Eric Jankowski: Efficiency Expert, Whiskey Blender, 380-Mile Failure

A 24-hour mountain bike race, a 380-mile bikepacking “failure,” and a custom whiskey blend might sound like unrelated stories, but they all point to the same theme: how we learn, how we collaborate, and how we get better without wasting effort. I’m joined by Dr. Eric Jankowski, director of the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering at Boise State University, for a wide-ranging conversation that stays grounded in real moments, real trade-offs, and real joy.

We talk about the Smoke and Fire race and what self-supported rules teach you about resourcefulness, planning, and humility. From there we get into craft and community: coffee as a precise ritual, whiskey blending as a long-running tradition with friends, and why care for process is often a sign of care for people. Eric also shares how Boise became home after Michigan and Denver, and what stood out to him about Boise State’s student-focused culture and its access to the outdoors and to industry.

Then we dig into the core research: energy efficiency, computational efficiency, and materials science that aims to power society without harming the planet. Eric explains how his lab uses high-performance computing, why wasted “bit flipping” makes him mad, and how smarter workflows can dramatically cut costs. We also explore Boise State’s NSF-funded AWESOME Center (Advancing Workforce Experience in Semiconductors Through Outreach and Mentoring Excellence), semiconductor workforce development in Idaho, and how emerging technologies like ferroelectric memory and neuromorphic computing could reduce the energy and cost of AI and data centers.

Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves science and stories, and leave a review so more listeners can find the human side of Boise State research.

Transcript

Welcome And Show Purpose

Chris 0:00

Welcome to On a First Name Basis, a podcast where we dive into the stories behind Boise State scholars. I'm Dr. Chris Saunders, but please just call me Chris. I'm a faculty member here at Boise State, and I'm excited to share with you some of the amazing stories of my colleagues, their journeys, the challenges they've overcome, and the connections they're building right here in our communities. Supported by the Boise State Division of Research and Economic Development, this podcast is all about getting to know the people and their work. Join me as we explore the human side of the innovative blue turf thinking happening at Boise State. Let's get to know each other more on a first name basis. On this episode of the podcast, our guest is Dr. Eric Jankowski. Eric is the director of the Micron School of Material Science and Engineering at Boise State University. Welcome to the show, Eric.

Eric 0:52

Hey, C hris.

Chris 0:54

So what may or may not become a running joke, or at least maybe if if three if three occurrences become a running joke, I'm gonna say that the the guests that I attract to the show apparently have a high tolerance for pain. I I say that that if you've listened to previous episodes of this podcast, I start off with Owen McDougal, who I thought riding his bike 27, 28 miles a day was was was a lot. And then I interviewed Anne Hamby, who is an ultra marathoner, and she just blew me with way about what sort of distances she runs, 50 to 150 miles, which blows my mind. And then I start to talk to you. And one of the first things we talked about was that you were one place away from qualifying from I didn't know that this thing exists, the world championship of 24-hour races. So tell us 24-hour race, what are you doing for 24 hours?

Eric 1:43

Yeah, this is 24-hour mountain bike racing. And that's the sort of accolade that it's got a bunch of caveats. This this was in 1999, and people didn't do 24-hour mountain bike racing. So if you came in second to last place at your local 24-hour race, this is 24 hours of Boeing in Northwest Michigan, and the other people that do that race had already qualified for the world championships, then yeah, you can be one place away from qualifying for the world championships because there's eight people that do this sort of race total.

Chris 2:25

I wonder why only eight people might consider, and and so so you're not, are you riding, you're not riding constantly for 24 hours, I hope.

Eric 2:34

Well, the people who win do. And I I hit a tree after about like 12 hours, and it was snowing, and my bike was making a funny sound, and I was not having a good time on that lap. So um, I had set up a tent that I would use to nap in. You do laps, these like nine mile laps, and whoever can do the most laps wins. And I I came back to my tent and laid down for like six hours. I took a long nap in the middle of a 24-hour bike race, but I then I got back up and it was sunny and it wasn't snowy anymore in May in Michigan, and I finished as many laps as I could. It was a really good day on the bicycle and came in second to last and also second to qualifying for.

Chris 3:22

So third, third to last place. That was qualifying. The the bar was was a was there a part of you that was relieved that you didn't qualify or were were you well, right?

Eric 3:31

I was a I was a senior in high school at this point, and I wouldn't have had the means to go do that race. I think it was in Germany that year. So uh like it was a cool thing to say, but mostly I had just gotten into endurance mountain biking and wanted to pedal my bike for a long time and had some ups and downs during that. And so I imagine one would.

Chris 3:56

So, so so let's let's do mileage. So, so for that one where you were one spot away, how many? So you said nine mile laps, how many, how many miles did you did you do in that 24 hour?

Eric 4:08

You know, I don't remember. You've blocked it from your memory. I think, you know, on the order of a hundred, hundred and fifty is probably um where I was at.

Chris 4:18

But that's right, but you've ridden farther than that. And so some some people actually listening might be, I was not f familiar with this, but there's there's a a local thing, the smoke and fire race. Is that that correct? And then that happens every year. And so tell us about your your tell us about smoke and fire and your and what I'll call your your 380 mile failure, which is it's a pretty good, pretty good failure, right? Yeah. So so tell us about smoke and fire.

Eric 4:43

So smoke and fire is a self-supported bikepacking race. It's typically a a little bit over 400 miles, and it's a loop that starts in the north end. I'm in Hyde Park, and you go out to Ketchum, up to Stanley, back through that stretch west of Stanley, and then back down through Bogus Basin and into Boise. The exact route changes from year to year. It depends a little bit upon like what fires have happened. And it can be a smoky and fire avoidant time of year in September that racers have to deal with. You take all of this stuff that you need with you. You can't be helped by any anything that isn't publicly available. So you can't accept help from other racers, you can't accept help from a secret team that you've planted in the woods. You support yourself on this 400 to 400 mile plus loop. And I didn't finish. I so I a week before the race, I noticed that I had a pretty clear calendar on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday the following week. And I thought, huh, smoke and fire leaves on Wednesday morning. I could if I if I just didn't go to Thermo on Thursday, I could do this race. I wouldn't have to cancel very many meetings to go on this race that I've always thought about. And I haven't trained for it. I hadn't done any scouting of the route. I hadn't done any gear prep. So I thought, okay, what do I need between now and Wednesday to put together something that I could ride in this race? Ordered a couple of things and put them on one of my bikepacking bikes and took off the next Wednesday morning.

Chris 6:31

So you just nonchalantly signed up for a 400-plus mile race that you're like, yeah, that this sounds like fun. I can make I can make this work. Yeah.

