I left Germany [laugh] in 1997 to come to the United States. Growing up, I obviously grew up in an academic household. It was interesting because it was never even a question that we would one day go to university. That just seemed to be something that was normal. What for - that was something you will have to figure that out.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I think there wasn't even an expectation that we would go into science. It was as long as you like what you're doing, that's fine, and we'll just take it from there. Basically, obviously, we still grew up in a household that had people who were science literate, and my dad always encouraged curiosity. He would teach us things. We would go for a hike, and he would show us what fruits from trees or things like that were edible and which ones were not. We learned to pick mushrooms and stuff like that. That's just one of those things where I was always intrigued by certain things, and I started asking questions. I was one of those children that would have driven non-academic parents nuts.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Why? Why is this? Why is that? How does that work? But I grew up in a household where that was cultured, so that was really cool. I also grew up in a village, so we had a lot of nature around. But it was also a village where you had a lot of people who were kind of academics, more educated people. The elementary school there was actually one of the best elementary schools in the city. The kids who went to school in that village usually were very well prepared for secondary school. In Germany, grade 1 through 4 is elementary school, and then you go to secondary school. I went to gymnasium, one of the secondary schools. That was the first time I really truly was exposed to the different sciences, of course. It's actually really funny in hindsight because physics in grade 5 and 6, I thought, was the most stupid subject in the world.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Of course, in grade 5 and 6, you just can't do a lot, right? We would take a mixture of sand and salt, and dissolve it in water, and filter it. It was boring. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

There wasn't anything to learn. It was just stupid work. The first time I had chemistry, in grade 7, I thought that was even more stupid than physics. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

It wasn't until I had physics again in grade 8 and 9 that it started making sense, and I started to be interested in it, and we actually went to an exhibit. Anyone who hears about these exhibits or museums that are hands-on, yes, they are very important because that is what really got me to say, wow, this actually makes sense, and I should pay attention. That's when I really started to pay attention in physics class, and started to enjoy it. Then I had chemistry again in grade 9 and 10, and really decided I liked that as well. One of my hardest decisions was actually when I graduated, whether I wanted to study chemistry or physics, because I found both absolutely fascinating. Now, we didn't have enough people interested in physics, so I could only take it as a regular subject. I did have the equivalent of AP classes in math and chemistry.

Eventually, I decided I just had an edge when it came to chemistry, because I had an AP class, and I was extremely well prepared. That is why I eventually decided to enroll in chemistry as an undergrad in 1994 back in Germany. I don't regret that decision. I might be saying the same if I look back on things, and if I had started to study physics. But it's not really surprising that I eventually ended up in a field that is borderline between physics and chemistry. I started my undergrad which, in Germany, was only two years until your pre-diploma at that point in time. Did my pre-diploma with all excellents in 1996. That's different than here. You don't get grades in your regular classes. That didn't exist back then. But you had final comprehensive oral exams in organic, inorganic, physical chemistry, and I'm blanking on what the fourth one was—physics, actually, yes, physics. That's of course a very different ball game, right, because you have an oral exam. That oral exam can go anywhere because it's you and the examiner. [laugh] It's just really funny because a lot of people were always very, very nervous when it comes to going into these exams. There were times when I was a little nervous, but I also had learned to stand my ground. One exam that I remember vividly was not the final comprehensive exam but an oral exam for one of the lab classes, which had been on qualitative analysis. This professor was known to sometimes be very mean, and really sidetrack you, and ask you trick questions and stuff like that. I came in there, and he said, "You've done the qualitative analysis. Let's assume you have an insoluble residue. What do you do?" I'm thinking, is this a real question or is this a trick question? I counter with, "Insoluble in what?" [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

That really set the tone for the whole thing, because he started laughing. He said, "OK, I give you a sample. What do you do?" Then we took it through things. We eventually really arrived at insoluble solid. Most of those oral exams, I learned something. I think that is part of my upbringing in an academic family that I knew you'll never know everything, and it's about learning. I wasn't nervous about not being able to answer a question, which really gave me a big advantage when it came to these oral exams. I didn't have to do a ton of boring questions because we established pretty clearly [laugh] that I had a reasonable understanding of things. It was actually that same professor that then called me up, and said, "Would you be interested in a year in the United States?" He was a member of the Rotary Club in Wuppertal. Georgia has something called the Georgia Rotary Student Program, where they bring students from all over the world to Georgia every year for a year. This started back in the 1940s when one of their Rotarians traveled Germany after the war, and said, "If we want to make sure that this never happens again, we need to make sure that nations understand each other."

Phillips:

Yes.

Lind-Kovacs:

I was interested, and so I applied, and I was accepted. In 1997, I went to the United States for what was supposed to be one year in the Georgia Rotary Student Program. This professor had also told me, "Make sure you get accepted as a graduate student, because if you get accepted as an undergraduate, you can take classes in how-many-hamburgers-can-you-eat."

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Which was of course somewhat of an exaggeration. But after seeing what the undergraduate program here is, I understand why he told me to apply for graduate school. I had done one year of graduate studies in Germany already. Now, because I only had three years at the university, apparently Georgia Tech had some discussions, but eventually decided they would permit me to start my graduate studies there. The same professor also told me, "If you get part of a master's thesis in inorganic chemistry done, you've fulfilled your inorganic requirements in Wuppertal, no questions asked." Now, that was about 70% of the things I would have had to do in my fourth year in my studies there, so this was a really good deal. Go to the US for a year, come back, make up for about three months or something—I took some exams earlier, like law for chemists, which I clearly couldn't take in the US—and basically not really waste time. That's a win-win situation.

I went to the US, and decided I wanted to join an inorganic group because that was what I was missing—advanced lab class, some advanced lectures, and a research period—because in Germany we had to do research in inorganic, organic, physical, and one elective before we could choose our diploma research topic. I had done the organic and physical chemistry already, and inorganic was the next one pending. I went around after taking the entrance exams, and interviewed with professors, and chose a research group, and I do not regret that choice. I chose to work with Angus Wilkinson. I interviewed with three professors. One of them was working on nanomaterials, which back then I felt were just one of those fashionable things, and I didn't want to do what everybody else wanted to do. The other two professors both had interesting projects. Now, one of them immediately made the statement, "This would be something to teach you overnight or during the weekend." I thought, I'm here on a Rotary fellowship. I also have obligations to Rotary. This could be an issue. The third professor, the one I ended up working for, was the one who suggested a project that nobody in his group was working on. He had read some papers. The big publications about some negative thermal expansion materials had just come out in Science. But zirconium tungstate was only thermodynamically stable between 1,105 and 1,235 centigrade, so really high temperatures. He also had just read some of the pioneering work by some of the French scientists that were working on non-hydrolytic sol-gel chemistry. He proposed it would be really interesting to see whether you can make this material at lower temperatures using these methods. Now, he thought I wasn't going to take this because nobody was working on it.

