Neil Garg, Organic Chemist, Author, Startup Innovator, and Educational Leader

Progress in science demands the perspective that any truth, any theory, and any textbook assertion must be subjected to scrutiny. As Neil Garg explains in the discussion below, this is the starting point that propels the Garg Lab in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA. As he reflects, organic chemistry is governed by rules about how molecules behave, and the breakthrough research he has led in catalysis and molecular synthesis is propelled by challenging assumptions, and revisiting established experiments.

For these achievements, Garg has been honored with many of the most prestigious awards in chemistry. And because he maintains a dual interest in making molecules that are interesting simply for their value to basic science, and for their utility in industrial applications, Garg moves effortlessly between the worlds of fundamental and translational science. Beyond the lab, Garg is passionate about pedagogy, the value of which he sees as a two-way street. As he emphasizes, there is no denying that teaching has made him a better researcher, but there is also a joy in sparking possibility and imagination in his students, his children, and the broader public in his capacities as a science communicator and an author of chemistry books for kids.

Of all the valuable insights and perspectives Garg shares below, one point of reflection is especially notable. As an incoming PhD student at Caltech, he was part of Brian Stoltz's research group, just as Stoltz was putting his lab together. And then for his postdoctoral appointment at UC Irvine, Garg worked with Larry Overman, whose career was already well established. As all incisive mentees, Garg benefited from the very different perspective of working with one professor who was just at the beginning of his career, while the other had decades of experience. Together, Garg developed a wide-angle view of what it took to achieve success in academic science, which meant that when it came time for him to choose between academia and industry he knew exactly what he was signing up for. And, as he emphasizes, at every stage of his trajectory, developing meaningful and lasting personal relationships is not simply pleasant, it is centrally important to doing good science. The lesson is that no matter the wherever the field goes next - any advance in technology or methodology - it will depend on the real (and organic!) development of friendships and supportive partnerships.

DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It's Wednesday, August 28, 2024. It is my great pleasure to be here with Professor Neil Garg. Neil, it's wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much for joining me.

NEIL GARG: Thanks for having me.

ZIERLER: Neil, to start, please tell me your title and institutional affiliation.

GARG: Sure. My title is Distinguished Professor, and I'm at the University of California, Los Angeles.

ZIERLER: The professorship is named in honor, if I'm not mistaken, of Kenneth Trueblood?

GARG: That's right. My more serious and formal title is: Distinguished Kenneth N. Trueblood Professor of Chemistry.

ZIERLER: If I have it right, you're the inaugural holder of the Trueblood professorship. Do you have a connection to Trueblood's research? Is there sort of an intellectual continuity in chemistry?

GARG: Kenneth Trueblood was as a physical chemist, whereas I'm an organic chemist. He was really an extraordinary researcher, but the largest lecture hall just outside of chemistry here, CS50 on the UCLA campus, is called the Kenneth Trueblood Lecture Hall. This is a place where I have taught large organic-chemistry classes for many years as well. So, partially, at the time when that endowed chair was created, there was some sentiment of honoring Trueblood and his teaching abilities, so I was very fortunate at the time, and I was able to receive that endowed chair position. Research-wise, Trueblood had interest in understanding three-dimensional structures using X-ray crystallography. If you fast forward to modern times, we all use this technology routinely. But on my side, we also develop software to help students visualize molecules in three dimensions. So, we're taking some of the foundations Trueblood established in terms of visualizing molecules in three dimensions, and now using modern technology, we're able to put that in the hands of researchers and in the hands of students to help other people visualize their molecules, like on their smartphone or computers, using apps or websites.

Making Organic Molecules Interesting and Useful

ZIERLER: Neil, I want to engage you in a very broad discussion to start out, on the research itself. What are the big questions you pursue in your lab?