Eric 6:39

So there's, you know, you hear the word racing and you think about speed and getting across the finish line as quickly as possible. And that's that's the goal for smoke and fire. And people that win, like Nate Ginston, you might leave on Wednesday and come in, come back to Boise on Saturday morning sometimes. And I was looking at the mileage, looking at the route, looking at what I thought I'd be able to do. And I thought, I, you know, if I average like six miles an hour, I think I'll be doing pretty good. And I'll come in on Saturday night. And I my wife was going to be on call that weekend. So if my my goal was to leave Wednesday, get home Saturday night, and then I'd be able to watch the boys and make dinner and wouldn't have to call in any extra favors. But when I'd gotten to just past Redfish Lake, so I was in Stanley, I was eating lunch in Stanley, and I had my first tumble coming into Redfish Lake, and I jammed my ring finger in my right hand. And I thought, wow, you know, I've had it's it's it's Friday afternoon. I've had great weather, I've had a really lovely couple of days, averaging four, four and a half miles an hour, which absolute value isn't very different from six miles an hour. But percentage-wise, now it's a big deal, it's it's added up. It's added up over time. And so I'm looking at the schedule and I'll be getting home late Sunday night now if I keep this pace up. And I'm thinking I'm not gonna go any faster. I'm not gonna make any fewer mistakes. And I'll be getting home Sunday night. I got to teach class on Monday. I'm not ready for class yet. So in catch them on Friday, I'm thinking, I've had a lovely couple of days out on the bike. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go home now. So I rode along 21 back through Lohmann and got a yurt in Lohman on Friday night, made it back to Boise on Saturday morning, took my kids to Pride, and they wanted to ride their bikes down there. And I was like, oh, you guys, I'm tired of riding bikes.

Chris 8:39

Yeah, it's the it's the last thing you want to do, right? Like, I need a cleanse from bikes. I can't. I'm quite sore right now.

Eric 8:45

I'm missing some skin. And and then Megan got to go be on call and I got back into dad mode. Uh so slotted right back in. But it was, it was a really great uh like being able to pedal off into the distance for 380 miles in the Idaho wilderness is such a gift. Just leaving my garage. I didn't have to drive anywhere to go take this adventure.

Chris 9:08

I yeah, I mean, the way the way you describe it, right? And I and again, I you know, I joke when it's you know a 380 mile mile failure. To me, it's it's analogous to to when I talk to my students about about that process of failing, right? And that that failing is not a bad thing. Failing is just a natural process. And you can actually in in the act of failing, that can be quite right. You you don't you don't strike me is that you feel bad about this experience that you didn't finish, right? You got all of these things out of, sure. Did you you did you fail at the the stated goal at the beginning of this race? Sure. But there were all these other things that you learn, learn through that that process. And to to to me, again, all of this is very much a good analogy, I think, for for even for graduate school, for undergraduate, for doing research and whatnot. There's a whole lot of failures along the way, but it might, they might be really successful failures. It might be 300 miles of of absolutely worthwhile time, even if it didn't end up, you know, kind of the way, the way that you, that you saw it.

Eric 10:09

Well, right. And it would also be unrealistic to think that I could like win a race where uh my job is over here. I I ride the 20 minutes to and from campus each day is the training that I'm putting in. So I'm relying a lot on experience and I don't know if there's such a thing as old man strength.

Chris 10:30

Or maybe just old man's stubbornness of like an unwillingness to say, no, I can't do this. So, like, yeah, I can do that. I got, I got this. I got this. Or maybe it's just the bravery of like, you know what, what's the worst that could happen, right? Like I turn around and I come back.

Eric 10:43

Yeah. Yeah. I learned later that Susan Shadle was picking up her son in Stanley that same afternoon, and that I could have, if I had sent one text, gotten a ride home.

Self-Support Rules And Trail Magic

Chris 10:55

Oh no. But but maybe it was good that you weren't tempted, right? Like I had a lovely ride home. Well, and and so you you you mentioned, right, self self-support, right? I think that's the term, right? And you I I remember an earlier conversation you and I had, I was kind of struck by by so you can't have any help, but you but you qualified that with uh if it's not publicly available, right? So all racers and so people, my understanding, right, or people or businesses make things publicly available. And what I learned from you is that some of these are in the forms of we'll call them treasures inside of coolers.

Eric 11:29

Is that correct? Yeah. So trail magic, there's coolers out in the woods that might have some snacks inside of them. You know, I actually there there's people that know a lot more about smoke and fire and like the history and community around it, right? I I just showed up and participated and dipped out early. And I I only got trail map, stopped at one of those coolers on the way up to uh there's a uh a mountain pass between here and Ketchum. And I was I had taken a wrong turn and I found some guys that were at one of these coolers. I think there's just like a bunch of candy inside of this one. Um, and I was not in the mood for candy then. But like if one of these coolers had had a beer in it at some point, that would have been great.

Chris 12:12

Um and I I would I would imagine those are like highly highly coveted, right? There's, you know, a note in one of them that says, you know, there's a cooler out here somewhere with beer and everyone's out looking for looking for the beer. Probably not the best thing to have on a ride, but I would imagine it would taste taste delicious.

Eric 12:27

Also, if you wanted one, you could stop at a bar and get a beer. Um, because it's publicly available.

Chris 12:31

So you could stop at restaurants. That was But you also told me though that you not everything in the coolers is also is always nice. So what was the the the worst thing that you found in a cooler?

Eric 12:42

I don't remember. I'm gonna need some more priming for this anecdote if you're thinking of something specific.

Chris 12:49

I we were talking about you said you said there was there was one thing that you got or that you that was not good.

Eric 12:55

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Um no, I'm gonna throw a restaurant and catch them under the bus who I also don't remember. But I got so I in Ketchum. On Friday morning, I woke up and rolled into town and got breakfast at a bakery. And there I got like, you know, an ex benedict with some like avocado that like totally hit the spot. Amazing. But I got a burrito to go that had like hash browns and eggs and bacon in it. And I was gonna eat this burrito over the rest of the day and just kind of nibble on it. And it was so dry. It was so dry, Chris, that like I threw away half of a burrito that I couldn't stomach during the hungriest day of my life.

Chris 13:42

Like at the point of time where you're like, I will eat anything except this burrito.

Eric 13:46

Yeah, like I was so mad at this burrito that like like it was like mealy and dry, and like I added hot sauce and ketchup, and I just couldn't make this burrito palatable. And it was so different from the breakfast that I had just had from this place that like gave me life, and that like two hours later I'm so angry at this burrito.

Chris 14:08

And I think was it hard to throw it away?

Eric 14:11

Did you it was simultaneously maddening that I could throw it away and disappointing that I was wasting food, right? Like I don't like wasting things. Like efficiency is at like the center of my research, it's the center of how I navigate the world. And so throwing away a burrito offends my sensibilities so deeply. And it was easy to throw this away because I was so mad at this burrito.

