Growing up in Bangalore, India, Adarsh Suresh was encouraged by his scientist father to go out, explore, and, most importantly: ask questions.
In neighboring forests, a teenage Suresh found his passion for science — well, at least for studying one class of organisms.
“Like everyone, I went through an insect phase,” he said. Not content to examine the six-legged creatures on his own, he reached out to an entomology professor at the National Center for Biological Sciences whose website said that he accepted high school students. The professor agreed to take in Suresh, assigning him to go into the forest, gather insects, and identify them. Soon enough, Suresh had graduated to bigger projects, including training bees to fly to the lab.
“I said, ‘This is really great. I really enjoy doing research,’” he said. “I was treated like an adult, and I felt relevant and important. And that’s when I really learned how to ask questions, how to break them down into digestible chunks.”
That led to a yearslong pursuit of research that took him to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then to the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago, where he also found his passion for teaching, mentoring, and communicating science. Now, as he finishes his PhD and looks back at what he has learned, he’s ready to help reform education in India.
“Science that is not communicated to society is useless,” he said. “And to communicate science and educate students, you need to make them feel relevant and important, to be allowed to make risky decisions to understand how the world works.”
Learning to fail
When Suresh arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015 — his first time in the United States — to study chemistry and chemical engineering, he immediately began to search for his next research project. He found his place in a lab that worked to convert nitrogen to ammonia using visible light. He enjoyed the experience so much that he began to research graduate schools. PME immediately grabbed his attention.
“The school was doing something new and exciting, and I wanted to be a part of it,” he said. “It was interdisciplinary and avant-garde, and I knew there would be challenges and opportunities as we figured it out as we went. It was the best decision I could have made.”
He wanted to work on big problems, like the global water crisis, so he devised a plan: He would work with both Prof. Stuart Rowan, who had developed a porous material with a high surface area, and Prof. Chong Liu, an expert at extracting ions from water using electron fields. Combining the two technologies could lead to a new way to not only desalinate water at scale — it could also remove toxins and mine valuable resources from it.
He developed a selective electrode to facilitate these processes, but it did not perform well enough inside the electrochemical cell. “Science does not go in a predictable way,” Suresh said. “When people ask me to tell about a time I failed, I say, ‘I’m a graduate student, I fail every day of my life.’”
Suresh even accidentally dropped the electrode and stepped on it. Luckily, it didn’t break. But the mistake made him wonder about the strength of materials — a question he knew would be on the minds of other young people, as well.
“I started to think about how to explain fundamental concepts of mechanics,” he said. “So I posed that as a challenge to myself.”
“To communicate science and educate students, you need to make them feel relevant and important.” PhD student Adarsh Suresh
Giving students ideas they can understand
In fact, where Suresh found his groove at UChicago was in communicating science, mentoring young students, and acting as a sounding board for his peers.
As a PME science communication fellow, he has presented scientific concepts at PME’s Junior Science Cafés and at the annual South Side Science Festival. To explain how materials get their strength, he shows how vertical rolled-up Post-it notes (seemingly weak on their own) can support a stack of books. He loves explaining scientific concepts to kids.
“Our job is not to inundate them with equations and theories,” he said. “We have an obligation to inspire them and make them believe they are capable of changing the world by giving them the ideas and toolkits they can understand.”
But young kids aren’t his only audience. He won UChicago’s Three Minute Thesis Competition and also served as a mentor to a group of students (one high school student and two undergraduate students) on a research project to develop next-generation carbon foams for selective carbon capture. “I will aways welcome high school students in the lab,” he said. “I want them to explore, to foster independence, and to learn how to ask questions.”
He also found time to serve as a PME ombudsperson, acting as a resource and sounding board for PME students. In each communication and mentoring experience, he draws on his the tenets of improv — saying, “Yes, and” — to respond to the person and situation.
Creating accessible education for everybody
As he finishes up his PhD, Suresh is excited for a career in education. He wants to inspire kids in his home country with visual demonstrations of the power of science. He had a taste of what it might be like when he taught a summer scholars class in 2020 to high school students. Due to the pandemic, the class shifted online, so every student was sent a breadboard, on which they could create circuits.
A month after the class ended, a student emailed him, asking for help building something new on the breadboard. Suresh was happy to comply. They got on a Zoom call and worked it out.
“That he emailed to ask for my help was very nice,” Suresh said. “I want to bring these innovative learning techniques to schools. I want education to be free and accessible to anybody. That’s my goal.”
This story was first published by the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