GARG: Perhaps the biggest ones we ask now are very much related to what we've been taught about how molecules react and what molecules can be made. Typically, in organic chemistry, we would have a lot of rules: this type of molecule will react, this type of molecule is too unstable—rules of those types. And most of what we do in my lab is challenge those basic rules, things that a textbook might say, and ask those questions. Is that really true? Why do we think that? How could we probe that? How would we get around some of these constraints that conventional wisdom has provided for a long time? We mostly do that in the context of what we call "strained intermediates," molecules that have arrangements of atoms that are unusual; that if we were teaching students, we'd say, "You would never be able to make this molecule or this type of structure," and then we go in the lab and we figure out how to do it. And in doing so, we're not only addressing that fundamental question, but we also keep an eye on what we call "synthetic utility." When we have an organic chemistry reaction, we want it to be interesting, but we also want it to be useful to anybody who has an interest in making organic molecules. And the people who are most interested in the types of things we do are people in the pharmaceutical community who are interested in making new chemical structures that can lead to the discovery or the manufacturing of new medicines. So, we're not trying to solve all the problems in the drug industry, but we challenge the norms and we develop new tools that others, like those in the pharmaceutical industry, can use.

ZIERLER: Where is your research group on the spectrum of theory and experiment?

GARG: A hundred percent trained as an experimental chemist. I'd say, until very recently, 95 percent experimental. We've traditionally collaborated with theoreticians – the lab of a close friend of mine and next-door office neighbor, Ken Houk – because some of the molecules we study are experimentally hard to see. More recently, we've been learning how to do a lot of that theory in-house, in my lab as well, partially driven by my interest, but also very much driven by advances in technology and whatever the students are interested in.

ZIERLER: Neil, you mentioned pharmaceutical work. Is your lab interested or involved directly in translational research? Or is it really a basic science operation, but some of the discoveries that come out of it obviously have relevance in that space?

GARG: The priority is the fundamentals, but even when I was a grad student at Caltech, I was making these molecules that were found in nature, and they were reported to have some biological activity. The focus in our lab was to do the synthetic chemistry, the academic pursuit. But my advisor, Professor Brian Stoltz, tells me, "If you want to learn about the biology, find out who on campus does that type of biology and go walk over to the lab." We don't really do that now. Now we'd send a bunch of emails and get on the Zoom call, but it was pretty wonderful at the time. I just walked over to Caltech Biology, I met a postdoc—I think it was the Chan lab—and yeah, it was great. We ran assays together. We did experiments together. We collaborated. I acknowledged the person in my dissertation. And I learned a lot. Nothing big scientifically came out of that collaboration, but it definitely had me exposed to and interested in possible applications. If I'm going to do all this pretty intellectually challenging and physically draining research in the lab that we do as experimental chemists, it would be cool to see some application of it beyond the fundamentals. So, I have always had that interest. And here at UCLA, partially because we have a medical school—and I have a colleague, Mike Jung, who has been very successful with two prostate cancer drugs: one's called XTANDI, one's called Erleada— we're encouraged to consider applied research.

We do have an ongoing collaboration project at UCLA in the area of treating leukemia, so that's been interesting. And then outside of the elements of pharmaceuticals, some years ago somebody posed the question of, "Can you figure out how to develop a marijuana breathalyzer?" Led by an extraordinary postdoc in the lab, Dr. Evan Darzi, we developed the basic science we thought would be valuable to address that problem, filed the patent, published it, and then started a company. UCLA really encourages this path and helps, and there are ways for academics to stay involved with the research even if it moves to the private sector. And again, a Caltech connection: I was involved in a project that was doing basic and applied research when I was a graduate student. It was in the area of DNA sequencing and ultimately involved a start-up company. It was helpful to have that experience when recently starting a company based on our UCLA research.

ZIERLER: Neil, some questions about the graduate students you work with, some of the trendlines you've seen over the years. First, the backgrounds that they're coming from as undergrads. Are you looking strictly for organic chemistry undergraduates? Are people coming to you with math, and CS, and even biology backgrounds as well?

GARG: For my particular lab, it's mostly organic chemists. But incoming to our graduate program—we're a very large program—we get students applying for all sorts of things, and they can choose between seven specializations when they apply. Once they are here, they can join any lab they want. I think it is super impressive nowadays in thinking about how good the students are, how much they know, their breadth, and their diverse interests.

ZIERLER: Coming on the other side, when they graduate from your group, the kinds of careers they go on to pursue, what's the ballpark breakdown? Who goes into academia? Who goes into policy? Who goes into industry?

