 Okay, last but not least, Professor Chris Goldenstein. He is working on developing new optical diagnostic techniques and applying them probably in the hardest application he can find, combustion application, so fiery detonation balls, things like that, right? So using laser absorption spectroscopy, his group has developed new diagnostic techniques for mid-infrared, planar, laser-induced fluorescence imaging, so I'm hoping there's some really cool pictures in his presentation, nope, okay, darn, never mind. So Chris has earned a lot of early career awards, so he earned a Young Investigator Award with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the DTRA Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an early career award with NASA, as well as a career award from NSF. And I've gotten to know Chris pretty well because he served on our graduate committee for the last few years. And he may look like a young, innocent guy, but he is quite wise for his age. He always has good opinions and lots of wisdom, so it's always a pleasure to work with him on these committees. So with that, Chris? Man, thank you, Nicole. It's a true story, my mother did always say I was an old soul, so I think that comes through on the grad committee a bit. But yeah, thanks, everyone, for coming. I guess the title of this says it all. I mean, this is going to be all about my journey to becoming an associate professor. And really, this is a story about people. And it started in basically the suburbs of Chicago. I was born and raised in Downers Grove. I went to Downers Grove South. It's a big public school there, amongst many in the Chicagoland area. And I guess at that time I was thinking about following a pretty ordinary career path. I really liked working on cars. I actually rebuilt the engine on a 67GTO with my dad when I was in high school. And so I kind of had a passion for mechanical engineering and working on cars. And so where would I go to school? I wonder. I went to the University of Michigan. I thought I would probably join the auto industry. And I worked with two really amazing faculty members in the Walter E. Leigh Automotive Lab there, one being Volker Sik on the bottom and then on the top right there's now President Dennis Isanas at the University of Delaware. But when I knew him, he was just a lowly NAE member at the University of Michigan running the auto lab. So he was really an inspirational person in my career. If anyone had the pleasure of taking a class with him, you just sat there and felt inspired to work on the things he worked in. And so he taught me a lot about internal combustion engines. And so did Volker Sik. And I guess Volker Sik might have had the bigger impact on me in particular because he taught me about laser diagnostics and how you can use beams of light to visualize molecules and turbulent flows and reacting flows. And that kind of set me on a path to go work for Ron Hansen at Stanford University. I did my PhD with Ron and I actually learned and worked on a different type of laser spectroscopy. But laser induced fluorescence has kind of always been my original passion, I guess. But I worked with Ron. I was there for five years with my PhD in that next year as a postdoc. And he's kind of always been a guiding force, this really strong voice in the back of my mind. If he ever watches this, he'll probably get a kick out of it. But just a really amazing mentor. And when I was there, he gave me the opportunity to work on a lot of different things and a lot of different projects, which was great. And by doing that, I got to write a lot of papers and even get started on my path to being a true academic by writing a book. So I got to co-author a textbook with him before I graduated. But I think one of the most unique things about what I did there was I actually started a company with three other fellow lab mates called Spectreplot. And that company is focused on doing exactly what its name says. We actually built a web app for simulating molecular and atomic spectra in the cloud. And I'll talk more about that in just a few moments. But basically, I was there and by that point, I basically knew I wanted to become a professor. And so I hit the job market and I landed here at Purdue. Probably no mistake. Two of my faculty mentors, Bob Luck and Steve Son, are fairly close colleagues with Professor Hansen. And they've really helped me get my start here at Purdue. And I guess the rest is history. But this brings me to my next point, which is the first key to success for all the young people is surround yourself with great mentors and peers. I didn't have the opportunity to talk about many of the peers, but they played just as big a role in my career path as the people I'm showing pictures of here today. Okay, so then here's that, I guess, all that led to this, right? That's why part of what I love about my job is the fact that I get to work with all these great students and get to help them achieve the goals that I achieved and so fondly look back on. So this is a picture of my group, it's fairly current. There's just about 12 PhD students in it. And we're all basically shooting lasers at some kind of reacting flow. Okay, so that brings me to this point, which is what exactly do we do here? So we're always trying to advance the thermosciences. I think we tend to, we work on a lot of applications, but we're often very interested in fundamental aspects of those applications. So we try to advance the thermosciences. But in doing so, we also try to advance energy propulsion and defense applications. And in everything we do, we're using laser or