Coffee Rituals And Blended Whiskey

Chris 14:39

I'm done with you, burrito. It's probably good that you don't remember the remember that but the the the bakery that you that you got it at. So so okay, so let's say you're listening, you're like, yeah, I you can't get me on a bike, bike, bike for that long. But but sometimes, you know, the biking can can bring you to unexpected unexpected things. If you talk to people about Eric, there there are things that you will hear. One of which is is he will make you coffee because you you treat your coffee very scientifically, right? Materials science and and and that. And and I if I haven't mentioned on the show before too, that that is my my my morning ritual is I do my first chemistry of the day is my my cup of coffee, my V60 pour over. That sounds pretentious, I promise you it's not. It's more of just I measure things out precisely because I want to create a good cup of coffee. But also you will hear about Eric's whiskey. I and this is more of a recent thing that I heard of of that you blend your own whiskey. And this has ties into, right, because you're biking, right? That there's a connection there in terms of the bike and whiskey. So, so, so tell us about it, and I say your whiskey, but but again, the rep the reputation for you blending your own whiskey. So, again, as I imagine, some people listen like, ooh, whiskey, that's that's more my speed than supposed to 400 miles on my bike. So tell us a little bit about your whiskey.

Eric 15:58

Yeah, so there's a bike race in Michigan called Iceman. It's a really large in terms of number of people. There's about 5,000 racers start the race uh each year. And it goes from Kalkasca, Michigan to Traver City, Michigan. It's about 30-ish miles, plus or minus two, depending upon the year. And it's the first Saturday in November. And when I was a freshman on the Michigan cycling team, I did this race. And the back in 2000, it was a smaller race, but wearing a jersey that a lot of people recognized the logo on in the state of Michigan, it was the first race where like there was a bunch of people cheering on the route for me, not me specifically, but like they saw Michigan and they were cheering. They said go blue. And I had such a positive experience with that race. And my co-president, I later became the president of the Michigan cycling team. My co-president, his best friend, was the president of the Michigan state cycling team. So we would start bringing our teams together for this local Michigan race that was off the collegiate racing circuit, off the NCAA circuit. And it was kind of a friendly rivalry, but we would either camp or stay in like a parent's basement that was nearby the race and get all of these racers together from these two schools, compete against each other. There was often the Michigan, Michigan State football game that we could watch together that same weekend. And it was part of the community that I had as an undergraduate at Michigan. So since graduating, those friends have often gotten back together to do this race. So since 2000, and it's now 2025, I think I've done the race on the order of like 19 or 20 times over the past 25 years. And each year there's this core leadership from these two cycling teams, Michigan and Michigan State. And then the a lot of friends that we raced with during this time that get back together and we'll, you know, bring like scarves and shirts for each other's kids from whatever wherever we're working, share some swag. And the joke is that times get slower every year in the race, but the wine gets nicer. And there's some nice wineries in northern Michigan that you should go visit. And there's a distillery in Traverse City called Mammoth Distillery. And they opened in like 2010-ish. And so as we've been doing this race over the years, there was one year when there was this new distillery and we went and tried them out, and it was fine. But you know, we revisit them year after year after year after year. There's this tradition. And one of the things that's neat about whiskey is that the longer it ages, the better it gets. So we've gotten to like see this particular distillery grow over the last decade and a half and have gotten to, you know, just like peek in to their story, which is a special privilege. And I got a bottle of their whiskey as a gift for Krishna Pakala over in mechanical and biomedical engineering when he got tenure. And I gave it to him with a note about how this whiskey was representative of his personality. There's things about like metaphors for like wisess and age and energy and spirit that I thought reminded me of Krishna. So I got him this whiskey that reminded me of him. And it was uh their distiller select. It was a blend from some of the feed stocks that the distillery had been aging over the years. That was a kind of a one-off blend that particular year. So I give it to Krishna and I got a text later that summer that says, Hey Eric, what was that? That was really good. I need some more of that. The the more of the one-off thing that doesn't exist anymore. And I was like, Oh, I'm so sorry, Krishna. Um, I've got like maybe a quarter of a bottle left in my pantry that we can enjoy. But after that, it's gone. There's no more. So we were really sad. But fall came around and I was planning the trip with my friends again. And I got on the website for Mammoth, and they had the option to you could you could blend your own bottle from their feed stocks that they're aging in a warehouse that's in northern Michigan. And I was like, well, you know, those same ingredients went into that distiller's select. We could try replicating that, Krishna. But it says here on the website that you have to go in on at least half a barrel, which is 75 bottles.

Chris 20:27

Fair fair amount of whiskey.

Eric 20:28

That's a that's a large amount of whiskey. And, you know, actually I'm I'm old and I can't drink as much as I used to when I was in undergrad. Like, right? Like I can have maybe a a glass of whiskey on a Friday night, and that's a that's a pretty wild week for me these days. So not only is it a lot of whiskey, it's a lot of whiskey if if you uh drink at the rate that I do. And I was like, what am I gonna do with all of this whiskey after Krishna convinced me to go in on this half barrel? So we I I got my friends together, we did a blending event with some of the whiskey makers at Mammoth and came up with our new blend. It it was a uh 60% rye with 20% of two different bourbons that were actually the same bourbon, different aged, and the younger one, the 17-year bourbon, was finished in rum casks. So this was the blend that we made, and it's fine. It's like not gonna like change. It's not gonna win awards, it's but it's definitely not bad. And I got all of this whiskey and would start giving it away for gifts for various events that we were running together. Like so Christian and I do these story collider workshops and with Anne. And um, we would give a bottle away to folks that like purchase one of these workshops, for example, for somebody off site as a little bit of a gift. There's a little sticker on the back that has characters, events, consequences the three. Parts of these storytelling workshops hidden in the message in the back. So we can give it to somebody that's done a storytelling thing and be like, remember that stuff that we did. It's here.

Chris 22:09

I didn't know that. There's even more you've put you've snuck more lore into that. That's amazing. And I think you told me almost all the bottles are gone at this time.

Eric 22:18

Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know exactly how many we've got left. I gave a bunch to Krishna to give away. And I've got maybe a couple left in my pantry. So three weekends, four weekends ago, I did another blending. So we've got 2.0 coming out in it's being bottled right now. It'll be dropped off at my parents' house in Michigan later this month. And I'll pick it up when I go home for Christmas and start shut shuttling some bottles back to try out the whiskey number two.