I found that extremely attractive because if I wanted to get part of a master's thesis done in a year, a project that was mine that didn't depend on other people was perfect, and so I took it. It was a very fruitful collaboration, basically. It worked out great for him—he was up for tenure another year later—and it worked out great for me. The research really took off. It was somewhere in February of my first year, and we had actually deviated from some of the non-hydrolytic sol-gel, because we also had come across a paper that suggested that there was a hydrate from which you might be able to make this material. I had made a completely new material, zirconium molybdate, that was isostructural with the zirconium tungstate high-temperature form, and we were going to get neutron data, and this, and that. When we got the note that they wanted our sample in two weeks—

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

—which if you know anything about neutron time allocation, it takes a lot longer than that. Jim Jorgenson was super excited about running this, and was going to use his own time to run our sample. My advisor came in, and was just so excited. "Oh, we could do this and that and that and that." I looked at him, and I said, "That sounds like work for a PhD, and not work for a master's." He said, "Yeah, you're right." I said, "I guess I should have said last fall that I want to do a PhD and not a master's." He's like, "You can change that anytime."

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

"As a matter of fact, if you want to change it, I would really like that." I was like, "I can?" [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

It was that day when I decided that I was actually going to stay in the US, and get a PhD in the United States. I think I shocked my parents a little bit because I called them close to midnight German time to let them know I was not going to be back home—

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

—after the first year in the United States. I stayed, and I definitely don't regret that. It was a really cool time. We made new materials. We studied them. We found a lot of things. They are all metastable, so you do kinetics as well, and particle shape and size control. There was just a lot of cool stuff to get into. By the time I was approaching graduation, I finished my PhD in four years, but I was very well prepared, and I didn't have to teach my first year, right? [laugh]

Phillips:

Right.

Lind-Kovacs:

I could just get going on my research, so that was a big advantage. At that point in time, I was pretty sure I wanted to go into academia because I like the academic freedom, I like doing research, but I also enjoy teaching. That was when the system in Germany was kind of like they were trying something new, and a lot of people said whether this is a success will depend on which political party is in power in five or ten years. I didn't really have the same connections in Germany either. That's when I decided I'm going to go for an academic position [laugh] in the United States. I did a postdoc at Cornell for two years, and then applied to any university that was a PhD-granting institution that was looking for somebody in the chemistry department, either in all areas or in my area of expertise.

I vividly remember coming across the ad of the University of Toledo, because they were not advertising for a chemist, an inorganic chemist, a materials chemist, the things I had been looking for. They were looking for somebody in crystallography. I looked at that ad, and I thought, can I apply to this? I was like, I use crystallography, and I'm not a standard user. I do a lot more. I do variable temperature. I do high pressure. I do synchrotron. I've done EXAFS. But I don't develop crystallographic methods, so I'm not doing research in crystallography; I am doing research that is dead without pushing crystallography to places where most people don't push it. I thought about it, and I couldn't answer the question. I thought, it'll cost me about $6 to mail a FedEx envelope to them, and let them decide if I'm OK for that job.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I was invited for an interview, and it was one of the places that just really felt like a place where I could connect with people. It wasn't one of the biggest schools, and I didn't really want to go to a tier 1 university, with all of the competition and pressure and stuff like that. But I'm a materials, solid-state person by training. I need instrumentation. I can't go to a small school that doesn't have an SEM and a good powder diffractometer. UT really was the best of both worlds because they had an instrumentation center, they had personnel for an instrumentation center, instead of a research group maintaining their own powder diffractometer, which I had plenty of experience in [laugh], and there wasn't the same demand. The instruments were actually available. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

You didn't have to sign up for 4 a.m. on a Saturday to get your SEM time. It was really like a small-scale major research university. That's what I told Alan Pinkerton, who was the department chair who hired me. He is obviously also a crystallographer, so we connected very well. I decided I like that place. I had two job offers: one from Toledo, one from Tulane. Tulane just felt like a place where I was that three-headed dog that they wanted to parade around and show off. Toledo was a place where I connected with people, and so I went to Toledo, and I've been there for about 20 years. I've built my research group. I've graduated a number of people. I got my tenure, or I wouldn't be there anymore, obviously—

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

—and definitely got involved with various crystallographic associations, Pittsburgh Diffraction Society, ICDD, Denver X-ray Conference, ACA, and it's been fun. [laugh]

Phillips:

Excellent. If you don't mind jumping back a bit, there were a couple of things I wanted to follow up on about your graduate school experience. First, and this is not necessarily strictly science-related but I'm very curious, you mentioned responsibilities to the Rotary Club while you were doing your master's. What did that entail with the fellowship?

Lind-Kovacs:

Number one, I often went to the weekly lunch of my Rotary Club in Buckhead in Atlanta that sponsored me. But the other thing was that there were four weekends throughout the year where various Rotary clubs had all of the Rotary students come together for a weekend. They had activities. That was really where they wanted to get that exchange going, that understanding of nations. It was one of those where it was like what if he insists that I need to learn something over a weekend when Rotary wants me at one of these events? That is where it was like, no, I can't join a group where I might then not be able to do these four weekends. I really owe that to these people who are paying [laugh] for my year in the United States, because they paid my tuition, they paid my room and board, and a small allowance.

Phillips:

I'm trying to remember the name. There's a book that I read when I was in graduate school that was about the political history of the Rotary Club, and US-German relations in the mid-20th century. It's fascinating stuff.

Lind-Kovacs:

We had 80 students from, I think, about 30 countries. It was fun to meet these people from the various places. They were all over Georgia during the school year, so it was really four times a year when all of us met up.

Phillips:

Also, you mentioned when you were looking at the job in Toledo that you had all of this experience with synchrotrons. Was there a photon source at Georgia Tech that you were using, or did you—

Lind-Kovacs:

No.

Phillips:

—have to travel?

