Michael Chen
Post-doctoral Fellow
Department of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Interviewed by:  Luc Charbonneau, American Geosciences Institute
Interview date:  November 15, 2022
Location:  Microsoft Teams

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In footnotes or endnotes please cite AGI interviews like this:

Interview of Michael Chen by Luc Charbonneau on November 15, 2022, American Geosciences Institute, Alexandria, Virginia USA, https://covid19.americangeosciences.org/data/oral-histories/michael-chen/

Transcript

Chen:

I am currently at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and I am an NSF Earth research postdoctoral fellow. I am effectively a researcher and a postdoctoral scholar.

Charbonneau:

From what you told us you started that in 2020 correct?

Chen:

The title of that position was different in 2020. I started January 2020, but I have effectively been a postdoctoral scholar with the same advisor for this whole period.

Charbonneau:

Can you walk me through a timeline of how the pandemic has impacted your work?

Chen:

In March 2020 I had been a couple of months in. In some ways I was still doing some on boarding. We started some preliminary experimental work, but we were still settling on what project to do. I was getting trained and everything when the pandemic hit it.

I am not going to say it came out of nowhere because it did not come out of nowhere, but the transition from “should I be worried about this” to “you cannot go to the lab” happened very rapidly. In my case it was a benefit to have been in such an early stage because I talked with my advisor, and we decided to rapidly pivot to doing numerical simulation work in a similar space.

I do reactive transport in porous media at the pore scale. I was going to do experimental work in that space, but we decided to just pivot to doing numerical simulations with the hope that we would then pair that with experimental work. Before things reopened, what happened is for year and a half of the pandemic where I did not really have access to the lab and whatnot I worked from home. I was doing the simulation work and I am very thankful that my advisor did numerical simulation.

He was able to help me with that. I did not intentionally choose him because I wanted to do numerical simulation, but with his help that meant I could be very flexible. He had access to the tools and let me go (to work) very quickly. As the pandemic started to progress or regress, our department outlined plans for people to get into labs and work. A lot of that had to be very solo. I had to wait because I was doing some of the experimental work that required the use of other facilities.

There was this coordination issue where I would need to make sure I could be in one facility to do the things I needed to do and then be able to go to the other one. Coordinating between the different facilities in this case, the Minnesota Nano Center and our main lab space was a little bit difficult to navigate. There was an added burden of any time I wanted to do lab work I could only go to the lab, and I had to commute. I could not go in, stay in my office, do whatever, eat lunch. I could not do any of that. I had to go in, do my lab work, come back, and that made the barrier to doing the lab work a lot higher, and so it was not until things were back in the office, and we were back full time where I would say got my footing better settled for doing the experimental in the lab work.

We are in this kind of, as you describe, this endemic phase. I am back in the office full time. I do lab work. We are finishing the paper related to that lab work in the simulations, and I am doing mostly other lab work. I will say the pandemic did not change my focus entirely. I still wanted to come back to doing the experiments, but it was useful having this thing that I can work on if I am stuck without access to like lab facilities.

I would say that the university worked hard to get us access to the labs early, so I had access to the building as early as I would like in May or June of 2020. Again, under very restricted conditions. I could not access my office. I could only access the specific lab that I said I would be in had to coordinate my hours so I could not overlap with other people. Some of the experiments we do take a long time. If my experiment does not take exceptionally long, it may be that someone else takes a couple of days or something and so coordinating that is always difficult.

Charbonneau:

When you made that shift and started working on your numerical simulations what platforms were you using?

Chen:

The specific tool I was using is COMSOL Multiphysics. A finite element Multiphysics simulator. I have a couple of sets of computational resources. I was running the simulator. I was running like barebone simulations and setting them up on a Linux workstation that we could remote into.

When that went down that provided issues. Because of the pandemic, you had to be able to get in to be able to restart the machine.

I also had access to the Supercomputing Institute at the university again because my advisor does research in computation using the computational methods we already had that set up. I was able to run the higher-grade high-resolution simulations on MSI. It is called MSI on the MSI cluster, which was helpful, and I still do that. I am still running simulations on the cluster. I do not know what I would do if I did not have access to it. I guess I would just be running the lower risk things and be having to take a lot of the results with some trepidation.

