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Quarantine: It’s day 8 of 15, but who’s counting?
It never occurred to me to start a blog at any other point my life. A few weeks ago, I joked with some colleagues in Philadelphia that I had no hobbies I could do while sitting still. That’s true at least if you don’t count reading, and even I, a voracious reader, was not excited about the prospect of sitting and reading for 2 full weeks of self-isolation. I know to some that might sound like the best thing ever, but the thought of that much stillness honestly sent me into a panic! Knowing that I would need to quarantine when we arrived in Seoul gave me a strong desire…
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Trees: The Ultimate Chemists. How Trees Inspire Me to Do Better Chemistry
When I talk to people about my research, I have found that it is not usually very helpful to say that I am an organometallic chemist or (worse) to say that I synthesize carbon dioxide complexes of molybdenum and tungsten. Instead, I usually start by talking about trees. Most people know about photosynthesis and that a tree, like all plants, harnesses the energy from light to grow. Some people even know that the whole body of the tree: its leaves, trunk, roots and all its branches are made primarily of carbon. Where does the tree get all of this carbon? From the air. The tree uses the energy it collects…
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Adventure #2: How we traveled 6,700 miles for COVID tests (Part 2)
Part 1 of this post described our unsuccessful attempt to get tested for COVID-19 before leaving Philadelphia. What we found in Seoul is a completely different response system and a different set of priorities for managing the pandemic crisis. Here is the rest of our testing story, preceded by some background information I had fun researching. According to Business Insider, in early March the U.S. “had done fewer COVID-19 tests per capita than many other countries with large coronavirus outbreaks.” Conversely, by February 28, just a few weeks after identifying the first case of COVID-19 in South Korea, that country was able to conduct up to 15,000 tests per day.…
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The Chemist: To Sabbatical or Not to Sabbatical, That is the Question
One of the perks of being a college professor is having the opportunity to take a sabbatical. At SJU you get a one-semester sabbatical every 6 years. If you wait 12 years, you get a full year. Thus, I decided to save up my sabbatical for the one-year option. In July 2019 with my year-long sabbatical approaching, I knew wanted to find a research opportunity overseas. I thought I would swing for the fences– try to find someone doing carbon dioxide activation research, my sub-area of organometallic chemistry. I made a short list of top research groups working around the world whose research was most interesting to me. Right at…
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Adventure #2: How we traveled 6,700 miles for COVID tests (Part 1)
When we entered this year, heading to Seoul in the midst of a global pandemic was not on our list of things to do. Multiple times over the past several months, Peter and I looked at each other and said, “we’re crazy, right?” And we probably are. However, it’s not necessarily because we chose to live in South Korea during these COVID times. According to Worldometer, as of August 3, the United States is reporting 4,813,647 total cases of the novel coronavirus, about 26% of the cases in the world. By contrast, South Korea on this date is reporting 14,389 confirmed cases, about .0008% of cases worldwide. This despite the…
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Adventure #1: Arriving at Incheon Airport
After preparing for months for this move, it was surreal to be in the airport and ready to go! It was undeniably strange to travel through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport, where the international departures board was almost empty, and most businesses in the terminal were closed. Stranger yet was traveling with fewer than 100 people on the plane to Seoul (Incheon Airport). We could each have had multiple rows to ourselves on the 15-hour flight, although thanks to the adrenaline rush of traveling we basically didn’t sleep anyway! When we landed in Incheon after an uneventful flight, we were ready to face the hurdles of COVID screening awaiting international visitors…
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The Chemist and the Counselor Take Korea
What’s a social worker with no Korean language skills to do when her partner lands a research sabbatical in South Korea? Start a blog, of course! Does said social worker have any expertise that would suggest she knows how to build a blog? Well, no. But she has two weeks of Korean quarantine time to kill, so why not? Forty-eight hours after signing up for a domain name, many of them spent in figuring out how to get this far, here is the blog we will use to document our time in Korea. Last summer, Peter first started talking with a fellow organometallic chemist in South Korea about the possibility…