Lind-Kovacs:

No. My first beam time ever was actually at the NSLS, the original NSLS at Brookhaven National Lab. The first time, I just got to tag along for the ride, because one girl in my group had gotten beam time for EXAFS, and a guy in my group had gotten beam time for single crystal at the very same time. We had to staff two beam lines, so we needed all the man- and woman power that we could get to run these things around the clock. I thought that sounded super exciting, I mean, to go to a synchrotron at one of these facilities. Other people didn't want to do it, didn't want to travel, didn't want to do night shifts, and I was like, "Can I go?" My advisor is like, "You're willing to go?"

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I was like, "Yes." [laugh] That was my first experience. I learned definitely some of EXAFS, and also some of single crystal. It was tiring, but it was also cool. It was an opportunity that was just amazing. It was around the same time that my first neutron experiments were run, but that was one where we shipped the samples. Jim Jorgenson basically ran them, and sent us the data back. I hadn't been at Argonne National Lab, and seen SEPD. But we also wanted to do some EXAFS studies on some of my non-hydrolytic sol-gel samples, which didn't make the cubic phase but something else, a completely new polymorph. We had applied for beam time at the SSRL because they had a faster turnaround on their proposal cycles than NSLS. I was, at that point in time, still supposed to leave after a year. We flew out to the West Coast in April of my first year in the United States to do EXAFS experiments at SSRL, so that was my second synchrotron. Then I got to visit NIST during a conference. There was a conference in Maryland that was targeted at grad students, and I got accepted. That was my first tour of a neutron facility. We also started doing work at Oak Ridge National Lab. That was of course not a synchrotron. They didn't have SNS yet. But they had a setup where we could do kinetic studies in the lab with a PSD, where we could collect a large range of X-ray data at once. That was the national lab that I went to the most as a grad student. People there are still good friends of mine, and I still visit them, and things like that. Then my first trip to Argonne was to attend the first Neutron and X-ray school, National School on Neutron and X-ray Scattering, in the summer of 1999. That was when I got to do some experiments at both the neutron source that was still there at that point in time, and at the synchrotron at the APS, and it was somewhere during the year after that that we had our first beam time at APS. Some of that was my samples. Some of that was collaborations. I participated in measuring clathrates at high energy with George Nolas and people like that. Then we did some studies on how concrete degrades. I got exposed to collaborative work early on as well.

Phillips:

I'm also just curious, just for other interviews I've done with other especially synchrotron structural scientists, my sense is that you had a lot more material scientists at SSRL. But at NSLS, it seems like there was a lot of protein work and biophysics work. Did you run into a lot of other materials scientists at NSLS?

Lind-Kovacs:

It completely depends on what beamline you want.

Phillips:

Of course.

Lind-Kovacs:

For NSLS, our first experiments were at beamline 3, which could do the single crystal. I think beamline 11 was the one where we did the EXAFS. What we later did a lot at NSLS was high-pressure work, and that was really John Parise's group at SUNY Stony Brook, who was heading a lot of that up. That was a hard-core materials-focused group because, well, most bio things would long die before you reach any of the pressures where you close the cell. [laugh] There definitely are materials people around. Really, back in the 90s, macro was there, but it wasn't as big as it is now.

Phillips:

When you got to Toledo then, you are now a crystallographer officially. How did you go about setting up your initial projects there?

Lind-Kovacs:

My projects were obviously proposed in my application. One of it was to continue in a different class but still on negative thermal expansion materials, applying some of those non-hydrolytic sol-gel methods. That was really, to some extent, based on a serendipitous discovery where, during my postdoc, I was working on nitrides. One of the materials that my PI wanted to try to target was gallium molybdenum nitride, because theory had predicted this to be a superconductor—I don't remember at what temperature—and so people really wanted to make it. Flux growth didn't work. Another thing we often did was making oxides, and then nitriding them in a flow of ammonia. It was like, OK, if we can make a mixed gallium molybdenum oxide, then we should be able to nitride it. I tried the normal methods, and it didn't work. I tried coprecipitation, and it didn't work.

That's when something tickled my memory, and I was like, wait, the stoichiometry I would expect might be something like Ga2Mo3O12. I looked at some of the papers that had been published by the Sleight group, because scandium tungstate, Sc2W3O12, that's a big family of NTE materials. There are publications out there that state you cannot make gallium molybdate. I was like, I wonder whether those non-hydrolytic sol-gel methods that I learned as a grad student would help with this. I tried it, and while it wasn't pure, I made gallium molybdate. Now, it didn't want to nitride. [laugh] That's a different story. It still decomposed into gallium nitride and molybdenum nitride. But I knew I can make a material that others have said you can't make. I was like, it would be interesting to see what else you can do. Especially if you want to tune properties, you need to mix different metals. That should be way easier with these NHSG methods. That was the biggest proposed project that I started working on when I got to UT. The other part of what we then started working on was because I got a phone call during my first fall semester from chemical engineering, saying, "Hey, we would like you to give a talk here because we like to know what new people in chemistry do, who are materials-related." I gave a talk, and there were several groups there that worked on polymer composites, and they were always interested to have something they could put in a composite to see what it does. I was like, "Let's talk," because one of the proposed applications for NTE materials was of course composites to control thermal expansion. We started collaborating, and we had several co-supervised students. I list a chemical engineering PhD as one of the students that I was a co-advisor for, and we had some students from my group also do work in engineering. We learned a lot of lessons from each other, so that really broadened the project and what we were doing. [laugh] That was the big project that we got started on. Again, the polymer composite a little less, but the other stuff clearly depends strongly on crystallography. There's no way around it. We wanted to study variable temperature, high pressure, crystallization pathways.

Phillips:

When you're working on these NTE materials, where was the support coming from? Was this mostly government, like grants, or was there industry involvement?

Lind-Kovacs:

At the very beginning, my start-up [laugh], thanks to UT—

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

—this was actually another fun thing that makes me chuckle, because during my first year, I got two new grad students that really started in my lab in January. I had gotten my glovebox finally at the end of October in my first year. They were still taking classes, teaching, stuff like that. I chose not to submit any major grants after my first year at UT because I was like, I do not have enough preliminary results to make this worth the reviewers' while, and I'm not going to waste the reviewers' time. Now, of course, we have a system where you have to hand in every year your dossier until you're tenured. There were the comments in there, "Dr. Lind is strongly encouraged to start submitting for external grants."