GARG: Most of the people coming out of my lab have gone into pharmaceuticals. They typically pursue medicinal chemistry, meaning they discover the chemical structure for what might be the next drug, and others go into process chemistry. The process chemists figure out how to make a lot of quantity of a drug, and do so cost-effectively, safely, and with minimal waste streams. Some former students have gone into agrochemistry, so making insecticides and pesticides—incredibly important for our food supply. And then two are now at the FDA. I have really been encouraging students to think about non-pharmaceutical careers, as there are many other places where the skill of being an organic chemist is important, as well as the mindset. The folks who work at the FDA, they're deciding if the next drugs should be approved or not, and why. They have to understand a lot of science and a lot of chemistry in order to be able to do that. Others have gone into patent law, and several are in academia. One of them is actually—again, Caltech connection—completing a Caltech postdoc right now, and she'll start as a professor at the University of Minnesota in a few months. Her name is Melissa Ramirez.

ZIERLER: Neil, let's do a verbal tour of your laboratory. Let's focus on the instrumentation. What are the instruments in your lab, and what do they do?

GARG: It's not an instrument, but it's really our workhorse: every person in the lab works in a fume hood. That's where everything happens, especially considering safety in handling chemicals. Within fume hoods, there are stir plates; so, when you have a chemical reaction you need chemicals to mix. You use a stirplate for that, with a magnetic stirbar in your reaction. We have things called rotary evaporators. Those are big pieces of equipment that remove solvent in order to collect a compound. And then you get to the more fun stuff. We have a solvent purification system. A lot of the chemicals we are using for reactions are sensitive to things like water and oxygen, so we have a big setup that allows us to use dry solvents. We have a few different types of chromatography instruments. We have what's called LCMS. That's liquid chromatography with mass spec. So, you can inject a sample, the instrument will separate the different compounds, and for each one it'll tell you the molecular weight, the mass. That's a very powerful tool. Is this the type of thing you're going for?

ZIERLER: Absolutely.

GARG: It's kind of nerdy.

ZIERLER: No, no, it's great. The nerdier, the better, in fact.

GARG: Okay, cool. I'll name a few more. We have something called SFC. That's supercritical fluid chromatography used to separate chemicals quickly, including isomers that may otherwise be hard to separate. We have something called a glove box. It's about eight feet wide and has these gloves sticking out. You put your hands inside of the gloves and then you can manipulate chemicals that are inside the glove box. The inside of the box is filled with an inert gas that avoids air and moisture, which is important for handling sensitive chemicals. We have lots of toys.

The Importance of Communicating Science

ZIERLER: Neil, I want to ask about science communication, something that's very dear to you at all levels, from kids' books, getting kids involved and interested in chemistry, all the way to TED talks, and outreach to the broader public. As a university professor engaged in research, why is this important to you?

GARG: There's a lot to unpack there. When I was at Caltech, I was taught how important the research is, and the critical-thinking skills you obtain from going through that process. The priority was to focus on research. Years later, when I got my offer letter to join the UCLA faculty, it said I would not teach undergrads for three years for the purpose of helping build my research career. I TA'd a little at Caltech early on, but otherwise it was ten years of not teaching undergrads, and then I was put in front of a 400 person class at UCLA. So, with that research focus over the years, my initial interest at UCLA was definitely not in teaching when I started. It was really very much the opposite. People were telling me, "It's going to be pre-meds. They just want grades. They don't care about learning." That was the reputation. But when I taught the class, it was nothing like that. I was just wonderfully surprised by intellect, curiosity, creativity of the students. And there's some synergy here. Students enjoy a class; they study harder. When students are doing awesome, I want to do better as a professor. So, to answer your question, I would say the first time I taught a large undergrad course, it flipped my opinion of how important education could be not just for the benefit of the students, but it also helped me realize I could make an impact in that area. And then I got really fascinated with this question: we in the research business talk about significance and novelty, what's new, what's important. Why don't we talk about that in education? And then everything that that I have done after that, I do with students. If I make a coloring book for children, I make it with children. You involve those people in the creative process, and it is very different than if I were to just sit down and write a coloring book on my own. So, in the long and short, I think there is a lot of room to be creative and impactful in the educational space and I have been really drawn to public outreach. Why is organic chemistry hated and despised? Most people even know what it is. It is incredibly important, so it is our job to inform society.

ZIERLER: Is it a two-way street in the way that obviously the research informs and enriches the teaching? The passion, the energy that you put into teaching, do you bring that back into the lab? Does that enrich the research?

