Success and Creativity in Scientific Research : Amaze Your Friends and Surprise Yourself

Long-term success in scientific research requires skills that go well beyond technical prowess. Success and Creativity in Scientific Research: Amaze Your Friends and Surprise Yourself is based on a popular series of lectures the author has given to PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Both entertaining and thought-provoking, this essential work supports advanced students and early career professionals across a variety of technical disciplines to thrive as successful and innovative researchers.

Features:

• Discusses habits needed to find deep satisfaction in research, systematic and proven methods for generating good ideas, strategies for effective technical writing, and making compelling presentations
• Uses a conversational tone, making extensive use of anecdotes from scientific luminaries to engage readers
• Provides actionable methods to help readers achieve long-term career success
• Offers memorable examples to illustrate general principles
• Features topics relevant to researchers in all disciplines of science and engineering

This book is aimed at students and early career professionals who want to achieve the satisfaction of performing creative and impactful research in any area of science or engineering.

David Sholl is the John F. Brock III School Chair of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. During an academic career of more than 20 years, he has advised more than 60 PhD students and postdocs. His research group has published more than 350 papers describing their work on computational material modeling for applications in the chemical industry and energy sector. David has given more than 200 invited seminar and talks around the world and written two previous books, Density Functional Theory: A Practical Introduction (with Janice Steckel, published by Wiley in 2009) and Polyphony, a novel. The former has been cited more than 1100 times (using data from Google Scholar). David has also participated in writing documents that defined research agendas for the US Department of Energy and the National Academies of Science. For the past seven years, David has led the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) at Georgia Tech, the largest academic chemical engineering department in the US, with 900 undergraduate students and 250 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. ChBE has recently been ranked as the #3 best undergraduate chemical engineering program in the US (US News and World Report), the #5 best graduate chemical engineering in the US (US News and World Report), and the #6 chemical engineering department in the world (Shanghai Ranking Consultancy Academic Rankings). During his time as School Chair, David’s research group has published more than 100 papers. This book is based on lectures David has given annually to the graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty in ChBE.