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I'm like, I know that. I'm not stupid. I know I need to do that. But I wasn't ready for it. I submitted my first attempt at a CAREER proposal after my second year, and got it funded on the first attempt.

Phillips:

Oh wow.

Lind-Kovacs:

After that, nobody told me anything about when I did or didn't need to apply for grants. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

That really gave us funding for the next five years, and we got some supplements to it. I had a student spend a summer in Germany, and things like that. That was really where the majority of that funding came from. We've also had some smaller grants from the International Centre for Diffraction Databases, where you can submit patents for a Grant-in-aid. While that's not a huge amount of money, it does allow you to buy some chemicals, go to a conference, take students to a conference, so that has definitely helped as well. My main funding source has been NSF definitely for the materials-related projects. We also got into some other projects for a while, and that was also NSF-funded. More recently, we did have some collaborations with industry, but that was often more like contract work, and so we run that through our instrumentation center, where they write up the credit [laugh], and we do the work [laugh].

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

We have worked with some companies, and done work for them, and stuff like that. That's fun because the students also get to see how what they learn applies to real life. The polymer project was the one that was the most fun there because we ran into some people from RJ Marshall, and we went out for lunch, and they started saying something about interactions in composites. I was like, "If you want to make good composites with good interaction, you need to do ABC." All of a sudden, there was that silence at the table, and they all looked at me. I'm like, "It makes sense; otherwise you don't have interactions. We have pictures to prove it." Then we went back to other topics. It was really funny because a few weeks later, I get an email. "Can we meet again for lunch?"

They had this material called Res’n’Sand, which is used to coat aircraft carriers. It's a composite, and it's way more abrasion-resistant than anything else anybody else could produce. But they didn't know why. What I had said struck a nerve there. They were like, "Oh, we wonder whether that—" because I talked about putting groups on the particles that could polymerize with the polymer. At that point in time, nothing goes anywhere, they have to interact. They were like, "OK, we need to sign an NDA. But how would you go about investigating this?" I had a student who worked on the polymer composite project, who had just graduated, hadn't found a job yet, and so he worked for them. We proved why Res’n’Sand performs as well as it does, and that was just really, really cool. We've done stuff like that. Currently, my main source of funding is industrial, but it's for a completely different project that I never thought I would work on, if you had asked me five years ago. But these things happen. [laugh]

Phillips:

Is that something you can talk about?

Lind-Kovacs:

I can talk some about it. Again, it started with crystallography. That's one of those fun things. About five years ago, an industrial customer from Crown Battery wanted to do some work in our instrumentation center, and wanted to do quantitative analysis on the things that come out of their furnace for what they use to make their battery electrodes out of their paste. The instrumentation center staff took one look at what she had, and what phases she thought she had, and said, "You need to talk to Cora." [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Samira contacted me, and I said, "Can I have your data, and play with it for a day, because I'm not sure whether this can be done." She had a good challenging problem. We are talking lead-containing sulfates, oxides, you name it, with like monoclinic and triclinic space groups, a mixture of multiple things, preferred orientation, the whole nine yards. I first used my Topas Academic license to convince myself that it could be done, because that's a super stable program. It took me almost a day, but I convinced myself it can be done. Then I took a program I can use when I work with industry, GSAS-II, and reproduced it. Then I said, "OK, let's get together and talk." I showed her how to do it. Actually, I had not yet done it with GSAS-II. I take that back. We set things up in GSAS-II, and I know which phases are in there because I've done it, and my refinement just does not work. [laugh] It turns out that for one of the lead oxides, there are two space group choices [laugh], origin choices. Of course, GSAS-II used the other one from the cif file that I had used. Once I realized this by looking at the multiplicities, I go, "Where's the international tables?" The I-center staff brought me the big blue book, and I looked at it, and I was like, oh, we just need to change the coordinates. This Crown Battery employee is like, "What are you doing?"

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I'm like, "I'm sorry. Without you taking a crystallography class, I can only give you a rudimentary explanation. This is like you're here on a map, and you describe everything relative to that, but then you realize you're not here, you're actually there, so you need to change how you describe things." We got the refinement done. Everything was fine. Then she wanted to learn how to do it herself. You can only get that far with complex refinements without having a good foundation in crystallography. She convinced her boss that she would take my crystallography class in the fall of 2019. That's when we really started talking about various things. My knowledge of lead batteries at that time was what is in our General Chemistry textbook. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Lead, lead dioxide, sulfuric acid, they both make PbSO4. That's an insoluble compound. Sticks to the electrodes. You can reverse it. Some of it falls off because, well, you know, potholes, stuff like that. You eventually have to buy a new battery. I didn't think there was research to be done on these things. They were like $100, right? It turns out there's a lot more in your electrodes than that. As a matter of fact, if you just did that, your battery would maybe run a cycle or two, and be dead. It might sit on the shelf for a few weeks, and be dead, and no longer charge. One of the things that I learned was that they put, number one, crystallization aids in there to control the shape morphology of the lead sulfate crystals. Barium sulfate is typically used. The other thing that goes in there are so-called negative expander materials. Some of that is carbon, which improves conductivity, but some of it is lignosulfonates. I'm like, "You put lignosulfonates in there?" The way this came about was that way back when, in the 1860s, when they first demonstrated a lead battery, you had to divide the compartments. They didn't have plastics at that point in time, so they used wood. It was reasonably resistant to the acid; reasonably stuck around. Then we went into the 1900s. Plastics became available. They were cheaper, lighter, easier to process, more reproducible, so they replaced the wood with the plastics. The batteries went to hell, and didn't work anymore. That's when they realized that wood was doing more than just divide the compartments.

Phillips:

Interesting.

Lind-Kovacs:

If you have wood and sulfuric acid, you form lignosulfonates. They are formed during the pulping processes when you make paper. They are by-products. These lignosulfonates, apparently, play a crucial role in making your battery last and cycle. Apparently, they also allow for really good rapid discharge. But they're not very good for rapid charging, which for a car battery is fine. You want to draw, get the car going, then you have time to recharge it. Start-stop vehicles already get a little more tricky there because you're in a partial state of charge. But what they're really going for now is advanced lead batteries, where they want to be also to rapidly charge for large scale energy storage, things like that, right? I'm like, "What are these lignosulfonates doing?" She goes, "That's a good question."

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

"You mean, you put these in your battery, and you don't know what they're doing?" "Yes."