GARG: Yeah, 100 percent. I'd say that I became a much better research advisor from teaching undergrads—patience, seeing what's fun, making it exciting. When I started my research lab, it was really much more serious and "let's go," but I think teaching really helped me be a better advisor. I would say that the research is always educational, but I have ultimately shifted my priorities. I put much more focus on the education of the researchers, and then we just work on really hard problems together. But the priority is the students and their individuality; for example, what do they want from their time here in graduate school? It's the education of the individual and investing in the person's well-being. And we published plenty of high-impact scientific studies with that philosophy of prioritizing the individuals. It shouldn't be research at all costs at the expense of the individual.

ZIERLER: We're talking about undergrads now, but to go even further back to childhood, between the coloring books, between the chemistry camp that you've developed, is that as much a reflection of fatherhood for you as being a chemistry professor?

GARG: [laughs] Yeah, definitely fatherhood helps you see what's going on with kids and what they're learning. So, certainly the organic chemistry coloring books we wrote came about because my kids like to color and we would talk about chemicals in the house. My children also were important in us creating the UCLA Chem Kids Camp. If organic chemistry is a little bit of a new language, why do we wait to teach it until college? Maybe kids can learn it earlier. So, I started to dabble with that idea with my now 12 year old, at the time she was 10. It was just a matter of asking, "Okay, how do you teach organic chemistry to that age group?" And then we spent some time figuring out how to do that, working directly with my daughters on creating and testing basic content. The graduate student researchers in my lab then played a huge role in refining the content and making it kid-appropriate.

ZIERLER: Neil, let's go back; let's establish some personal history. As a teenager in high school, when you were thinking about colleges and courses of study, was it organic chemistry for you from the beginning?

GARG: Never. Absolutely not. I grew up in a small town, Fishkill. I sold knives, worked at the video store, and conducted the dog census for the town. I was pre-med because my parents told me so. I had an older brother who was also pre-med. That was it. So, when I went to college, I had to take some of the pre-med courses. Long story short, one of those was chemistry. I did fine in general chemistry, and then when I got to organic chemistry, many things just clicked a little bit more. My NYU chemistry professors, especially Marc Walters and Yorke Rhodes, were instrumental, as were some great friends I met along the way and studied with. Most notable is Ray Doss, who also landed at Caltech for his PhD studies after graduating from NYU. He was even the best man at my wedding and has remained one of my closest friends over the years.

ZIERLER: What programs were you looking at? What colleges were you considering?

GARG: My story of applying to colleges is one of rejection, for both undergrad and grad-school times. Most of the places I applied to as an undergrad I was rejected from. The two places I looked at most seriously were NYU and Boston University.

ZIERLER: And why did NYU win out?

GARG: New York City. I still keep a huge picture here of New York City on my office wall. Enough said, right? It's New York City—greatest city in the world.

From NYU to Caltech

ZIERLER: What was the process of coming in, thinking pre-med, and then getting on a sort of more academic track?

GARG: There wasn't any real process to this. It was just: go to college, try things, and figure it out. For pre-meds, there's a lot of pressure to volunteer in a hospital, to join a research lab, even as a freshman. So, I did those things because all my friends were talking about doing these things. I was volunteering at the NYU emergency room. But every time I would go there, I was in the way. It was just a crazy, busy place and nobody taught me anything. I wanted to help and working in an ER had all the potential in the world for being a life-changing experience, but it just didn't deliver. And then in the meantime, when I got into Marc Walters's research lab—me and five other undergrads and the professor—it was a totally different pace, totally different mindset, and it was just fun and educational. So, I really enjoyed that. The other thing that NYU allowed at the time was for undergrads to help teach, so starting my sophomore year, then for two additional years after that, I was a teaching assistant for general chemistry. This was important. "You like research. You like teaching. You don't like the pre-med mentality. What do you do?" Things were beginning to align. And then I met people who were a little older and had gone through similar experiences. So, I enjoyed the research and teaching. I enjoyed the people that I was with. And then I did one of these summer research-experience programs in Strasbourg France. Because I enjoyed that experience so much, it was another plus sign for me to go to grad school.

ZIERLER: What was that summer experience?

