I'm not surprised to find this in my e-mail inbox, but I am enraged. Springer Nature is now offering "AI" to "help" you "quickly understand any paper" and edit your manuscripts.

Publishers should be pushing back against "AI" to protect scientific integrity and author's rights. (1/2)
⚗️🧪 #AcademicSky

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court ruled that funding can be withheld for schools that continue DEI practices or recognize gender diversity. Today, I learned that @cmu.edu removed signs in its restrooms supporting trans folks' needs and autonomy. Every day validates my decision to leave the US.

Alt text of the open letter that I sent to ACS is continued here.

The 2025 @acs.org Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C. while D.C. is in the midst of a take-over by the Trump administration. In spite of the circumstances, ACS is not allowing any speakers to switch to virtual presentations. This threatens the safety of vulnerable community members.

⚗️ 🧪 #AcademicSky

These optimized particles included some with visible/UV emissions 6.5x higher than any UCNP in our training set! To ensure that these far-OOD predictions were reasonable, we validated by performing additional kMC simulations, finding generally good agreement. (9/10)

While testing out these different models, we realized that UCNPs and similar core-shell particles display a unique "subdivision invariance". You can define layers arbitrarily, and the particle behavior doesn't change, but the representations (including for heterographs) do change. (6/10)

We also designed a new heterogeneous graph representation, with one set of nodes representing UCNP dopants and another set representing interactions within a layer or between layers. We found that our hetero-GNN outperformed other models in-distribution and especially out-of-distribution. (5/10)

With SUNSET, we can learn structure-property relationships for these complex nanostructures. We considered a number of different representations for nanoparticles - simple feature matrices, voxels (for convolutional neural networks), and graphs (for graph neural networks or GNNs). (4/10)

Towards this end, we performed thousands of high-fidelity kinetic Monte Carlo simulations (using RNMC, recently published in JOSS) and compiled them into a dataset called SUNSET - Simulated Upconverting Nanoparticle Spectra for Emission Tuning. (3/10)

I'm Evan (they/them). I live with asthma, an autoimmune disease, and a host of mental illnesses (depression, anxiety, and more!). Also neurodivergent.

I'm a postdoc and incoming ChemE faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. I study reactivity, sustainable chemistry, chemical data science.

I just got back today from a kickoff event at TRI HQ in CA. Pictured here are several of the other SARC PIs - Aditi Krishnapriyan (Berkeley) and Daniel Schwalbe-Koda (UCLA) - and the TRI crew. Not pictured: Bingqing Cheng (Berkeley) and Tonio Buonassisi (MIT). Very excited to work with these folks!

Name: Evan Spotte-Smith
Pronouns: they/them
Field: #CompChem, electrochemistry, chemical data science
Picture: I have so few pics of myself! It's a problem
Hobbies: hiking, reading, tasting wine and tea
Random fact: my first educational gig was teaching a high school Model UN group in Brooklyn

While our findings are preliminary, we suggest that oxygen anions superoxide (O2^-) and peroxide (O2^-2) could be to blame. Both anions can react readily with EC, especially peroxide. We hope this stimulates more studies into cathode-side electrolyte decomposition, especially with oxygen anions! 5/5

Similarly, when we looked at chemical oxidation of EC by evolved singlet oxygen, we found that the mechanisms reported in the prior literature were kinetically limited and basically inacessible at room temperature. There must be some other, unexplored mechanism driving electrolyte degradation. 4/5

We find that direct electrochemical oxidation of the common solvent ethylene carbonate (EC) is thermodynamically infeasible at essentially any potential reached during normal Li-ion battery operation, even when accounting for concentration effects. 3/5