Phillips:

A hundred years of industrial research on batteries, and nobody has—

Lind-Kovacs:

Serendipity.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Lind-Kovacs:

One of the guys from a battery company at a conference I attended said, "We sprinkle some magic dust at it, and it works." Yes.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

They do know there's a correlation to sulfonate content. I was like, well, in that case, it has to be something about how the sulfonates interact with the lead species. How would you study that? I'm thinking, OK, spectroscopic methods, stuff like that, but definitely not with lignosulfonates. I would make small molecules that mimic portions of it, so that you can actually figure out what's going on. We talked a little more, and then she invited me for a company tour, where apparently there were a bunch of other people from various places who have a consortium [laugh] that is studying things to try to make advanced batteries. They started asking me the same questions, so I repeated the same answers. That was also the day when I learned—because I was like, "When you say deep discharge, what do you actually mean? How much material do you want to use?" One of the guys goes, "Ideally, 100%." I looked at him, and I said, "It's not going to be possible with your current construction." He's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "What's going to be your current conductor? [laugh] That sulfate is an insulator." He goes, "Oh, well, what would you do then?" I have no clue, but I've listened to other battery talks. Most of them use graphitic carbon. I'm like, "Probably something like graphitic carbon should be reasonably resilient, and a reasonable conductor. It shouldn't interact too much with the other things." He just goes, "You really prepared for this. I'm impressed."

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I'm thinking, what? [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

It turns out there was a DOE report that had about this much [indicates half a page length with hands] on lead batteries, and it did mention that the issue of current collector needs to be overcome, and that probably some kind of carbon material would be used. Didn't know that at that point in time—

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

—but managed to impress people. This was just before COVID hit, and the lockdowns. Then during that time, they requested that I would join them, and put a few slides together over what I had proposed. They would also have somebody from Argonne National Lab online with whom they had worked for a number of years already. It was really reassuring to see that this electrochemist/material scientist from Argonne, who had been working on lead batteries for years, had exactly the same thoughts on how to try to study this as I, but he can't synthesize stuff because he isn't a synthetic chemist. Now, for an organic chemist, what we are making is child's play, right? No steric centers, no five-step, 20-step synthesis, but it's organic chemistry I can easily do because I once did research in O-chem back in Germany. Oh yeah, that was required.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I've also taught O-chem majors lab. We basically were then tasked with writing a proposal together, and we've just gotten renewal for another two years of industrial funding to make these model expander molecules, as we call them, or MEMs. We now have enough that we are starting to see some things that might be trends. Now we are really targeting specific materials, because we are asking you know, is this really a trend? Is this just a few compounds that happen to do this? We have found a couple of molecules that don't give as much improvement as the lignosulfonates they use commercially on the discharge, but that improve both charge and discharge. We also found one molecule that improves discharge about the same amount as the Van A additive that they use, and inhibits charge a factor of two less than the Van A. While that isn't great - it still inhibits it - it's a heck of a lot better than Van A. We are actually now going into a phase where the battery companies get involved in this whole thing, where they are going to make some two-volt trial cells to cycle to see how do these materials behave if you run them through 1,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 cycles. It's really interesting. I had no clue how much wasn't known about these batteries. Again, if you had told me five years ago that I would be working on lead batteries, I would have been like, what?

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

But it's been fun.

Phillips:

Yeah, absolutely. Now, you mentioned that you started this right before COVID. How much did that disrupt things? I know the National Labs had some restrictions in place.

Lind-Kovacs:

I was introduced to the person at Argonne during COVID. It was actually while we were in lockdown. We had an online conference and talk. The nice thing was we had time to write that proposal, because we were limited in what we could do in the lab. By the time we were then negotiating about funding, we were actually back in the lab with a hygiene plan. The National Labs were also partially back. It took a while, because they also have other related projects that have DOE funding, so everything needs to be cleared through DOE to make sure it's not the same thing, and you're not abusing DOE money. This one is distinct, so it was approved. But it took until the spring of the following year before we had all of the signatures. But that had given me the chance to recruit a grad student to start working on it, and I actually need to read his thesis draft—

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

—because he's getting ready to defend.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

[laugh]

Phillips:

If you don't mind jumping back a fair bit, you'd mentioned very early on just the teaching, and your enjoyment of teaching. Can you tell me a bit about when you got to Toledo, what was the teaching load like as a new faculty member? Were you just teaching crystallography courses, or were you able to teach broadly in chemistry, or what was going on there?

Lind-Kovacs:

The typical teaching load for research-active faculty at our institution, teaching is 35–40% of our workload, and so it's usually one major class, plus all of us do seminar, colloquium, things like that. For my first year there, my fall assignment was the Crystallography class, which was four credit hours, and my spring assignment was General Chemistry 2. Those are two classes that I've taught very frequently. I've also taught General Chemistry 1. I've taught an advanced lab. I've taught an organic majors lab. I've also developed a solid-state chemistry class. But my most common assignments are crystallography and gen chem 2.

Phillips:

At Toledo, the gen chem courses, I imagine, are they two, three hundred students in a lecture hall?

Lind-Kovacs:

We try to keep it at or below 200, so even back then, typically like 170, 180, maybe 200. But, yes, it's a large lecture class. My first year of teaching the crystallography, I had a ton of fun with, because I took crystallography on the quarter system, and I actually took not just a regular crystallography class. I also took a diffraction methods class with Ray Young in physics that also had a lab component. And then I took a macromolecular crystallography class, just for the fun of it, at Georgia Tech. There were things I liked in all the classes, and there were things that I liked better in another class. I had a lot of material to draw from, that was the first thing. The second thing was I had four credit hours for a whole semester.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I really constructed my own curriculum, and I incorporated hands-on stuff. We actually do a project on solving a single crystal structure. In the old days, we used to do three projects, where one was on indexing, because indexing programs weren't what they are now, so you had to do things in multiple programs, hope you get the same answers, stuff like that. Then we had the single crystal project, and then we did a Rietveld refinement. Nowadays, the indexing and Rietveld are combined, so we only have two projects. Back then, two out of three projects counted for your grade; now both count. But I had a lot of fun with that one, and I think the students had a lot of fun with it. Then I taught gen chem for the first time, and that first time was a train wreck. I will attest to that.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I had no idea what all they didn't know, because the material I was teaching was pretty much all stuff that I did in high school. In addition, at that point in time, they had to read the chapter, and write a chapter summary before we would cover the chapter in class. Looking at the level of material, I was like, if I was in this class, and I had read the chapter, written a summary, I would be bored out of my pants. Why even go to class, right?