Charbonneau:

Have these research adjustments you made due to the pandemic guided the research and what tools you use now?

Chen:

It is one of those things where I think the tool can be helpful. It is like knowing that option is available, but it is something that I must be careful in how I think about it because what I found during the pandemic when I was getting started is that it was extremely easy to do it.

I want to run a lot of things. You can build out this nice big matrix of like I am going to run this simulation, with these like 10 different parameters, and those have 10 different variations, so I must run 100 simulations. Is that like too many? It made me grapple with how to make the most use of that time. That was the most helpful lesson that I pulled out of this forced pandemic experience.

I think the other thing that will come up if you did not ask it now, but I am going to bring it up now is how quickly the switch needed to happen meant that I had to take the tool that was most like ready to start producing results. COMSOL is particularly good at that, but it is a finite element simulator. It has major drawbacks, especially for simulating fluid flow and reaction chemistry, where mass conservation is important. Finite element simulators do not do that as well natively compared to say, finite volume simulators, but because COMSOL is pre-built, and you can just set it up and click “go,” we ended up using that tool instead.

The main research tool that some of the other people in my group use is called OpenFOAM. I did not feel like I did not have the time to learn it. I was starting to learn it, but because of the barrier to learning that tool because it is a little less easy to use, I chose to do COMSOL so I could get results quickly instead of the tool that would serve me better in the long term.

Charbonneau:

How did you shift your communication with the people you were working with during the pandemic?

Chen:

A lot of my work, especially because I had just started a lot of my work, is very solo. It was me working on my project and just advised by my advisor. We just moved from in-person meetings to doing meetings on Zoom. The university provides Zoom in terms of seeing what other people were doing. We have group meetings, and we hold those by Zoom as well.

I forgot because my advisor has been changing the frequency and type of meetings we have been having, but it is once every couple of weeks that we have these bigger meetings. The group members talking about their research are not necessarily like a targeted, project-oriented meeting. I would have individual meetings on my projects with my advisor every other week. Then also every other week I have these larger group meetings. Now we just do it in person now that we are in this more endemic phase.

Charbonneau:

Did they extend the time for you to complete your research? Did they give you more funding?

Chen:

The timing is a bit curious and lucky in some ways. I applied to the fellowship in 2019 in the September 2019 cycle. They had initially turned me down, so usually you would hear back by like March or so. In that first round of funding, they said you did not get it.

In summer of 2020, the program director called me up and said: “Hey, we have a little extra money. Your application was highly rated. You are the next person in line to get funding. Do you want this fellowship and when you want to start?” We found out in 2020. I talked with my advisor about it and said: “Why don't I start in March (2021)?.”

The fellowship is 2 years and NSF did not give me any extensions, like any extra funding or anything like that. They gave me the funding and I was able to choose a timing that made sense because by March 2021 we had been in a year. I had a little more access to the lab at that point. We were able to time when I started the fellowship nicely so that I could do the work I had initially set out to do.

Charbonneau:

Do you think there is anything in your research that has been permanently altered by the pandemic?

Chen:

I do not think the pandemic has changed the tools I would say the field uses. It changed some of the tools I use and have experience with, but I would say it is in a broad sense. Paleontologists using 3D printing and whatnot. I would not say the pandemic has had that impact in my field because there is already microscale fluid dynamics and reaction chemistry work.

It was already common to use these kinds of microfluidic tools that I have been using. It was already common to use numerical simulation and so I would just say I just got to step in the tradition a little bit more than maybe than I had been before. In that sense, the pandemic did not have a strong impact on the techniques and methods I used.

Charbonneau:

How did your productivity level change because of the pandemic?

Chen:

Oh, it is murder on my productivity. I know some people who really like working at home. My wife does some work at home, and she is not geoscience, but she likes being able to roll out of bed. I really like having the separation of spaces and I had to work extremely hard to try and have separation of my space. This is the place where I work. This is the place where I like to do not work.