Chris 22:48

That's awesome. I I'm gonna I'm gonna request, I don't need a bottle. Just to taste would be absolutely would be brilliant. It's first for science, as I would tell my as I would tell my students. See, this is this is why we right better living through chem through through through chemistry. Do you have you have ever have you ever do you have a favorite distillery brewery here in town? I I I feel I feel very fortunate. I I over the over the when I moved back after graduate school, that was kind of when I was at graduate school, I remember I left and beer and all those kind of things for me. We're kind of like, eh, it's okay. And then there's this explosion of craft beer. And and Boise is definitely, I mean, it we keep we keep adding it. I keep thinking, no way can we sustain this much. And apparently, apparently Boise can. Good good job, Boise. Like we we keep you keep making good stuff to drink and and and we'll do it. But but do you have do you have any favorites?

Eric 23:43

You know, I I really appreciate when anybody puts care into their product. So like, even if like IPAs aren't my favorite style of beer, if I get to like listen to you nerd out on the thing that you made, I appreciate that. I think I lean a little bit more towards like like ales and porters and the beers that I enjoy. And so anybody who makes those around town, from a beer perspective, I enjoy. You know, I actually haven't had much stilled spirits from Idaho. I've got a gin from Bardonnais, and that might be it. So if you the the you folks out there have recommendations, I would love to hear them.

From Michigan To Boise State

Chris 24:27

So I am not, I am not a huge connoisseur, so I'm I'm it when it comes to distilled spirits, but I but I am again a chemist. I uh so I'll tell you, I when I was an undergraduate out in Caldwell, we did the chemistry club did a field trip to Koenig Distillery, which was at that point fairly new and it is now far more established. I've been out there in the last year and they they make some love, like so. I would say Koenig is it's also a beautiful place out there. They have a beautiful facility. But I remember as an undergraduate and they had these two big, beautiful copper stills, and and and you know, they're doing the distillation and the smell. I think they were making apple brandy, and the smell was just, and I go, see, chemistry doesn't have to smell bad all the time. But it was like it was this lab equipment that we had been taught, you know, in in undergraduate small scale, but now it's been scaled up and it it had been made to look beautiful, right? Someone had put care and attention into this thing, and we were all kind of wowed of we can talk about the chemistry behind this and also like drink the the final product. So that again, that that science and the beauty and the art and the the deliciousness of those things. So Koenig, but but I I I will make my plug for for for beer. My probably one of my favorite brewers locally is barbarian brewing. And I've I've had an opportunity to talk to some of the folks, folks there in my number of visits. And a lot of their beers that I that I enjoy are their barrel-aged beers, right? And just like with whiskey, right? With time, there's a time element. Beer does not age as gracefully as as bourbon, as as whiskey does. Uh-huh. But I remember talking about some of the folks, and I and I said, you know, what is it that you what is it that you do that makes this so good, right? Because I've had some barrel-aged beers that are okay, right? You know, there's some there's some magical chemistry that goes in there. But but they said that, you know, their head brewer doesn't is patient enough to say it's not ready yet, right? Of like, we would, we would like to sell this, but it's it needs six more months. And and I and I remember just thinking, like, good on you for like, you know, you're gonna make a good product, but but how hard would that be, right? The patience to to to wait that long. And you're talking whiskey, right? Of like, yeah, this isn't gonna be ready for 20 years. You know, like that's how do you how do you plan for like what kind of business model allows you to make something that you're not gonna sell for 20 20 years later? But I would I I Barbarian is is is very good. They make some of the best barrel age sours that I've that I've ever had. Again, whole lot of really cool, cool chemistry. So so you're from Michigan, but right, so you like to you like to drink, you like to bike. Boise, Boise's a pretty good fit, right? I'm not I'm not saying that everybody in Boise likes to bike and drink, but like there's a there's a Venn, there's a Venn diagram of these are these I think are popular activities in in the valley. I don't think I'm stretching too too much on a limb. So, so I guess what got you, what's the story from from Michigan to Boise?

Eric 27:30

Yeah, so I did both my undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Michigan in chemical engineering. And during when I was finishing up my undergrad, my then girlfriend, now wife, came from Notre Dame to the University of Michigan. And I was a super senior because I had co-opt for Dow Chemical and extended my undergraduate graduation date by a year. So I was a fifth-year senior and she was a new medical student at Michigan. And we'd been long distance for all of undergrad. We started dating in high school. And so I didn't want to leave right when she showed up. So I applied to MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley, and Michigan for PhD programs. I got rejected from all of them except for Michigan. So I was like, oh, that's easy. The only place I got into is here. Guess I have to stay. So it was a really tough decision, is what you're saying. Really tough. And we got married about a year after that. And I did my PhD there at the at the University of Michigan, and she got a job to specialize in gastroneurology at um UC Denver in 2012, when I finished up my PhD. So we moved to Denver for her, and I got a postdoc at the University of Colorado Boulder Chemical Engineering Department. So I commuted from Denver to Boulder for about a year and a half. And then I got a postdoc at the National Renewable Energy Lab. Actually, about the same day that I got a job offer for a new faculty position here at Boise State. But I asked the chair, Peter Mullner, who was eager to get me on campus. I asked him if I could delay my start by a year and do this postdoc at NREL, the National Renewable Energy Lab, because A, Megan had one more year of training. So we're going to be in Denver anyway. B, it was a great opportunity to network with folks that were in my research area at this lab. And we had just started a family. So we could have our kid get born in Denver and then move up to Boise altogether in July of 2015, is when we actually moved up here. And but I think maybe a detail that's important here is when I was interviewing for faculty positions, coming to Boise had all of the things that we liked about Michigan and Denver, but more accessible. So in Denver, you've got the Rocky Mountains that are pretty close by. And there's great biking, there's great skiing in the Rocky Mountains. But we lived on the east side of Denver. So you have to drive through Denver and then out into the mountains for all that stuff. And it takes time to get to. So you're like, well, if it's going to take 45 minutes on a Friday afternoon, we might as well just keep going and like make a weekend of it. And then you're fighting with everybody else who has the same idea and you're stuck in traffic for three hours. And you know, it's dark when you get to your campsite and you've got a compressed timeline to have fun out there, then get back. So, you know, we didn't take advantage of the outdoors in Colorado as much as we would have liked. And coming to Boise, seeing how living in the neighborhood that we live in, close to camel's back, you're going to roll out of your garage and experience, you know, thousands of miles of trails without having to drive anywhere, point your bike in another direction, you end up at work and didn't have the traffic that Denver and Boulder had back then, at least. So when we came in here in 2015, it was lovely from a quality of life standpoint. And the first conversation I had when I interviewed at Boise State was with Susan Schadel in the Center for Teaching and Learning. And the faculty that I met here, from my perspective, got it. They were like, oh, this is a place where people care about students, where people care about teaching, and were scrappy from a research standpoint. This is a place that aspires to grow the opportunities for students to be involved with research and the impact with discovery writ large, where the research skills that I have now gained since my PhD like have opportunity here. And it's a place that cares about the undergraduate student experience deeply in a way that connected with me. So those things together uh led me to accept this job while on an interview to UC Irvine, where I was like, this place doesn't make sense to me. Everybody has new cars, all of the houses are more than a million dollars. How do faculty live here? What is going on? I want to go back to that other place in Boise.