GARG: It was a NSF-REU program—research experience for undergraduates. Mine was in Strasbourg, France in the lab of Professor Wais Hosseini. It was absolutely amazing to be abroad and to do research in another environment. I got so much out of that experience, not just from the lab, but also just by traveling to another country, exploring much of Europe by bike and train, and through meeting people.

ZIERLER: How widely did you study in chemistry? Did you sort of explore everything, or did you have an early focus in organics?

GARG: After taking sophomore organic chemistry, I didn't take more organic chemistry until my senior year. So, when I applied to grad school, I didn't have a specific direction I really felt I wanted to go into. It was just chemistry overall. And then when I visited prospective graduate schools, that's when I started to take some upper-division or graduate-level organic chemistry classes at NYU. It turns out there was also a NYU alumn who was a few years older than me who was touted as being a legend. This is Phil Baran, now a famous organic chemistry Professor at Scripps, and I was encouraged to follow in this footsteps. To have a NYU role model like this was very important in my decision to specialize in organic chemistry.

ZIERLER: The question I always love to ask: When did you first hear about Caltech? Because you have to hear about it to know about it.

GARG: I was advised that I should apply to the top 15 or so graduate schools, give or take a little bit, and just see what happens. And Caltech, for any chemistry PhD program at the time, and still today, is always listed in the top three, almost certainly. I was from the East Coast; I had no connection to the campus, ever. I don't know, was the movie Real Genius at Caltech? [David laughs] I don't know if it was supposed to be Caltech or something, so maybe I kind of knew it from Val Kilmer in the old movie Real Genius. There was some reputation of that awesomely nerdy environment where people are just up all night making lasers and stuff like that. Anyway, I just came up with a short list and applied to top schools. I got rejected from many of them, but I got into Caltech. When I went to Caltech, it was so focused. You live and you breathe chemistry. It's kind of a weird and special place like that.

ZIERLER: And you came knowing the focus was going to be organic chemistry? Or, that sort of developed in real time?

GARG: My interest in organic chemistry developed during visits to prospective graduate schools. Caltech had hired three new organic chemistry professors that year. So, when I visited as a perspective student, I met with those three, and that was really fun and really exciting. I started trading emails with those professors and ultimately came to work under the advisement of Professor Brian Stoltz.

The Launch of the Stoltz Lab

ZIERLER: So, Brian was one of those new professors?

GARG: Yep, brand new! He was starting his lab in 2000, which was the same time I was starting graduate school. I joined his lab over the summer as part of his first crop of students.

ZIERLER: Did that strike you as either exciting or risky, not going with a more established professor? Did you even think strategically in those years?

GARG: I liked Brian and got along with him really well. For me, that relationship was crucial. There were some professors I met who seem totally nice, but I was terrified. [David laughs] So, to interact with somebody who's maybe seven years older than me, talked like I did, and said things like "just call me Brian," created a unique dynamic. When people would ask me that if I was concerned about working with a new professor, I would say, "Well, I think I need hands-on mentorship." I really like working with him, and I'm thinking, "He's pretty good at what he does. He got a job at Caltech after all."

ZIERLER: Were you there really from the beginning, where you were in a position where you could help Brian put the lab together?"

GARG: Absolutely, yes. It was me and three others the first summer. It was just a bunch of boxes and empty lab space. We set up everything. It was like going from zero to a hundred in about a week. What was really special about that time is, for the chemistry part of it, I hadn't been trained in a lot of the techniques that organic chemists use. Brian came in and showed me how to do all that himself. What if I had worked with a different professor or was in a sink or swim environment? I would have sunk pretty hard if Brian's wasn't there, not just looking out for me, but physically taking the time to do things with me, show me the techniques, quiz me a little bit in a fun way, and more. I didn't feel intimidated. It was a pretty special time.

The Stoltz Lab and the Synthesis of Natural Molecules

ZIERLER: As he was setting things up, what were the science objectives of the Stoltz lab?

GARG: A lot of it was to make molecules that are found in nature, but to make them synthetically in the lab. Mother nature makes a lot of cool and interesting chemical structures, usually to defend an organism. For example, it could be a compound in a marine sponge, or it could be something in a plant. Once the compound is discovered, synthetic organic chemists can figure out how to make it in the lab. It's an enormous intellectual exercise, but this type of research can also contribute to the discovery or production of new medicines. There's also what we call synthetic methodology, which is to develop new types of reactions. A big objective for the Stoltz lab was to develop what were called oxidative palladium-catalyzed reactions.