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

No idea how lost most of the students were. At that point in time, the way things were done, you know, I was told you write everything, and we used like an acetate roll on an overhead projector. My handwriting isn't the best.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I know I have an accent. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I was constantly struggling to catch up, and it was just, I mean, we made it through, but I don't think the students were very happy. It was certainly not the best experience.

Phillips:

It sounds a lot like my gen chem course in undergrad. [laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

My second year, I actually had the spring off so I could focus on grant writing, which worked out great. In my third year, when I was teaching gen chem again, I was like, "I don't care what you tell me, that you always do it on the acetate roll, and handwritten." I was like, "I am doing PowerPoints." "Well, the students won't pay attention." Yeah, whatever. I was like, "You know what? They will get a PowerPoint with blanks, and they have to fill it in, and it will be important stuff that's missing. But I'm using PowerPoints." It made a huge difference. Number one, I didn't have to worry about writing, keeping up, stuff like that. Number two, I wasn't blind when I looked up, and looked into the class. It worked a lot better. It felt a lot better. Then for the third time I was teaching gen chem, we were starting to introduce clickers.

Phillips:

Ah, yes [laugh].

Lind-Kovacs:

All of a sudden, everybody else was struggling on how to get a PowerPoint with clickers. I was a step ahead.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Since that time, I've really enjoyed gen chem teaching, because now I get instant feedback. I see whether they are lost. I will put answers in there where I know if you make this mistake, you get that answer. I can use it as a teaching moment, and say, "If you got this answer, you used the wrong R, the wrong gas constant or something. Look at your units." It really has gotten a lot more interactive.

Phillips:

This is a very minor sidebar. I'm curious, were the clickers implemented at the department level or at the university level?

Lind-Kovacs:

It was not a university or department decision. There were more classes at the university that were doing it at that point in time. What we have is a general chemistry committee. They are the ones who make the decision, and that then applies to all the gen chem classes. That was the level in our department where it was implemented. Since then, analytical, organic, a lot of them are now using it as well. But that was how it worked. The gen chem committee decided we would.

Phillips:

OK. I was just curious.

Lind-Kovacs:

I was a member of that. [laugh]

Phillips:

They had just introduced clickers in my undergrad institution, and we had different clickers for gen chem, O-chem, and then the upper division biology courses that I was taking. I had to buy three or four different clickers. [laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

In the old days, you had to buy that. Nowadays, you have an app on your phone.

Phillips:

Oh, right, OK. That makes sense.

Lind-Kovacs:

It has completely changed. Yes, in the old days, you had the physical devices, and you had to be physically in the classroom. Nowadays, you can do it from anywhere in the world—

Phillips:

Oh wow.

Lind-Kovacs:

—which was a huge advantage during COVID, because I was teaching gen chem when we were thrown into lockdown. I chose to stay synchronous. That was an awesome and, again, eye-opening learning experience, because while I had learned that they are a lot more lost than I thought they are, I didn't realize what all can get them lost. Having a chat that the students used a lot, we had an active learning community in that chat, made me realize that. For example, I've explained what Ka and pKa is. It's minus the log of the Ka. I have a slide, and we have a Ka, and I convert it to the pKa, and we do math. I have another slide, and I immediately write down what the pKa value is. You invariably always had the question, "Where did you get that number from?" I learned I need to repeat, "That's the pKa. That's minus log Ka," because people don't get it initially. That was really eye-opening, because I wouldn't even have thought about that. To me it was, I explained it. We are doing it again. But that isn’t enough. That really was helpful for me to see where students get lost.

Phillips:

Were you able to keep the chat logs?

Lind-Kovacs:

I didn't keep the chat logs, but it was specific things that were recurring, and so I just made it a habit to explain these things. I still do that now that we are back in the classroom. Like I said, that was something I didn't think I needed to repeat multiple times. But, then again, it makes sense. This is new to them. Not everybody absorbs that immediately. I've actually enjoyed the synchronous teaching during COVID. We had a very interactive time, including a lot of fun things. [laugh] During my first remote lecture, somebody—I always promise my students, if they have 100% correct on a clicker question, I'll bring candy. One of the first questions that made me lose it was, "What if we get 100%? How are you going to get us the candy?" I'm like, "I might have to bring it in when we are back in person. [laugh] You have to stop by then, right?" Somebody goes, "Carrier pigeon." [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I was just like, "This is hilarious." Then the next thing that made me really completely lose it and just bust out laughing was somebody posted, "My dog is watching this with me. Can he get his degree in chemistry too?" [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I was just like, "I can't award degrees. You've got to talk to the president of the university." Then I thought, "I can't give degrees, but…." I sent an email to the class afterwards, and I said, "I can't give degrees. But if your pet watches the lecture with you, take a picture of your pet watching the lecture, send it to me, send me the name of the pet, and you'll get a certificate of participation for your pet."

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I've given certificates to dogs, cats, hamsters, I think a guinea pig. [laugh] It's just been fun.

Phillips:

When we went remote, obviously, at AIP, and I was doing interviews remotely over Zoom, and my cats would show up on the screen, and so I put them down as co-interviewers sometimes. [laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Oh yeah. I've given these certificates. Then two of these students started doing research in my lab, so I have a lot more pictures of their pets.

Phillips:

[laugh] Excellent.

Lind-Kovacs:

They are guest stars in my lectures now.

Phillips:

Excellent. Now, what about graduate students? How many grad students did you generally have?

Lind-Kovacs:

My group size has been anything from a couple—so at the moment I have two—to at the biggest I think I had five at the same time.

Phillips:

Oh wow.

Lind-Kovacs:

Five was—

Phillips:

That's a lot.

Lind-Kovacs:

—stretching it. [laugh]

Phillips:

Yes [laugh].

Lind-Kovacs:

Typically, two to three, and always some undergrads usually.

Phillips:

There were more questions I wanted to ask about your career[?], but I also want to make sure I don't forget. As I was getting ready for the interviews, you always check the biography of the person—

Lind-Kovacs:

[laugh]

Phillips:

—who you're interviewing. We haven't talked anything about your extracurricular activities and hobbies. I understand that last year you—

Lind-Kovacs:

The vice president wasn't at the ACA meeting, although she should have been there? Yes. [laugh]

Phillips:

That's what I heard, the rumor, at least, but for a good reason.