Chris 32:15

Because the faculty aren't the ones making millions of millions of dollars, unless they do things in UC Irvine that that are really, really different. But yeah. Yeah. So that's how we ended up in Boise. Interesting. I the the things you said really resonate. And and so I'm right now, I'm I'm overseeing a couple of new faculty hires. And so part of that, right, is is you know, they're gonna ask about what is it like to live here, what is it like to work here. And as challenging as it is sometimes, and I think their challenges no matter where you marry, no matter where you work, where you teach, where you where you live, is that even as the university talks about, you know, our our inevitable progression to R1 status and what that what that that means, and not to go too deep into what R1 means ever. There are some metrics for that. For for me, it's this, it's this ever-growing, and I don't want to say emphasis on research, but because I I I think it's more resources for research, it's more opportunities for for research, it's more we are meeting metrics that show that we are we are at at this level. But all along, I always hear those same voices of saying this creates not opportunity for, you know, oh, so that Eric can publish more papers and become more famous, but of how does this benefit our students, not just our graduate students, but our undergraduate students that can be involved in that research. These are these are opportunities for them to be able to do things that that frankly, I, I, I look at some of what our undergraduates do in chemistry and I'm blown away. I'm like, I wasn't doing this stuff until graduate school, if I was lucky. They, they, they may not think that, though they have already leapfrogged what what my experience was as an as an undergraduate. And for them, that's just a part of it, right? It doesn't seem that big a deal. And I hope that someday they're like, wow, what an amazing opportunity it was. And to do it in a place, right? When when people ask, well, you know, what's it like to be in Boise? I say, Boise is big enough to have fun things to do, to have culture, to have music, to have fun things to eat and to drink and everything, but it never is feels so big that those things, like you said, aren't accessible, right? You I literally walk out my office and I'm on the green belt. I'm next to the river. I I we we were visiting with a candidate and they were like, so I could go fishing on my lunch break. Like, yeah, like some people do. You see faculty and students, they just go down the river and they're they're fishing. Like, and that's that's you're in that space already. It's not some far, far distant, distant thing. I think it's an amazing opportunity.

Eric 34:44

I'm gonna leave this room and take my kids up into the mountains and we're gonna go snowshoe to a yurt and hang out there for the weekend.

Chris 34:52

That's awesome. Is there enough s I is there enough snow?

Eric 34:54

The forecast looks like eight inches are coming down today at the Moores Creek Summit. So I think I think it might be pretty snowy when we get out there, if we can get out there.

Chris 35:04

By by the time that anyone hears this recording, well, hopefully you'll have come, you'll have come back, you'll have come back safely. But yeah, but those those opportunities I I think are are are amazing. So so with that, now that we've kind of we've kind of started started the the research, the the the scholarship talk, you know your your name comes up a lot, I at least from my perspective, when you see, you know, what does the university, you know, what's the new shiny thing or someone, you know, your name comes up a lot. You're involved with a lot of high, I think, high profile initiatives, which is which is a great thing. And I have always been, I I'm not gonna say a critic, I've always been the university, I understand why university marketing it right and and wants to promote all of these large dollar amounts, these large, these high profile things. And I think that's only one piece of the big kind of research story. And just because something brings in a lot of money doesn't always necessarily mean it's the most fun thing. These things are important. I'm not, I'm not discounting these things, but there's so many other, so many other things. So, so outside of the big money things, or or you know, in conjunction with the big money things, what what is the scholarship that you do, that you're involved in that really that you want to talk about the most of the things that you feel make those impacts for for students and then to now this community that clearly right you've you've bought into, right? And and that you that you are a part of, right? We as scholars, right? We're here, we're at the university, but we're also part of the community. So so what are your favorite things?

Eric 36:44

I I love learning things and I love helping people help people. So, so my research is focused on efficiency, and I want I want to generate power efficiently without harming the planet. I want to store that energy efficiently, without harming the planet, without harming people. And we do this with computer simulations in my lab, and computers use energy to do calculations, and I think about the efficiency of each of those bits that is flipped for each step of these calculations. And how can we extract as much knowledge as possible for the least amount of work? So efficiency is also like one angle to look at it from is laziness. How can we get the most for the least? And to do that, to write computer simulations that use supercomputers to answer questions about the structure of solar cells made from plastic that we might be able to inexpensively manufacture we have to learn a bunch of stuff. And so it takes someone that might be interested in material science learning how to do high performance computing. And not a lot of people wake up in fifth grade and say, you know what? I want to be, I want to be an expert at supercomputing for plastic. That's not a ubiquitous dream, I don't think. And so, so to do that, there's a problem that we have to solve on the way a puzzle that we need to figure out, which is how do you take somebody that doesn't think of themselves as a programmer and become not just a programmer, but an excellent programmer? Or how do you take someone that perceives of themselves as an excellent programmer and become an excellent material scientist too? How do we how do we help somebody see themselves as an area of expertise that they didn't associate with their identity? That puzzle pops up in a bunch of different ways across higher education. How do you take somebody that doesn't see themselves as a material scientist and show them that they can be an amazing material scientist? How do you take an engineer who doesn't think that they can communicate well with others and show that you are an excellent communicator or that you've got the skills, or we've got the skills, the tools for learning how to hone that efficiently? How do we get the most for the least amount of work?

Chris 39:31

So, how how how can we become more productive, lazy people? I I like I I use I use the term lazy in my classes actually quite a quite a bit of when we're solving problems of you could do it this way, but that's a whole lot of extra steps. Let's think about how to how to be how to be efficient with that. So, so so you had uh right of how do we tap into these things, right? There's all these, there are all these, let's call them positions or fields or very specific things, like you mentioned, that none of us even knew existed when we were. What do you want to be when you you grow up, right? Like the list isn't very long at that, at that point. So how how do you how do you start to have have those things that I know from a lot of your research, right? There's the the the word that keeps popping up is collab collaboration or or collaborative research. So how how do you start to go about and do that? And at what level are you talking? Undergraduates, graduate students, all of the above, faculty who are stuck, who have been stuck in their ways for a while?

