Meet Geraldine Richmond, 2018 Priestley Medalist

The breakthroughs

Credit: Amiran White

Richmond in her office at the University of Oregon.

Richmond expects her team members to take charge of their research and to challenge her when they think she’s wrong. That’s how one of her most important papers—a 2001 Science paper that precisely describes the ordering of water molecules at an oil-water interface—came to be (DOI: 10.1126/science.1059514).

Her University of Oregon lab’s work in the late 1980s and early ’90s used the nonlinear spectroscopy technique called second-harmonic generation (SHG) to study solid-liquid interfaces. Later, she would move almost exclusively to using a related technique, vibrational sum frequency spectroscopy (VSFS), to study the air-water and oil-water interfaces. Both techniques were pioneered by Yuen-Ron Shen at UC Berkeley.

The junction between different types of liquids or other types of matter causes a break in symmetry that these nonlinear methods can detect. In SHG, two photons from a laser beam combine at the interface to generate a signal photon that’s twice the frequency of the input beams. VSFS operates on the same principles but uses two photons of different frequencies, one infrared and one visible. By scanning the infrared beam through a range of wavelengths, scientists using the technique can measure vibrational spectra and the orientation of molecules of all kinds sitting at interfaces.

Richmond was interested in VSFS to study the oil-water interface. The main challenge to using VSFS at the time was building a tunable IR laser. Then-grad student Gragson had already built one and used VSFS to explore the air-water interface. His initial success led to further studies of hydrogen bonding at water’s surface, including atmospherically relevant adsorbates, by many of her graduate students and postdocs.

Two of Richmond’s other group members, John C. Conboy, now at the University of Utah, and postdoc Marie Messmer, who later became a professor at Lehigh University, wanted to try VSFS on the oil-water interface, but the IR laser system in their part of the lab was not designed for VSFS experiments.

“I was very skeptical that VSFS experiments using this much simpler laser system would work,” Richmond recalls. But because she expects them to take ownership of their research, she let them try it. Sure enough, they obtained the spectrum of the surfactant sodium dodecyl sulfate at the interface between D₂O and carbon tetrachloride within a day or two, which they published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1995 (DOI: 10.1021/ja00135a032).

Related: Geraldine Richmond to lead AAAS

That paper, Richmond says, gave her oil-water research a real boost, and she’s been pursuing that direction ever since. It took another six years to get to the seminal Science paper. Her grad student Larry Scatena, now the director of the University of Oregon’s Shared Laser Facility, was able to make measurements of the bare oil-water interface that required higher sensitivity and purer solvents than Conboy and Messmer’s work. The paper showed for the first time that water molecules strongly orient themselves along the interface and weakly bond to oil molecules. Richmond marks her decision to let Conboy, Messmer, and Scatena follow through on their hunches as the launch of some of her most prominent research efforts.

Like most things with Richmond, the list of her contributions to surface science is long. Her group’s measurements at the oil-water and air-water interfaces have produced observations of how environmentally and biologically important molecules adsorb and orient at liquid surfaces. In the early 2000s, she began adding a theoretical element to her work, confirming observations generated by VSFS and adding details about molecular bonding at and near interfaces.

“The whole field of research into properties of water is extremely active,” says Richard Van Duyne, a physical chemist at Northwestern University, who nominated Richmond for the Priestley Medal. “Richmond is one of the world’s foremost contributors to our current understanding of the chemical processes that occur at water surfaces.”

The workshop

Credit: Amiran White

Richmond surprises group member Brandon Schabes with the pie he intended for her in the group’s lunch corner.

Richmond’s accomplishments extend far beyond the lab. Nothing embodies that so well as COACh. She founded the group—whose name originally stood for Committee on the Advancement of Women Chemists but that now serves women and men in all physical sciences and engineering—in 1998 with other female professors around the country.

The program was inspired in part by Richmond’s mother. Lucille Richmond had a salon in Lindsborg, Kan., where Richmond worked as a girl. Not only was it the place where she learned her first chemistry—her mother would point out the names of chemicals on the labels of beauty products—but also “the beauty shop in those days was a female haven,” Richmond explains.

A haven like this was something she sought out years later in Oregon. She organized a group of female colleagues from the university who would gather at her house outside Eugene on occasional Saturdays to make beads out of Fimo clay and talk. Their husbands would keep hot clay coming and their kids played in other rooms. “I realized how much I missed that female camaraderie my mother had back in the beauty shop,” Richmond says with a laugh.

Beyond talking about their families and admiring the beads they’d made, the women started talking about their careers. That’s when Richmond began to realize how many challenges they faced in common, even as midcareer scientists.

Richmond and chemist Jeanne Pemberton of the University of Arizona got a dozen women together from universities around the country and applied for a grant from the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation. She wanted to get female professors together for a series of discussions and workshops about how they could advance their careers. “I was confident in the power. I knew that you just bring these women together and it will be successful,” Richmond says.

At the group’s first meeting, Richmond recalls, everyone said they were basically doing fine. Sure, maybe their male colleagues had it a little easier, but these women were all professors at world-class institutions.