optical diagnostics. So this is kind of a CAD rendering and photo of some of the lasers we use. We use some lasers that are as big as an optical table that produce femtosecond pulses. We use other lasers that can fit in the palm of your hand to basically semiconductor lasers like diode lasers and quantum cascade lasers. And we've really tried to develop fundamentally new methods of measuring gas properties and maybe even liquids through detecting light matter interactions. And we don't just do that for fun, right? As I said, we do this to advance a whole wide range of applications in science, whether it be trying to measure temperature, pressure, and carbon monoxide a million times a second behind a detonation wave, or characterize all the different chemicals that are formed when you burn a propellant to get a proved understanding of combustion of solid propellants. Or to characterize essentially the thermochemical evolution of post detonation fireballs to, for example, understand the radiation that's coming out of these. That's obviously a hot topic for a variety of defense applications. You can't understand the radiation coming out if you don't understand the thermodynamic state of the fluid. And then last but certainly not least, we are increasingly working in an area that's kind of near and dear to my heart, which is non-equilibrium flows in hypersonic applications. And there you have, as Nicole alluded to, I guess really with all of these, you have almost the most difficult environment you could imagine studying. You might have gases at temperatures that well exceed that of the surface of the sun, say 10,000 Kelvin. And basically everything falls apart, everything reacts. And we have to try and quantify that chemistry that's occurring behind, say, really strong shock waves. And then as that super high temperature gas flows onto, say, a heat shield material. And that's the focus of one project that we're working on for NASA right now, motivated by the Dragonfly mission to Titan. It all rides on the heat shield, right? If anyone's seen Apollo 13, they know the heat shield is key to any space mission, right? And NASA's going to Titan because it's just a really amazing place in the solar system to try and understand about the origins of life and et cetera. But that atmosphere is a lot different than our own. It's about 95% nitrogen, 5% methane. And when you enter that atmosphere, it's a Mach 10 or 20, there's a shock wave out in front of that vehicle that then shock heats the gas and actually produces a lot of CN. And CN then radiates like crazy. So it's actually the dominant source of heat transfer to the heat shield. And so what we're doing is doing experiments in my shock tube to try and understand basically the thermochemical path that CN takes as it basically is born right behind the shock wave and then dumped into a bunch of different quantum states. And so we're measuring six internal temperatures of CN that are related to its population in different rotational and vibrational states in its ground electronic state. And so it's not just one temperature. We're measuring six that belong to one molecule. So it's a really unique problem that has been responsible for me losing a lot of sleep over the last year, as Vishnu could probably tell you. But super, super interesting to try to see this, develop new tools that enable us to see this, and then try and understand why this is happening. I won't get into it much more because I don't have time. But it's a really interesting non-equilibrium problem. OK, so the future's in the cloud. I think we all know this. And now ChatGPT can solve any problem that we can dream of by just asking it a question, right? But so in 2014, myself and three fellow lab mates, we're sitting around thinking that we should put spectroscopy in the cloud, right? Spectroscopy is a really, really confusing field. It's just riddled with different conventions and no one really properly explains which one they use and which units they're using. So we wanted to kind of bring down that barrier and develop a web app that could simulate atomic and molecular spectra by just knowing, say, the temperature or the pressure or the composition of the gas you're interested in. We saw that spectroscopy was moving its way into many different areas of engineering and we thought you shouldn't have to be a physical chemist to use this powerful area of science. And so we developed this web app. It's now been used over a million times by 4,000 users in over 70 countries. And it all started with just trying to make something so easy that even an engineer can use it, right? It's kind of a plug at the arrogant chemical physicist out there. But engineers use this stuff too and we can even use it on our phone now with this web app. So this is an area of service that I thought was pretty unique and actually something that I'm really, really passionate about beyond the more traditional things that us professors work on, like serving on committees and things. Okay, so what am I doing on time? Okay, four more minutes. I got plenty of time. So I thought I would take a moment for the students in the audience to just share some advice. I think I kind of took like perhaps the most direct path you could take to become a professor. I guess I kind of knew I wanted to be a professor from midway through undergrad and then just followed a straight line more or less with a little bit of wiggling but a pretty straight line and it was kind of boils down to these areas. One is just pursue your passion, right? If you love what you do, then you never have to work a day