Lind-Kovacs:

Yes, and I told Council early on. [laugh]

Phillips:

How long have you been doing martial arts?

Lind-Kovacs:

I started my first martial art just before I turned 17, this was back in Germany, and it was actually jujitsu. It was taught in the police sports club, but that's open to non-police members. It was my sister who got me into it, because she had a friend whose parents wanted the friend to do something. Eventually, Christiane agreed that that might be something to try out. My mom thought that it would be good for us girls to know some self-defense. I thought that sounds pretty fascinating, so I decided, oh, I'll check that out. My sister did about a year, and quit. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

She did get her orange belt, but that was it. I continued, and got into competing, and did that until I left Germany, for about five years. Actually became a member of the German national team just before I left. That was something I did have to forfeit when I decided to stay in the US, because you could be gone for a year, and keep your membership, but after that, that's it. When I went to the US, I was looking for some martial arts to do, but I didn't have a car. I lived in the dorm, and so options were somewhat limited. I was just working out at the rec center, and saw a couple of guys who were doing something, like, some stand-up throws, some grappling, stuff like that. One guy had a hard time throwing the other guy, and so I watched him do that like five times repeatedly, reproducibly wrong.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I walked over, and I said, "Hey, the reason why you can't throw him is XYZ." They looked at me like, "What's that girl doing, telling us anything?" He tries it again, and he again does it wrong. I said, "Look, the reason why you can't do it is XYZ." Then he started paying attention, he tried, and, sure enough, he got the throw. They were like, "How do you know?"

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Then we got talking, and so we would just meet once a week, and do some sparring according to agreed-upon rules. It was fun. Then I ran into a friend who was studying with somebody who was doing Taekwondo, and said, "Oh, you're both martial artists. You should talk to each other." The guy's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "Currently [laugh], not really anything for serious." He was like, "You should check out our Taekwondo club." That's how I got started on Taekwondo at Georgia Tech, and continued doing that for my remaining three years there. Got to just below black belt, then moved to Ithaca. Yeah, you really have limited martial arts options there, so I did a little bit of kickboxing, did a little bit of judo and, for the most part, just did outdoor stuff, because I was in Ithaca, and that offered itself.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Then I moved to Toledo, and realized, I'm in the flat land. There's no climbing here. There's a lot of things that aren't here. I need to find some martial arts to keep myself sane. I first tried something on campus, because that would be convenient. There was a karate group, and the first class was pretty good, but it didn't go anywhere from there. I started to realize I wasn't motivated to go there. I was like, this isn't right. I need to find something else. I was like, if I go off campus, I may as well go for jujitsu or Taekwondo, because that's what I have belts in. I found a really good Taekwondo school, and I joined that Taekwondo school. I joined it in January of 2004, tested for my first-degree black belt in August that year, tested for my second-degree black belt a little over a year later, and then tested for my third- and fourth-degrees there. Then went on sabbatical in England in 2012, basically ran [laugh] the university Taekwondo club there, which was run by a poor blue belt. [laugh]

Phillips:

Oh no [laugh].

Lind-Kovacs:

They were so delighted to have a fourth-degree running things, so it was fun, and it was a good experience. When I came back, my instructor was going through a rather ugly divorce, and so he pretty much had just withdrawn. It was another black belt and I who pretty much ran the school for the next couple of years. Then the other black belt moved away, and I was like, "Look, you either need to come back or you need to close down the school, because I cannot cover all the classes. It's just not going to happen." It was under him also when I had gotten into competing internationally, stuff like that. He came back, and I was getting back into things, and was getting ready to think about testing for fifth degree, but I ended up with a pretty bad knee injury that put a halt to things for a while. By the time I was ready to come back, he decided to move to Long Island to be a nanny for his new granddaughter. I was like, how do I keep doing TKD if you move away? And he told me, “You don’t need me for that!” "What do you mean?" He goes, "You are a fourth degree. You have a key to the building. You can teach." [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I was like, "OK, whatever." I just started it on a volunteer basis, and started teaching some friends, had a couple of people come back who had trained under him. Then one of the people that had started with me, who was a blue belt at that point in time, was going to move to Michigan. I started looking for schools for him up there. In the process, I came across a flyer for a Taekwondo tournament in a suburb of Toledo. It said, "ITF Invitational." I was like, well, I'm not ITF. I'm not an ITF club, but I'm ITF style. It says by invitation only, but it doesn't hurt to just ask. I sent an email, and explained who I was, who I had trained under, and got a very nice email back, saying, "While it is typically by invitation only, I know your instructor, and you and your students are more than welcome to join us." I convinced the two people who had trained regularly with me, including the one who was about to move to Michigan, to join me for the tournament. Two weeks before the tournament, got a message from my previous instructor, saying, "I have somebody interested in renting the building. You need to get your stuff out of there by tomorrow." [laugh]

Phillips:

No [laugh].

Lind-Kovacs:

It was just like, oh, god. We would put down the puzzle mats in my driveway for the next couple of weeks, and [laugh] train there, and we went to the tournament. It was just a really great welcoming experience, and so we joined that school afterwards. That's where I've been training for the past four years now. That is through where I then ended up trying out for Team USA, and qualified by taking the gold in the women's fourth-degree patterns, and in senior women's sparring last year at nationals, and then went to Amsterdam to compete in the world championships. [laugh] That happened to be overlapping with Portland. As a matter of fact, my competition events were on the main council meeting day.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I started out by actually getting the bronze in patterns, which I was extremely proud of because patterns, I was taught slightly different than what the ITF actually teaches. I still have a lot of learning to do there. To actually get a medal, that was just amazing. Then I took the silver in the senior women's heavyweight sparring. I managed to call into Council meeting, and show my medals—

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

—and then all the competitors crashed the hotel server, and that was the end of going online in the Netherlands. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I got to show off the bling. [laugh]

Phillips:

The important thing.

Lind-Kovacs:

But then I was out. [laugh]

Phillips:

Yes [laugh].

Lind-Kovacs:

That's my extracurricular, yes.

Phillips:

That's fantastic, which then also leads very nicely to the last thing I wanted to make sure we talked about, which is just your experience with ACA governance. Can you tell me a bit about when you first started getting actively involved with the ACA, and how things have been the last few years up through obviously now?