It only took one more meeting for the veil to drop. The second meeting was a negotiation skills workshop, and when they started talking about their own negotiations they realized how bad things were. One person was losing her lab space; others were being passed over for promotions and raises. By their third meeting six months later, the group’s work enabled the women to start making gains in their jobs.

COACh started shortly thereafter, with funding from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. At first, it was only for women who were tenure-track chemistry professors. The analogy Richmond uses is oxygen masks on airplanes: They first had to take care of themselves before being able to help others. But the program has now expanded to all women and men in the physical sciences in the U.S., as well as across the world. This winter, COACh held its first workshop for community college professors.

The program still runs out of Richmond’s office, thanks to her longtime assistant and COACh coordinator Priscilla Lewis. She organizes all the COACh workshops around the country and the world: sessions on negotiating a salary, advancing careers, giving effective lectures, mentoring students, and more.

Richmond teaches people how to do their own COACh workshops, especially in other countries, and leads mentoring, communication, and negotiation workshops. In addition to Lewis and Richmond, an advisory board of more than two dozen people and a handful of facilitators travel the globe to lead COACh workshops.

“When you undertake this long-standing problem of gender discrimination, you have to be a very special person to believe that you can make progress. And Geri has made progress. There’s clearly a lot more work that needs to be done, but she’s had a huge impact on the quality of women’s lives in academics and the quality of women’s careers,” says Mary J. Wirth, an analytical chemist at Purdue University who was at those first meetings Richmond organized.

The front of the room

Credit: Courtesy of Geri Richmond

Richmond stands with women from across Africa at a 2016 U.S. State Department-sponsored COACh workshop in Kigali, Rwanda, that was focused on people with careers in water science and engineering.

Richmond’s drive to be a mentor and role model shows up in less explicit ways, too. The trajectory of her career hinged on her decision in 1985 to leave her first professorship at Bryn Mawr College—a liberal arts institution where her focus was more on teaching and less on her research—for the University of Oregon.

That move put her in a position to achieve the heights she has in her field of chemistry. One could argue she wouldn’t have a Priestley without it. But the decision to leave was about more than her own success.

She remembers asking herself at the time, do I want to be in the back of the conference room with my students, or do I want to be at the lectern as a role model? She chose the latter.

At Oregon, her research career took off, she founded COACh, and she got involved in the public policy work that would take her to Washington, D.C., and around the world as then-president Barack Obama’s science envoy in Southeast Asia. She has become the role model she’s striven for, even if it’s sometimes a thankless job.

“We need people in this field who are willing to be high profile. Her willingness to step up and take the lead on things that are related to policy and diversity and all of these issues that she’s championed, I think it’s so important because otherwise science just stays in the background,” says Aaron Massari, a physical chemist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who uses VSFS to study interfaces in organic electronics.

The oil spill

Richmond’s trip to New Orleans in February fired her up. She’d been invited to speak at the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill & Ecosystem Science Conference, an annual meeting set up in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She couldn’t wait to tell her group about it when she got back.

There are a few ways to clean up oil when it spills into the ocean. It can be contained at the surface with booms and burned or skimmed off. Or people can use dispersants, chemicals that emulsify oil and sink it into the water column. That stops the oil from washing up on beaches and makes it easier for naturally occurring microbes in the water to break it down, although there are questions about which approach does less harm overall.

Dispersants are why the conference organizers invited Richmond. Recently, her group has been applying its spectroscopic techniques to the surfaces of emulsified droplets, both oil in water and the reverse.

The people who clean up oil spills, including oil companies like Exxon, have been looking for new dispersants. The ones most commonly used are sold under the name Corexit, a line of dispersants comprising emulsifiers and solvents designed to lower the surface tension of oil as much as possible. But even the scientists at the New Orleans meeting aren’t sure how these emulsions form and break up.

One of the main ingredients in Corexit is dioctyl sulfosuccinate sodium salt (AOT). Richmond published a paper last year describing how water, oil, and AOT interact at the surface of nanoemulsion droplets (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2017, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1700099114).

Work like Richmond’s is vital to spill responders, says David Westerholm, director of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Response & Restoration. Fundamental research can lead to new products that are more effective or more environmentally friendly than those available today, although he cautions that the road from lab bench to a commercial product is sometimes long and arduous.

Richmond hopes her work can contribute to formulating improved dispersants and thinks her presence at the meeting demonstrates that her work and that of others in the field of surface science will be critically important in the years to come. “This meeting was really a confirmation of that,” Richmond says.

Richmond is proud that in addition to winning the Priestley Medal for her contributions to physical chemistry and surface science, she’s also being recognized for her work in service of other scientists through her founding of COACh, her time as president of AAAS, her appointment to the National Science Board, her role as a U.S. science envoy, and more.

“I think it sends a very strong message that success and impact isn’t all about h-indices and citation metrics,” Richmond says.

“I was told when we started COACh that it would look as if I wasn’t committed to research,” Richmond says. “I love the research and the wonderful students it has brought me. But as my career has advanced, I realized that the research alone is not enough.”