Storytelling That Builds Belonging

Eric 40:31

Yeah. So I'm not super smart and I can't do everything. I can't even do most things. And so what I've learned is that wisdom is embedded in communities, not in individuals. So figuring out an efficient solution to a problem is expedited by hearing from many different voices that have more and different knowledge from yourself and creating the circumstances where that is possible. So there's a real element of efficiency that depends upon playing well with others. And so some of the ways that I think about playing well with others involve riding bicycles, making whiskey, and making coffee. We, the seminar that I ran with Elton Grangard, who roasted the beans that we made pour over from earlier today, uh, was talking about coffee. So we had a coffee tasting seminar as part of the material science seminar just a moment ago. And so one example of a successful collaboration was the story collector work that I do with Krishna and Anne and Patrick Lowenthal here on campus. So I had with Krishna piloted some storytelling, in quotation mark, interventions across our College of Engineering, where we had students tell true personal stories about thermodynamics. From my perspective, it was to collect evidence for ABED, our accreditation process, where I had been tasked with Eric, you need to show that our students can communicate effectively with a wide range of audiences. And thermodynamics is a math class. I'm like, how am I going to do this in a math class? So I asked a friend at the Story Collider, do you think you could come and tell our students, help our students learn how to tell true personal stories? And I can use this to gather this evidence. So Liz Neely, the executive director of the Story Collider, came in and ran our first Story Collider workshop back in 2017. And it was amazing the from the perspective of we as a room learned about each other. We learned where we came from, what we cared about, we connected with each other. And that classroom turned from a bunch of students into a community in the course of one workshop. And the I wondered if writing and sharing these stories in forcing metacognition about one's major and saying, how do you connect with thermodynamics or material science? I wonder, I wondered if forcing this metacognition through this assignment was sufficient for finding connections to one's major that we didn't interrogate before. So the idea was that grew from this was if we have one storytelling assignment, is that correlated with persistence in a major, with identifying more strongly with this discipline, with better graduation rates, with better grades? So Krishna loved this idea. And Ann Hamby, who studies the psychological psychology of narrative, got together at a cert and they were like, we got to write this proposal. And they did all of the work of pulling that together. I was like, Yeah, like here's the experiences. That I had in this classroom. And I'm glad to help with this. And I think the relationships that we had, building trust with each other and sharing stories about the things that we cared about, laid the foundation for that proposal going in really smoothly and having a clarity of vision for that work that landed well with our reviewers. And we've gotten an undergraduate-focused grant, a graduate-focused grant on using the story colliders framework for storytelling in classrooms and graduate training spaces to do reflection across the different ways that we develop as professionals, whether in an undergraduate-focused course, how do you connect to this major or as a graduate student? What are the ways that you belong or don't belong in this field as a professional, as a researcher? And there's a lot that we've learned since about the power of this reflection to give us some data and some agency in finding our path and honing that path and connecting the dots between where we are and where we want to go.

AWESOME Center And Semiconductor Workforce

Chris 45:05

I I think that's that's an amazing work. And and your kind of description of this, of again, where this all came out of is that sense of community and collaboration. And it makes it makes things so much, so much better. And again, I'm I'm biased because this podcast came out of a cert and it came out of conversations with colleagues. And and so I think that talking about what is important to you can really help drive you to doing those things and to get over whatever, you know, I my my students, and I and and not just students, you know, it's very easy to have doubts, right? Of you have this, we'll say this, this in your brains, you're like, is this a brilliant idea or total junk? Right, right. And and sometimes you just need to say it out loud to somebody else and they're like, oh wow, what a great idea. And you're like, phew, right? Like, cause until you know, you're because you're you're worried, like, oh, someone's gonna tell me it's it's it's silly. And hopefully there are people out there that will tell you that the idea is silly, but but I do think it's really important that communication piece, because no matter what, you know, what field you are in or you might go into, that communication piece uh is so important. And it's not just can you talk to other people, but but what you're saying, and and and again, Anne has been on the show and so of not only are you saying like it's just to say it, but you it actually can create this narrative in which it helps you to be the thing that you that you want uh to to be. And and so when we when we talk about again the role of of Boise State, uh what I what I would hope that this uh that that you know uh uh that storytelling, what that what happens is that uh Boise State as a as an entity is also part of the community. And when the community and Boise State overlap, that's when really uh cool things happen. And and to me, if you were to ask me, not that my opinion uh counts, but that's the whole point of a publicly funded research institution, is that it is not separate from the community. It is a piece of the community, it is solving the community's problems, yeah, right, with a set of expertise, right, with a set of tools. You had in an earlier conversation, we had talked about tools, right? Of new tools to solve things that used to be impossible and impossible problems. And that actually ties back to an early, earlier guest, Jared Talley, who who talked about, you know, farmers and their ability to solve problems. And we talked about like my grandpa would build his own tools, like this tool doesn't exist, but I need to use it to fix it. And his way of problem solving was to literally build, build the new tool. And Jared had had similar things, but but I I again it may not be physical tools, but we are we are members of the community trying to build those, build those tools. So, so with that, right? So you have some connections and some projects that that have directly to do with Idaho workforce development and probably one of the better, I'm not gonna say best because you never know, one of the better acronyms out there. Awesome. Awesome is the acronym. So tell us a little bit about this Idaho workforce development. Tell us about Awesome and and first, you know, I'm always impressed that you know what the acronym stands for, but what does Awesome Awesome stand for?

Eric 48:13

So Awesome is uh advancing workforce advancing workforce experience in semiconductors through outreach and mentoring excellence. And this is a National Science Foundation funded grant at just here at Boise State University. So it's nearly $7.5 million that pays for researchers, that pays for students to grow as researchers, all around semiconductor technologies and semiconductor workforce development. So on the research side of things, we want to make computers more efficient. You'll read these stories about companies like Meta thinking about building nuclear reactors to power their data centers for training AI. And that's a that's a ton of wasted energy. And one of the things that we're working on in this grant is using computer simulations to identify recipes for new materials that we can grow. So with techniques like atomic layer deposition. And if we can grow these ferroelectric materials that we can use as memory elements where we can use light to flip the bits instead of electricity to flip the bits, we can lower the switching cost for each of these bits that we need to flip. And if we can build neuromorphic computing architectures, spiking neural networks from these ferroelectric devices, then we think we can lower the cost of training something like ChatGPT by a factor of 100 or more, depending upon the some of the economies of scale that go into this. And so that's the technology pipeline. We've got four labs across material science and mechanical and electrical and computer engineering. So Lon Lee, Elton Grangyard, Karthik Srinavasin, Curtis Kantley, these are the PIs that are working on the different scientific elements of lowering the cost of computing, specifically around AI and the materials developments that we'll need to accomplish those feats of engineering. And through these technology, through the developments in these labs that's happening right here on campus, we're going to have opportunities for students in our Switch course. It's a course on making the modern computer, the history and future of computing. This is an undergraduate Foundations of Natural Sciences course that has a lab component in these four labs that students will be able to take next fall. Leslie Atkins is teaching this course. I'm so excited about this class. It's so cool. And so, so this is a perfect class for students in engineering and in business and in health sciences to get a sense for what's happening behind the closed doors at a company like Micron or Applied Materials or on semiconductors. What are they doing? How do they do it? What do I need to know to be a responsible citizen to make policy around a company like around an industry like these? How should I be thinking about it? What are the trade-offs that we're making as a community when we're building a giant fab? What does that require of our natural environment, of our natural resources? What are the economic payoffs that we get for that? What do I need to know as an accountant when I'm working Micron? What do I need to know as a construction manager when I'm building these data centers? All of this connection to society and the materials and engineering techniques that we use to make semiconductors that power society today overlap in the courses, the research experiences, and the vertically integrated projects that overlap with these labs in this in this center.