Lind-Kovacs:

I joined as a graduate student in, I believe, 1999, and that was one of those—I didn't really understand all the different crystallographic organizations [laugh] at that point in time. That was the year when I won an ICDD Ludo Frevel Scholarship. I was like, oh, I won a crystallography scholarship, I should join the Crystallographic Association. I joined the ACA, not realizing they had nothing to do with the scholarship at all. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

But such is life. I did buy my International Tables of Crystallography from the prize money [laugh]—

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

—so I still have that as a memory. That's when I joined the ACA, and it was cheap enough. I got the RefleXions journal. There was interesting stuff in there. It was something I continued being a member of. It was in 2006, in January, when I got my CAREER award, when I told my back then two grad students that I had, "We should celebrate by going to a cool conference." One grad student goes, "The ACA meeting is in Hawaii." [laugh]

Phillips:

Oh, nice. [laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

We have been to PDS conferences before and stuff like that, so we've been to crystallographic conferences. I said, "Cool, let's go." Realized the next day, because I got an email, that I had a perfect conflict because I had agreed to be at the GRC for solid-state chemistry, which was at the same time.

Phillips:

Oh no.

Lind-Kovacs:

My two grad students went to Hawaii to the ACA in 2006, while I slept in a dorm in New Hampshire. They never let me forget that until they graduated.

Phillips:

Oh no [laugh].

Lind-Kovacs:

We had a lot of fun with that. But it was great because that was when Alan Pinkerton, my department chair, was vice president, and one of my students won the Linus Pauling Poster Prize, and the other was an honorable mention for something. Me being hired in crystallography, and having my students present at that level at an ACA meeting was just absolutely amazing. Now, I was at the GRC. Right after that ACA meeting, one friend, Julia Chan, was like, "Oh, I want to nominate you for a committee that has to do with like crystallography stuff." I said, "Yeah, that's fine." She said, "Yeah, it's a really fun committee. We do a lot of, you know, it's not really any boring stuff.." I'm like, "Cool, nominate me." About a week later, Bryan Chakoumakos from Oak Ridge National Lab calls me up, and goes, "Oh, I wanted to nominate you to chair of the powder SIG". I was like, "Yeah, Julia already asked me. It's fine. I already said yes." He's like, "Oh, cool."

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Didn't realize they were talking about two different things.

Phillips:

Oh no [laugh].

Lind-Kovacs:

I was elected. I was chair-elect for the powder SIG in 2007. I was also elected on the US National Committee for Crystallography, which was what Julia was talking about. Early in 2007, my department chair comes sauntering down the hallway, and said, "Congratulations, you won the Etter award." I'm like, "I won what?" [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I had to google what I had actually been nominated for, because I had no idea I had been nominated. So 2007 was my first ACA meeting. I was the Etter awardee, I was on USNC/Cr, and I was the chair for the powder SIG. I immediately just got involved with everything, by default. It's a fun group of people. It was a great experience. 2008, I was the chair of the powder SIG. Then I don't remember whether I ran a—I think I ran a session in 2009, an educational session in Toronto. It was natural to be involved because it was cool and it was exciting. I was on the National Committee from 2007 through 2012, so I just missed out on both of the Hawaii meetings. [laugh]

Phillips:

Oh no [laugh].

Lind-Kovacs:

Then I was re-elected onto the committee in 2015 as vice chair. It was at the Philadelphia meeting when Bill Duax tried to talk me into running for vice president for the ACA, and I literally told him no. I said, "I'm on USNC/Cr as vice chair. I will ascend to chair. This is a six-year commitment, and I cannot be the ACA president because you can't hold two positions on the committee." I said, "I'm not doing it." He said, "But you would make such a great president." I said, "But I am committed to this for the next six years. I ran for that. I won the election. I'm doing this." He was like, "Will you promise me that you will consider running one day?"

Phillips:

[laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

I said, "Yes, one day, I will consider it." Ever since Joe Ferrara called me up two falls ago to ask me to run for vice president, I've thought back to that conversation. I actually met Bill at the opening reception. I said, "Remember that conversation we had?" I said, "I've been thinking back to that quite a bit, because that was when I made that promise. I've lived up to it."

Phillips:

You have.

Lind-Kovacs:

I was on the education subcommittee in between, and things like that. I would have to look up the years. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh] That's not a problem. As president, what has been your plan for the future of the ACA? What directions things are going?

Lind-Kovacs:

The big thing is, of course, keeping and growing membership. One of the things there is to truly be inclusive and welcoming. I just told you about my first experience at ACA. I was talking to people all the time. Some of them, I already knew. Others, I met there. I'm also an extrovert. I have no problem going and talking to people. A friend's husband, who is a staff crystallographer, had a completely different experience. He's an introvert. He went to an ACA meeting. He said, "It was cliquish. I had nobody to talk to." He's a staff crystallographer. He doesn't have the National Lab contacts that I have, and he was too shy to go and talk to people. Now, people would happily have talked to him, but he didn't initiate. We are so busy talking to friends that you don't see that one person that's just standing there. That is actually why when I was running for VP, I said, "If I get elected, I want to implement a companion program, where you match mentors and mentees, and you have that one person. They can introduce you to more people." I matched people before the Portland meeting, and the feedback I got was great. Allen Oliver was one of the mentors. He said, "I want to continue this, and I think we should make this permanent, and the vice president will run it every year." Hopefully that will really be the case. It's funny because you have these dots, and you see somebody standing there without somebody else around who has an orange dot. You just go, and you talk to them. I think that will help with making people feel more welcome and, hopefully, with having more people there.

Phillips:

Yeah, absolutely.

Lind-Kovacs:

That's one of the things that I think is important, and it's timely because we just added the Structural Science Society to our title. We now have the electron microscopy folks coming in, and stuff like that. I'm excited to see what the future holds. But it's not a dead science. It's not just a tool. It's very well alive and active.

Phillips:

That's certainly the impression I've gotten this weekend. [laugh]

Lind-Kovacs:

Oh yeah.

Phillips:

Let's see. You needed to be downstairs in about ten minutes.

Lind-Kovacs:

Yes.

Phillips:

I'm going to—unless you had—were there any final thoughts, things we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?

Lind-Kovacs:

I think you covered things pretty well. If questions come up, I can always answer them later—

Phillips:

Of course.

Lind-Kovacs:

—so that's not an issue. But, yeah, that's my story with the ACA. [laugh]

Phillips:

That's wonderful. Thank you, again, and I will pause here.

[END]