in your life, right? My dad said that to me a thousand times growing up. But being an academic, you get to choose, especially if you have tenure, what you want, what you get to work on, right? And so another one of my mentors said, if you're a professor and you don't like what you do, it's your fault, right? Which I find to be pretty true at this point. And what that means is that you should really be pursuing your passion, right? Work on the things that you're most interested in and do so in a way that you can make a contribution and have impact. The second one is one I already alluded to. But it's you really got to surround yourself with great mentors. If you're able to do that, it makes everything easier. I guess then the question is what makes a mentor great, right? Well, there's no one right answer. But in my opinion, it's find people that inspire you. I think that's why I became a professor is I got to interact with so many professors that inspired me to become one. And then also those that support you because you're going to need support. That's a very difficult journey to get a PhD and then go through the tenure process and put in all those long hours. And then last, you really need someone that's going to push you. People that coddle you and do nothing but support you are really not going to help you on this journey. You need that once in a while, sure. But you really need people that are going to push you towards excellence. The third point is advice I actually got from Volker Sick when I was just starting at Purdue. And he said the best advice he ever got as an untenured professor was, don't worry about what other people are doing and the success that they achieve. Just keep your head down, focus on what you want to do, and figure out how to do that well. And I think that's really, really good advice because you're always tempted to look at someone around you that's having success or winning some big grant or inventing some new thing. And you just got to worry about what you're working on. Do your thing, right? If you're not doing your thing and doing something unique, then I think you're making a huge mistake as an academic. The last is also some good advice that I got from my advisor. And it's definitely not the only reason to become a professor, but I think it's a pretty good one. That if you want to become something that you're the best of the world at, I think that's a really good goal that realistically you may never achieve if you're being honest, right? But maybe become one of the best in the world at something, because everyone thinks they're the best in the world at some point, right? But yeah, just being able to work towards something that you can become one of the best of the world at, I think is a really special thing that not many careers enable you to do. All right. So with that, I then want to take a moment to thank some very important people. And I'm going to start with my first three PhD students, actually. So Ryan Tansen, Garrett Matthews, and Morgan Roush, they all left my group within the last one or two years. But they were my first three. And everyone knows that your first students are extremely special, right? Because they believe in you and your ability to take them across the finish line before you even have a lab, right? And sometimes I wonder, what did I say to them that convinced them that I would be able to deliver on all these big promises that I made to them? And so I must have said something right, because I got three really outstanding students to start my career here. And they make everything easier, right? Everything easier. So they were really, really special. And I wouldn't have my lab without them left an amazing impact on my group and my lab and continue to be supporters of my current students. And I guess everyone that's been through this process also knows that you need a lot of emotional support. And so my wife is shown here in our two-year-old daughter, Ayla. And my wife's been with me since early in graduate school. And so she's had to put up with just an absurd amount of insane behavior that it takes to become an academic working on Sundays, waking up in the middle of the night to write something down, work on a code, et cetera. And it's just really given me tremendous support and made this path a lot easier. And then last but not least, my mom, who unfortunately I actually lost last year, but she was basically the perfect mother. Basically provided me with unwavering support and love and never hesitated to support me in going off to get a PhD and always encouraged me to follow my passion. So without her, there's obviously no way I'd literally be standing here today, but also figuratively. And I think that's it. So then I just want to say one more thing, which is to thank all of my current students. So the first three are always very special, but the rest of them are special too, just because the first three are really special doesn't mean the others aren't either. And so I'm really fortunate to advise a tremendous group of students that make my job just extremely rewarding and enjoyable. OK, so then I'll leave it open for any questions. One of my current students. Fourth student, I have seen your group triple in size in the last four years. How do you best manage that part of the job, like the rapid growth and acceleration? I don't know. You really have to change how you manage it, as you know. With your first students, you're the postdoc also. You're the senior PhD student. You're the postdoc and you're the advisor when you first start. So you have to wear at least three hats to start