Chris 51:59

I mean, in in in so what what you're talking about to again to to me to to me, right, like you're truly on, and I I almost hate to use this because it seems so clear, right? The cutting edge, right? Like this is the state of what it is now. And I think that that sometimes sometimes academia is sometimes too slow to change to the current state of things. But what you're talking about is responding to to the now, what is in the news, what are the what are the demands? You know, Micron is building, expanding their facilities, you know, and so I'd imagine that a lot of this work I would think ties into what Micron wants, needs. Do you have a lot of students that go straight to Micron that internship there? Yeah. What are the connections like there?

Eric 52:44

Just last Monday, we participated in the Micron Student Combine, an opportunity for students to learn about internship and job opportunities at Micron. Micron's been an incredible supporter of Boise State University and our department specifically. I think, you know, over $70 million in support to the university over the last couple of decades. So really, really incredible support that has enabled so much student success within our discipline and many others on campus. And Micron wrote a letter of support for the Awesome Center. So part of the case that we were able to successfully make with the reviewers at the National Science Foundation is that Boise State is the right place for this. There's demand from a job perspective at companies like Micron, at Applied Materials, at On Semiconductor, at EMD Electronics, Tokyo Electron, Photronics. There's a huge industry here in the Treasure Valley around pushing the cutting edge of semiconductor manufacturing. And that requires both a trained workforce and new technologies for making these processes more efficient, cleaner, and profitable. So we couldn't do this without Micron. We couldn't do this without the support from the semiconductor industry here in Idaho. And between Boise State's student-focused culture overall, plus the connections to the industry, plus the expertise that we have from a research perspective on campus, we were hitting this sweet spot where I think it was very easy to make the case for why Boise State, why now? I mean why this particular direction of research.

Chris 54:31

And that's it's it's exciting. I I right some there's there's always parts of me that that hope that my students, right, they they leave the nest and they go out and they go do wonderful, wonderful things, you know. But there's also, you know, go out and Jared Talley and I talked about this of go out and do those wonderful things, but you can always come come back, right? And I I I think that that's an important part too, is that this this this uh this helps and that this helps the community here and the region, right? This isn't a well, we're training all these people and they're gonna go off off somewhere else, right? They they do get an opportunity to to stay here and give, kind of give, give back, right? I mean, Micron is doing this as a support, right? But they they they certainly it's an investment. And with an investment, you want, you get something back. And part of that is is the students that have this amazing, amazing experience that that from again, from my, I'm gonna call an uneducated standpoint, because I'm not an expert in this, but when all I'm hearing, you know, even financially, right, that the stock market, right, the AI will will call it a bubble. I'm not an expert, and I know that not everyone thinks it's a bubble, but but from you know, the power that NVIDIA has, right? And and what it what is the new landscape gonna look like? I've been listening to a whole lot of news articles about that very thing of these data centers are are gigant are monstrously big, and the electricity demands, like I I think that this again, I'm making a an somewhat educated opinion here. I think that AI, one of the consequences of AI is it's gonna accelerate the energy industry in a way that it wouldn't have otherwise because we just have it, it's it's created a problem that now again, right? We have to be able to be lazier about how we how we do these things, how we do these things.

Eric 56:18

Yeah. Yeah. And I I think about, you know, back when I was a graduate student, I got so mad thinking about all of the bits I was flipping in the simulations that I was running that were just generating heat that we didn't learn anything from. Thermodynamics. And and that was at such a teeny tiny microscopic scale compared to the energy that we are spending now today. And that makes me mad.

Chris 56:48

So every time you use AI, are you thinking about that? That you've sent in a query and the amount of energy it takes to answer your query. Is that is that hard sometimes of the tools you use are perpetuating the problem that you're trying to solve?

Eric 57:04

Well maybe that's not a fair statement, but I should admit that I don't use generative AI tools very much. Okay. So like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. I think maybe it's part of the privilege of the role that I sit in that can be easily replaced by something that knows a little bit less than me about a broader swath of things.

Chris 57:28

You haven't been replaced by your robot overlord yet?

Eric 57:30

Well, I think robots are good. And but it if if they're used for not evil. But but so so, you know, we're we're quite mindful of our energy footprint in my lab. We start with efficiency first. This is why we're doing what we're doing. And sometimes we'll we'll do machine learning ourselves. We'll iteratively use a computer to learn something that we can use for something else later. And if that makes the overall process more efficient. So, one example is we could do these density functional theory calculations about how long it takes an electron to hop from one place to another place in a material that can catch light and turn it into electricity. And we were doing these calculations to figure out the conductivity of materials like poly3 hexalthiaphine that we wanted to learn more about. And we noticed that we're doing these same calculations for really similar configurations of atoms over and over and over again. That felt like a waste. So, could we train a computer to look up how long it would take an electron to hop from here to here based upon the position and the orientation of these atoms with respect to each other, instead of doing that calculation from scratch every single time, that a calculation that was very, very expensive. Um, so we published a paper on this a few years ago where we replaced those, we we basically made a fancy lookup table, but we called it machine learning, because that's what it is. And we're able to replace this expensive calculation by uh that sped up our workflow by a factor of 300. So there's there's places where doing machine learning and um leveraging that using that artificial intelligence about these systems that we've built to good effect. But the one could argue that like making like a picture of your kid shaped like a cat is doesn't have the societal benefit that at the same level of uh identifying a new solar technology that we could manufacture at low cost.

Chris 59:39

So that I'm understanding correctly, that somewhere else that calculation had been done. And so you were looking, using it to look up the answer as opposed to do it to do it yourself. That that so that's a really interesting thing of of right. So the the output that you right, the input you said you ask it a question, but what you're saying is that so the output's the same, but how the output was generated was different. One was I did it for I I did the math by hand. The other one was, well, I just looked over and looked at what somebody else had done. Is that correct? Like when you're talking about looking up the not redoing the calculation.

Eric 1:00:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like let's say that the distance between two rings and how much one ring is rotated relative to the other are the two things that we figured out are what matter for an electron hopping from the first ring to the second ring. Instead of doing the expensive calculation again, we can do the expensive calculation once for a bunch of different distances, a bunch of different orientations. And that's that creates a two-dimensional space of answers. And then we can interpolate between those answers given positions and orientations. And that works great. Works super great.