ZIERLER: Did you have much interaction with other research groups? Was there sort of a permeability?

GARG: Absolutely. We used to have joint intellectual exercises with Dave MacMillan's lab. He had moved from Berkeley to Caltech as an assistant professor around when I started graduate school, although he later moved to Princeton. And the other labs we interacted with the most were the labs of the late Bob Grubbs and the labs of Peter Dervan. I had many close friendships and great scientific conversations through interacting with these and other labs too. It was a super friendly and collaborative environment.

ZIERLER: Is that where you picked up some of your interests in catalysis?

GARG: I think my interest in catalysis mostly comes from being in the Stoltz group early on where I was exposed to lots of palladium chemistry. And at the time, reactions called cross-couplings were really becoming very popular and I used them in my own graduate school projects.

ZIERLER: What does that term mean, cross-coupling?

GARG: Very generally speaking, you can take two molecules and link them together. That is cross-coupling. More commonly though, what people say "cross-coupling" they are referring to types of reactions that are metal-catalyzed cross-couplings, typically using a palladium catalyst. That type of palladium chemistry was the topic of the Chemistry Nobel Prize some years ago. When I started my career at UCLA, I had some proposals that were about taking molecules that were known to not undergo cross-coupling and asking the question, "If we wanted to make those undergo cross-coupling," and we had reasons why, "how would you do it?" Long story short, a lot of what we do now in my lab is use nickel catalysis instead of palladium catalysis. We can break all sorts of bonds that, historically, people wouldn't break, and then we can do cross-couplings. In the process of breaking a strong bond, we can achieve unconventional cross-coupling reactions that link two fragments together.

ZIERLER: What does the experiment look like? How do you do this?

GARG: The experiments are easy. The simple analogy is like cooking. You take a flask or vial, you add a stir bar into it usually, and you add whatever chemicals you want. So, if you have two different fragments you want to react together, you add those. You typically add a solvent. And if you want to add a catalyst or anything else, you'll add that in too, as well. If you need the reaction to be free from air or moisture, there are experimental precautions you can do. You can suck the air out of the flask and refill it with nitrogen or argon, which are inert gasses. And then you might heat the reaction. You might let it run at room temperature. We have different ways to take little samples from the reaction to see if they're progressing or not, how many different products might be forming, things like that. Once we're ready to shut off the reaction, you can shut off the heat or do different things to stop it. We call that quenching a reaction. And then you have to do multiple stages of purification. Typically, you'll have mixtures of salts and organics. We do something called an aqueous workup to separate things that are organic soluble from things that are water soluble. We usually want the organic soluble stuff, so we isolate that and then we analyze it by what's called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. That lets us look for the number and types of protons on a molecule. Typically at that point we have a mixture of chemicals, and then we do chromatography to separate those chemicals, and then we can re-analyze whatever chemicals we isolate. That's all for one reaction. In a given day, a student might run two or three of those, sometimes more, sometimes less. So, it's pretty labor intensive.

ZIERLER: What was Brian's style like as a mentor? Did you talk with him every day? Would you only go to him when you were running up against a wall?

GARG: I talked to Brian all the time. I was not shy and he was a new professor. If I needed help, I would ask him for it. If I had an idea and I wanted to get his feedback on it, I would just go up to his office and ask. He was incredibly welcoming for that type of dialogue. And he was also in the lab a lot talking with us. Some period of time he was in there helping us with experiments, but over time, it became more of him just coming in and talking science. We had a lot of blackboards in the labs where we could draw structures and ideas. It was environment for really great intellectual conversations and lots of professional development. Brian and I are still very close now. I saw him Saturday for coffee and breakfast in Pasadena. It's been a really great relationship for almost 25 years.

ZIERLER: What did completeness look like for the project? How did you know you had enough to defend?

