HQP Highlight Series: Eden Goodwin
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Welcome to the HQP Highlight Series: a series of interviews designed to highlight the innovative research and diverse experiences of Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP) across the Carbon to Metal Coating Institute (C2MCI) network.
Today, we welcome Eden Goodwin (she/they), a PhD candidate working with Dr. Seán Barry on micro-scale research at Carleton University. Eden will be sharing her insights on the exciting science taking place at C2MCI and the approaches, challenges, collaborations, and career journey behind their research.
Could you introduce yourself and briefly share what you’re currently working on at C2MCI?
My name is Eden Goodwin (She/Her or They/Them); I am a PhD candidate wrapping up my studies at Carleton University under the supervision of Dr. Seán Barry. I have been working with the C2MCI since its inception and, before then, was working with both Dr. Paul Ragogna and Dr. Cathleen Crudden on an SRC-funded research project on N-Heterocyclic Carbenes (NHCs) as small molecule inhibitors for Area Selective Deposition.
Currently, I’m in the micro sub-division of the C2MCI. I primarily work on modelling the thermal properties, adsorption kinetics and surface functionality of NHCs for advanced integrated chip manufacturing applications.
What first drew you to your field of research?
Above all else, what drew my attention to microelectronics as a teenager was speculative science fiction. As a teen I was obsessed with The Matrix (1999) and the retro-futuristic technology it featured. Like most science fiction enjoyers, I deeply resented the Wachowskis for their inaccurate world-building and would take any chance I got to explain why the law of conservation of energy makes the premise of the movies conflict moot. This eventually led to an obsession with technology on every point along the Kardashev scale: from Dyson swarms to kinetic mass accelerator launch systems to brain organoids. For the record, Lana and Lilly: reduced energy cost of compute would have been a far better premise than humans as batteries.
In Grade 11, I found myself in a tattoo shop getting Bohr Rutherford diagrams of Hydrogen and Helium on my wrists (with a permission slip from my father), explaining to my deeply unimpressed artist why representing any atom with a 2s or higher orbital would be criminal. Two years later, I started my combined honours degree in physics and chemistry at Carleton University. Four years later, I was an undergrad in Dr. Seán Barry’s group learning the science that drives Moore’s Law. Now, I am at the end of my PhD in the same group.
What’s the coolest analytical or synthetic technique you’ve learned recently? Why did it excite you?
Low Energy Ion Scattering, or LEIS for short. It is a rather surface-specific technique that bombards a sample with charged ions that inelastically scatter off to have their kinetic energy measured by a collector. LEIS is one of very few compositional techniques that relies more upon Newtonian kinetics of two charged particles undergoing an inelastic collision rather than the quantized nature of electrons. I received firsthand experience with this technique during a research exchange at the University of Helsinki on their impressive cluster ALD tool known as “The Monster”.
LEIS is interesting to me in large part due to its remarkable similarity to Ernest Rutherford’s 1909 Au foil experiment. This experiment, first taught to me in Grade 9, serves as the basis for our current understanding of the atom: a central nucleus containing positively charged nucleons surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons. Learning and practicing this technique in Finland, a country that declared independence only 8 years after the principles on which this technique is derived, was a highlight of my academic career.
Have you ever worked with people from different disciplines? How did you make the collaboration effective?
Chemistry has often been referred to as the bridging science, connecting applications in the material world with the principles of the theoretical. This has been especially true in the kind of the collaborations I find myself in. I have had the privilege of collaborating with materials scientists, physicists, engineers, neuroscientists, computer scientists, education researchers, synthetic chemists (both organic and inorganic), and on rare occasion a biologist. In all these collaborations, the first and most essential step is establishing scope and expertise. Determining what each party of a collaboration can bring to the table and how it will benefit the project is essential for dividing tasks.
Prior to the C2MCI’s inception, I was a part of a collaboration between the Drs. Crudden, Ragogna and Barry at Queen's University, the University of Western Ontario, and Carleton University respectively. Each group at each university had its own unique scope and expertise: Queen's had outstanding synthetic organic chemists and equipment, Western had some of the best surface characterization available in Ontario, and Carleton was one of a handful of groups in Canada who had knowledge and practical experience working with atomic layer deposition equipment. This division of labour allowed my colleagues and I to refine our primary fields of interest with feedback from peers outside our discipline while simultaneously developing our ability to understand and critique work we were unfamiliar with.
Tell us about a presentation or poster session you gave. What made it successful?
Personally, I am not a fan of the poster presentation as a format for science communication. While I see its merits, I find the endeavour too loud and repetitive for my liking — I enjoy the sound of my own voice, but I don’t like repeating myself. Despite this, I do think my favourite presentation I have ever given was my poster presentation at the 2024 annual general meeting for the C2MCI.
As a recipient of the EDII Fellowship grant, I had been asked to present a poster that highlighted both my research and advocacy in EDII fields. As such, I decided to combine my collaboration with Dr. Kim Hellemans on predicting success in first year classes with my early work establishing the technique of Atomic Layer Restructuring. It is uncommon that I get to discuss two of my passions that hold significant but seemingly unrelated values, and it is even less common that I can find an apt and witty title.
The talk, “Smoothing things over: Helping your students and your surfaces” was received quite well — I provided hand-outs to those who came and visited, many deans and chairs were interested in how a cheap drop-in style support system could cause such a drastic change in student performance (~12% average grade increase), many surface scientists were curious at the prospect of a new Atomic Layer Process to exploit, and ultimately I ended up winning the 1st place award for the micro division.
I can attribute this success to a multitude of factors, but the one I think truly mattered was passion. I was deeply enthusiastic to share these ideas and results with anybody who would listen to me, which translated into a unique presentation that kept the audience engaged.
I still don’t like poster presentations. Just chat with me at the coffee break instead.