a research group. But that actually, in my opinion, needs to end, to be a proper advisor. You have to peel away to give your students time to think independently, to sit in the corner by themselves. Sorry, guys, to think about what they're doing and why they're doing it. So in a way, scaling has forced me to do that in some capacity. And that's really the only answer. If you have 12 students, you can't mentor them the same way you mentor two. But I think it's a really interesting and essential correction that's unavoidable, that's in the mentoring system, that you basically change your style and one for the better, I think, in the terms of long-term development of the students to force them to become more independent thinkers. And that's kind of what I've done. But it's definitely a work in progress. It's not easy to do. Other questions? Thank you for the great talk. It was very nice to know how you basically grew into being a professor. That was very nice. My question is sort of similar to his question on, it's more about how do you have the time to dig deep and involve yourself in research when you have a lot more number of students to mentor? Like, do you still get the time? Because that's something that I am a little anxious about that in the future, if I become a professor, then I'll have to guide it. Maybe I won't have the time to do the research myself. Well, there's only so many hours in the day. So when you become a professor, you're asked to do a million things. And so inevitably, you do not have as much time to just focus and think about research as you did when you're a PhD student in a postdoc. And I'll share something that my advisor told me, which is that you're going to look back on your career and think that when you're basically a PhD student in a postdoc, your life was never simpler. Because you got this opportunity to just think about science and work on technology. And it's really a special time in your career. The good news is, is you get better at that. So you can do it faster. And then if you can do it faster, then you can work on more things while still having 24 hours in a day. But I won't lie. You definitely stretch across more things. And you just have to constantly be kind of evaluating your balance, I think. And say, am I happy with how much time I'm spending on things, am I unhappy? If I'm unhappy, I gotta make a correction of some kind. And for me, it's still very important to not lose connection to the science and the engineering that's done in my lab. If I don't understand how something one of my students has produced works, I'm extremely unhappy. So I still make sure that I at least understand the fundamentals and the big picture. So I think that's essential for me in moving forward. But I won't pretend to say that I know how to run all the equipment in my lab. That's definitely not true. So it just changes a bit. And you just have to find new balance. It's a great question. I also had the same concerns when I was your age. Any other questions? Thanks for the talk, Chris. Very nice. I was curious about the comment you made about writing a book during your PhD. Yeah. I haven't been thinking about that as well, but the task just seems daunting. So my question is, how did you manage to find the time while finishing your PhD dissertation to also contribute to the book? Yeah. Well, I'll say it helps if there's three authors. So that's for step one, right? And I won't take excess credit for it. So we also certainly benefited from the fact that my advisor had a course reader that had been fine-tuning over 30 years. So we had a great starting point to kind of catapult the process. And then myself and a fellow lab mate wrote a few additional chapters and helped form it into more of a textbook style. So we had an amazing starting point. I think without, if you were starting from scratch with nothing to work on, that probably would not be possible to do while doing a PhD. But yeah, it is a big effort as anyone that's gone through it will tell you. So I think start with as much material and be open to co-authors as you can. Okay, I think that's all we have for today. Thanks so much to Chris and to all of our speakers. One second. Before you all get away, right? So I'd just like to thank the speakers. I always find these talks inspiring and we're looking forward to even more great things from you. Now, those of you that have read your email before coming here know that we will soon have a new Dean of Engineering. And having worked with Arvin Rahman very closely now of the last three years in my two tours of duty, I can say that there could not be a better choice. The College of Engineering is in great hands. And we're going to ask Arvin to say a few closing remarks now. Arvin? Thank you, Mark. I was just gonna say that I'm still Associate Dean. And I was just gonna do my job and just tell everyone, hey, remember April 10th, we're gonna meet again to celebrate the careers of four additional, four other faculty members from four different schools. Ever since we started this program, I really loved to see how this has grown. So many faculty students join. And you really get to see what makes success and beyond just the papers and what is it about people's character, about their relationships with others that are essential to success. And certainly looking ahead, I look forward to seeing a lot more of this happen. And remember it's a huge college and we have great faculty and staff and we'll do a lot more to learn about each other and what makes us take and succeed. So I look forward to that. Thanks everyone. Appreciate it.