I am a bit of a gamer. My computer is a gaming machine which is helpful. I can do simulations on it. It is hard to just sit in front of your computer and have Steam sitting there, it being like you could open and play video games instead.

As interesting as I find the simulation work and how useful it has been, that is not where my heart is. I like to do lab work. I prefer to be in the lab. I prefer to be meeting with people and so I think the sum of all that the social isolation, especially when I have just moved to a new place and have not gotten to meet anybody, plus not having access to resources, it added up to me. I was just not being as productive as I could be.

I am not even going to say could have been just not being as productive compared to say like a reasonable baseline. There is a lot of pressure, especially as a postdoc, to just always be producing, and I have had to just step back and be like: “Look, this is just how it is.” If someone down the line gives me some guff about it, I am going to be like: “Look what were you doing in March 2020?”.

I hope to be able to give some of that kind of grace and understanding to the students that I mentor into whoever I might be working with down the line.

I had just recruited an undergraduate student to do work and it was just bad. We had to wait. We put together a few trivial things that this undergraduate could work on, some reading that she could have done that sort of thing. We also mentally had to delay that research until they were more able to access the lab, because they had to get lab training. No one had figured it out. How do you do lab training, but not have everyone in the same place? It took a little while to get the coordination figured out and we did eventually get a research program with this undergraduate off the ground. That was the other way I was interacting with students is I did a guest lecturer for my advisor's class. As lecturing on Zoom had a bit of a trivial components, figuring out how to teach on screen which is not fun and tough.

Charbonneau:

What is your current work model? Are you going in every day or are you in a hybrid where you are spending a few days at home?

Chen:

I would say that barring a sickness, or like a compelling need to stay at home, because I do not want to commute or the weather sucks, I would go in every day. I am at home now because I am feeling unwell, and I will say that it is like the pandemic reminded me that I can do that. There are ways that I can do work from home that are reasonable. But a lot of the stuff I am doing now is applying to faculty positions, which I can do at home.

Doing lab work I must go in. There is not much more room there to do it otherwise.

Charbonneau:

Has your career trajectory or passion for what you are doing with fluids changed over the pandemic?

Chen:

Every postdoc is in this position where we say what we are going to do. We are like sussing it out still. I am applying for faculty positions. My main goal is to end up at a primarily undergraduate institution. Mainly be teaching, I would still be able to do some research, but I would primarily be teaching, that is where I think my work will crystallize.

I just applied to a USGS position like a month or two ago and they just got back and said that my application made it through the initial HR screen. Who knows, I will just end up being a hydrogeologist for USGS or something like that. It is a USGS job like there are only so few of them and this one is in Saint Paul. I do not want to move to the middle of Missouri. Like I get to stay where I am.

Charbonneau:

Were there more people doing webinars, publications, and posting online resources during the pandemic, or did that stay the same?

Chen:

Let us say in my specialty I did not notice a dramatic uptick in any content. There was a lot of stuff being circulated about how to do work from home, and what I would call toxically positive idea that you have all this time to yourself now like you should be better out of this. I would call it a little nonsense, but I would not say that within my field there was a lot of significant difference.

There was some amount of people doing webinars online and that sort of thing, but I did not see a huge change.

Charbonneau:

What strategies did you implement that worked for you to maintain your workflow during the pandemic?

Chen:

I mean the thing about being a postdoctoral researcher is that there is no challenging work. There are (only) a few hard deadlines in your life. If I had a hard deadline, I find it extremely easy to get the work done in time. I do not get distracted. Then the project is unstructured, we are still exploring what we need to do, we do not have real deadlines, that is where I really start to struggle.

In that space, I accepted that I was not going to be as productive. I was fortunate that at the time I did not have a kid, my partner and I were able to have our own kind of working spaces because she had to have her own working space for her work requirements and so it was easy to at least I set myself up for success, even if it was just tough.

Charbonneau:

Do you feel like there were any skill gaps related to the pandemic?

Chen:

I would say with the major caveat that this is because I am incredibly lucky, I was lucky in the advisor that I got. I was lucky with the timing of everything that happened. It did not really have an impact because I was able to neatly pivot. Do this like numerical modeling with someone who knows how to do it. I learned different skills, but I did not lose out, say on like learning a skill or something.