Have you ever proposed a new idea or method in your work? How was it received?
I would be remiss not to bring up my work on Atomic Layer Restructuring, not because of its novelty in the field nor its reception, but because of how we arrived at that result. In 2023, I had been delving into the kinetics of adsorption of our champion NHC on our champion surface: N,N’ di-isopropyl benzimidazole on Au. The original idea had been to compare the kinetics of adsorption under different dosing regimes as there had been some hints in the literature that allowing the NHC to “relax” on the surface with a slower dose may result in a denser, more robust protective layer which we could exploit in ASD or as a rust inhibitor. I was presenting my findings at a poster session when Dr. Matt Davies approached me to let me know I was fitting my data wrong, and that it would probably be better fit using a bi-modal adsorption model instead of a mono-modal adsorption model.
Over the next year and a half, we dug into this bi-modal adsorption model on QCM surfaces and consistently saw that the physiosorbed component of the bi-modal adsorption model would always reduce upon cycle. On one of our many video calls about this issue, Matt suggested that the surface had to be getting smoother for the number of surface sites to be changing so drastically. I was not convinced, and more importantly neither was my supervisor, so we designed a handful of experiments. The most interesting of which was a Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM) experiment wherein I had to somehow convince my collaborator Emmett DesRoche to intentionally roughen a single crystal Au (111) surface he had so carefully crafted. Once we saw by STM what was predicted by molecular dynamics simulations, QCM kinetics analysis and spectroscopic ellipsometry we had to accept that these NHCs could smooth Au surfaces.
I first presented this work as an oral presentation at ALD/ALE 2024 in Helsinki, Finland and had nearly a dozen industrial and academic peers approach me to discuss how this new phenomenon could be exploited. I came away from that conference with far more ideas about my own work than I came in with.
What’s one thing about your research that consistently makes you smile or surprises you?
Nothing brings me more joy than seeing a researcher grow into their craft. Throughout my career, I have met and collaborated with dozens of researchers, many of which I first met as their teaching assistant, their graduate student supervisor, or a senior graduate student on a collaboration they were just joining.
It never surprises me in the conventional sense, but it always catches me off guard how suddenly that an early career HQP will go from nervously reading off their slide notes in a weekly standup, to explaining something to me about their research that I had never considered before. Every time, I find myself remarking about their progress with my peers and reminiscing about their early days in the collaboration, as a student in a lab I was TA-ing, or an honours student frantically taking notes as I over-explain the Sauerbrey equation. Those are my happiest days in research and are always in the forefront of my head when I am teaching or mentoring.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone just starting their journey in chemistry?
When and where does someone draw the line at “starting” their journey in understanding chemistry? With the most pedantic of pedantic lenses, one could say that the layperson’s journey in chemistry begins, for example, with learning to cook. Feeding ourselves and our loved ones is a deeply personal pursuit every human being has engaged with in some way. The principles behind it all boil down to chemistry: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (as the kids say). At this level, my advice would be focused on discovery: meet your failures with curiosity and try to recreate them. A loaf of bread failing to rise, fermented greens exploding in the cupboard, garlic turning green in a cast iron pan, all of these are opportunities to learn. Grab them and run.
If we presume instead that studying chemistry requires intentionally studying chemistry, we find ourselves speaking to the high school junior or the first-year student. Learning chemistry at this point of your life is synonymous with resolving contradictions. Every trend you learn will have an exception, every simplistic model you learn will be replaced by a more accurate and complex one, every problem you face will bear resemblance to the last and somehow require a completely different approach. The advice at this point is to embrace the iterative nature of chemistry. Unlearning the previous model and understanding why it fails is necessary to fully understanding a higher level of theory. Lewis diagrams will help your understanding of molecular orbital theory, which in turn will help your understanding of density functional theory. Don’t get bogged down in what you learned before, or what you will learn in the future. Focus on the exercise at hand, I promise it will be worth it someday soon.
If we move a step further and say that to pursue chemistry one must be pursuing unknown chemistry, then we find will find ourselves at the threshold of research. Most people starting their journey in chemistry are simultaneously starting their journey into research. I regularly tell people that the first year of graduate school will likely be the hardest year of their lives and am usually correct. You are entering the valley of despair where you are beginning to understand how little you know about chemistry. Every new thing you learn reveals twenty you didn’t, and progress feels like falling behind. Despite this, you are still learning valuable things. My advice for this majority is mostly repackaged advice for the junior graduate student: take notes on literally everything you do especially if you consider it a failure, the worst collaborator you have is your past self. Setting yourself up for success is a multi-year endeavour and failure is a critical part of that.
If you had asked me this question a year ago, I would have stopped there as these encompass what I would consider to be the most relevant entry points to chemistry. However, there are still researchers from other fields who take a detour into chemistry whose journeys are not intertwined with their burgeoning journey into research. A perfect example is Dr. Sanne Deijkers, a phenomenal plasma physicist from the University of Technology Eindhoven, who joined the Barry Lab eight months ago. Working in ALD and CVD, she has a significant amount of crossover with our research scope but from a much different perspective. In many ways discussing research with her feels like a function approaching a limit from above and below: sometimes we converge and sometimes we don’t. The most interesting times are when we do not.
My advice at this level, which I unabashedly copy off the plethora of excellent postdoctoral researchers I have worked alongside, is to embrace the novelty of the differences between you and your new colleagues. The journey from question to answer is not a state function; the paths we take are as important as the conclusions we find. Whenever possible share your reasoning and listen to the reasoning of others.
The HQP Highlight Series is made possible by the support of the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (#NFRFT-2020-00573).
If you are a C2MCI HQP who might be interested in appearing in future instalments of the HQP Highlight Series, please reach out to Dr. Tetyana Levchenko to get involved.
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