Chris 1:00:53

You have a reference, you build the reference, and then you can refer to the reference so you don't have to do everything again.

Eric 1:01:00

And uh, that's what a lot of machine learning ends up being at the end of the day, is taking a whole bunch of answers, writing those answers down, and figuring out how to color in between the dots where we don't have answers already. And in that particular case, it's something that you can do on a laptop in an afternoon, and it solves, it it takes away the need for using a supercomputer for answering the same question that lets us speed up our workflow and lower the energy footprint of our workflow. But all of the stuff that we're doing with our supercomputers here are like it's such a tiny fraction of what's happening in the data centers that are being used to train the the next chat GPT, et cetera.

The Bathroom Bow Story

Chris 1:01:45

And again, to turn your kids' pictures and right, turn them into cat cat faces. So as we as we as we wrap up, again, I alluded to the fact that that from my my perspective, every every time I hear that you have a a reputation, it's not it's it's good right, right, reputation for for for whiskey, for right, that's the new one for the coffee thing. But but for me, every every interaction I've ever ever had with you, I the impression is that you're a good storyteller. And so, you know, to me, it's no big surprise if your involvement with Story Collider. And so, so so my my last, it's less of a question, more of a hopefully a well-received directive of so so leave us with leave us with a good story. So if you're you're teaching people to tell a story, so what so so give us give us a good story.

Eric 1:02:33

When I was a new postdoc at the National Renewable Energy Lab, this is a place that has the world experts at that time on organic solar cells, this material that I was just telling about that catches light and turns it into electricity. And I had started as a director's fellow over there. So it's a named fellowship that was like $90,000 a year for a postdoc job. It was incredible. It had a budget of like $15,000 a year just on professional development. So I could go to like all of the conferences that I wanted to. That's wild. It was wild.

Chris 1:03:09

That's why that's that's a why, right? So so for those of you, right? Postdocs normally do not do not do not pay pay that well, near nearly that well.

Eric 1:03:17

And so, so when you apply for this fellowship, you're actually writing a proposal for yourself for a grant that is internal to the lab that you're competing against other people for this grant that then you become the PI of if you get that job. And it was my first week. I'm in the bathroom washing my hands, and this old guy comes into the bathroom, this old Japanese guy. And I don't know him, but like I know old Japanese guys. My grandma is Japanese, and I play this old board game called Go, where a at the US Open for Go every summer, it hops around from city to city. There's a group of about 50 retired Japanese guys that will come over to the States for their summer vacation to check out another city in America and play Go with the people that show up and care about this old board game. And so, like, I don't know this old Japanese guy, but like I know his deal. I hang out with like old Japanese guys every summer. And like I try to learn Japanese so that I can I can converse with them when we see each other year after year after year. And so we I say hello and uh give a little bit of a bow because by virtue of being in this room, he is one of the world experts on organic solar cells, and I want to learn from him and I want to be liked by him. I want, I want to benefit from his expertise during this postdoc. So we engage in a little bit of a bow, and there's a lot of information that is communicated in a bow. And I need, I know that I need to uh bow a little bit deeper than him because I'm the new guy and I'm younger, and I need to demonstrate some deference to to this stranger. So I bow a little bit deeper and we cross like 10 degrees, and I think that like, oh, like this this bow is still going. There's a little bit, there's a little bit more happening here than I expected. So I I I keep going and we we cross 20 degrees, and I was like, oh, I wonder I wonder what this is all about. Like so, like a game of chicken, like of who, like who stops first or or I I know that I need to maintain the bow further because I'm new, because I'm younger, and b the fact that we're still going communicates that he knows something about me, maybe. There was a newsletter that had gone out about the new director's fellows, and I wondered, well, maybe he saw that newsletter and recognized me. We passed 45 degrees, and I'm thinking maybe. He's read one of my papers. We pass 60 degrees. I'm like, maybe he likes one of my papers. I'm getting really excited. We hit 90 degrees, and I begin to experience some degree of discomfort. I don't know how I've misread this situation, but I know that something's wrong. And I have to keep going. We we passed 90 degrees. I'm all the way down at my toes now. And I'm mortified. I don't know if he's still bowing or if he's stood back up and he's looking at him anymore.

Chris 1:06:45

You're looking down at your feet. Uh-huh. You have this in your brain going, What is going on?

Eric 1:06:50

If I I'm so mortified that like I'm groveling at the stranger's feet, and he's standing up just embarrassed for me and embarrassed about this, and that this is the first impression that I'm making. This is in the bathroom. Yeah. Okay. And I peek, and the reality of the situation is so much worse than I had thought. Not only am I groveling at this man's feet, we're not in a bow. He is just checking under the stall to see if he can drop a deuce. And I am an idiot. And that was pretty racist.

Chris 1:07:35

Oh man. Wow. Did did he? Okay, so now you realize that you have you have you've made this gigantic cultural error. Does he acknowledge it? Like do you do you say anything? Does he just No, I walked away and never went to the bathroom again. That that that particular bathroom? Or just still still in that I did I I at some point did you did you talk to him?

Eric 1:08:09

You know, I don't think I ever saw him again. Um so it was unresolved. It was Yeah. Well, you know, I I only stayed in that postdoc for nine months because I got this job. And so between taking advantage of the paternity leave that I had at the end of that year, that first year, and then moving over to Boise State, it was a pretty quick stint at NREL.

Chris 1:08:33

Not because you offended him, but uh because of other things. I kind of wish that that you had like reconnected and he or I again, I wonder what he I wonder what he thought. I I would imagine you do too. Like, what is he thinking? We're gonna we're gonna find him through this podcast. I I I hope so. I we need to send it to to people that can get it in the right of like listen to the story, and it might be one of those things where like I don't even remember. Hopefully for him, he doesn't even uh doesn't even remember. Well, thank you for sharing. So I it's uh honestly, that's not that's one of the stories that I haven't heard. I but I every time it's a new, really interesting story of where where is this gonna where is this gonna take us? So I appreciate your your willingness to to share, but it's been really yeah, I I've enjoyed learning about your role on campus, what you do, what you bring again beyond the headlines, it's always good to kind of know like, okay, who's the person behind all of the all the shiny stuff? So I really appreciate you taking taking the time. I know it's busy, busy time of year. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me.

Eric 1:09:35

Thanks, Chris. This is great.

Chris 1:09:42

If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics discussed on today's show, please visit boiseystate.edu slash research. I want to give a special thanks to Albertsons Library on the campus of Boise State for the recording space. The theme music for this show was composed and engineered by Boise State graduates Alan Skirvin and Taylor Ross. Thanks again for listening.