I did not really spend a lot of time trying to draw blood from a stone where I am trying to make the most out of some data or something. I could just change it. Instead of learning this microfluidic stuff, that weird stuff that my group does, I was learning numerical stuff.

But my experience is very uncommon compared to most other people, especially in geosciences, because so much of what we do is field oriented or lab oriented. I could see why NSF is interested in skill gaps.

Charbonneau:

Do you notice any difference between the students you work with now in comparison to pre-pandemic students?

Chen:

Absolutely. I had an intern over the summer and for a little context, they were a non-traditional student, so they are a little bit older and were making changes in their career path. The pandemic stood out to me as having an enormous impact on them.

They had taken all of these, in air quotes, lab classes, but had never stepped foot inside of a lab. This was them doing an internship with me was the first time they had ever stepped inside a lab and worked in a lab space in their life.

I would say that the pandemic had an enormous impact. From their experience, it was helpful that I was able to bring them into a lab and show them things like: "Look, this is how you weigh a thing out." This is like how you do some of like the data analysis like me.

I will say I did not notice as much of this kind of difference in communication, but that is just a reflection of my own experience rather than necessarily like a reflection of general trends. But I think learning everything via Zoom, especially the lab stuff, was a huge disadvantage for this student because it is not the same. You can watch someone weigh a thing out 100 times. It is not going to be the same as you doing it.

Charbonneau:

Did the pandemic provide you with any new opportunities you might otherwise have been aware of if it had not occurred?

Chen:

I do not think so. Even numerical modeling, I feel like the pandemic accelerated me spending time learning how to do that stuff and ensured that it would happen. But look, I signed up to work when the advisor who did numerical modeling and laboratory work, he would do some fieldwork now as well. I was hoping to do some of that branching out regardless, and in some ways the pandemic forced that to happen instead of me just doing lots of lab work and like trying to fit in, you know the numeric modeling as I could.

This allowed me to like do that expansion very readily. That was one of my goals, to expand my capabilities. I was able to do that more efficiently because of the pandemic.

Charbonneau:

For you personally do you feel like the pandemic opened or closed more doors or stayed the same?

Chen:

I would say it is multifaceted. I think in terms of my personal life I would say it is a net negative. The pandemic was absolutely a net negative. I did get to connect with some old friends. Staying connected with some old friends was a little bit better because everyone was Zooming each other instead of going out and doing things.

I do not really have a social network in Minneapolis. My partner, I decided to have a child and so that also has killed really the possibility of building out my social network. That is a strong net negative.

I would say you know the positive side of it is I was able to focus on myself and focus on what I was doing. Focus on my partner, and that was nice, and it confirmed for me, we were married at that point, but it confirmed like yes, we can coexist in this space together. We are not struggling to do this. Yes, we can do this work or find out that it does not work, and then that is a tough situation. But it worked. It worked out for me.

Charbonneau:

What is a piece of advice would you give yourself for how to navigate obstacles and changes that get thrown at you in the future?

Chen:

I would tell myself to pay attention to the lesson that you learned about. Think about how I work best and just set myself up to do it. If that means hacking together another place for me to work on it, that is a different computer, that is what it means. Does it mean setting up another user account on my computer that does not have access to the things that are distracting on it?

I did not mention this but, over the pandemic, I also liked learning how to manage my time better. I had not really had to do that in graduate school, but it was often just putting fires out as the fires were coming. Whereas here I feel like I have taken a much more elevated level of being strategic. How am I using my time, applying it? I would encourage myself to continue doing that.

I had another point, and it came. I felt like I lost it, and it came back to me. It is the positive impact in job market because right again lucky in the timing the fact all these faculty positions just shut down. They were not offering faculty positions, and so a lot of these universities have these big gaps that they need to fill where they had been trying to hire and were not able to hire over the pandemic.

Now I am on the market and applying, and there are lots of positions available. There are more job opportunities available than I have heard in the previous year. There is particularly relevance in these positions to the types of things that I do.