GARG: The first molecule I made is called dragmacidin D, and that was about two years into my PhD and done in collaboration with an all-star postdoc, Dr. Richmond Sarpong.  If it had taken five years, that probably would have been the end of my PhD. After "draggy D", I just started to work on another molecule, "draggy F" as we called it, which I then completed with fellow graduate student Dan Caspi. Quick side-note: Richmond and Dan remain two of my closest friends to this day. At time equals four years into the graduate program, I had to come up with an exit plan and had to present it to my faculty dissertation committee: "Here's where I am. Here's what I have done. Here is where I am going to be, and at that point I think I am qualified to graduate. What do you think?" At UCLA, we have adopted something similar modeled after Caltech's fourth-year meetings. If the faculty committee agrees, they agree and you work toward your exit plan. If they disagree, they tell you what you need to do, and you work on a revised plan.

I think the challenge is that there is some overall development that you're looking for, and different students come in with different skills, and they grow in different ways. For this one student, it might be that it's about productivity. We need them to be a little bit more productive to finish the story, and then they they've earned their PhD. For another student, maybe they publish five papers, but they've just been turning a crank, and they haven't been thinking as deeply as we might want them to be to be successful when they go out in the job market. So, it really depends on the student, and for me, that's usually what I'm thinking about. In my own lab, I have implemented a hard rule; five years and you're out. But it is also upon me then, when students are hitting year three and year four, to double-down and really think about: Where are they? Where do we want them to be? Not just in terms of productivity, but intellect and skills as well.

Celebrating the Making of a Molecule

ZIERLER: Getting back to the science itself, what were some of the key conclusions of the project? What were the takeaways?

GARG: From my own thesis?

ZIERLER: Yeah.

GARG: Certainly just the ability to make these molecules that nature makes for us—to make them in the lab, those accomplishments we celebrate. So back to these reactions called cross-couplings, these allow you to take different fragments and link them together. In the bulk of my PhD studies, we basically made three different fragments, and we had to link those three different fragments together without disrupting other parts of the molecule. There's actually a lot of design and effort that goes into those three different pieces, and then the optimization of the reaction sequence to link those three pieces in a productive way. Our synthesis of dragmacidin F —I think—is in the detailed Nobel Prize announcement as an example of how cross-coupling chemistry has been impactful. So, we were pushing the limits of known cross-coupling chemistry, to take really sophisticated fragments, design them, and then put them together in a controlled way.

ZIERLER: Neil, when did you start thinking about your next move? Were you thinking about industry? Was it postdoc all the way from the beginning? What was that process like for you?

GARG: I figured I could go into industry or be an academic. I didn't have a strong feeling about it. My PhD advisor, Brian, he would say, "A postdoc is not a fallback plan even though sometimes you hear people talk about it: 'Yeah, if I don't get a job, I'll do a postdoc.'" Instead, he said, "It's really an amazing experience. You already have all these skills you just get transplanted into a new place. You're not a student. You know what you want to do, and it's really fun to be in that new environment and learn new things and build your community." Me and all my friends that were in that same cohort, we all wanted to do postdocs, not because of a fall back, but because it sounded cool. So, that's number one, was just to do a postdoc. Two, I wanted to do a postdoc with Larry Overman at UC Irvine. I wrote a draft cover letter, and in the bottom of the cover letter, I said, "With regard to my future plans, I'm currently undecided between industry or academia." I sent it to Brian. Five minutes later, the lab phone rings. He used to call me Gargo. He says, "Gargo, come on up for a second." And he says, "Look, Larry Overman gets a lot of applications, and if you might be thinking about academia, I think you should just write down academia. Because he gets all these applications, and there's this thing in our community where academics like to breed academics." In hindsight, it was sort of a fake it 'til you become it type of situation or perhaps a Jedi-mind trick. Next thing you know, I am writing that I'm academic bound. I go to interview with Larry Overman. He said, "Oh, I see you want to be an academic." I say, "Of course." [both laugh] And then I work on this crazy project, and we finish synthesizing this molecule that the Overman group had been working on for a long time. And then he comes in and he says, "Neil, there's this new NIH program for postdocs who want to be professors. It's called Pathway to Independence." And he said, "I think you should apply." At that point there was no turning back. And I had already committed; I wasn't even thinking about industry at that point. It's probably at that point I figured I could do it. And I'll tell you the last thing that's important, and this is a Caltech connection, is that—I've never seen another school do this—but Caltech, in the chemistry program at least, you have to write five proposals in order to graduate: two in your second year, at candidacy, and three in order to have your thesis defense. You can't do your thesis defense without writing and defending three independent proposals. It's like super Caltech-style; no place does that. But what they do is they are really helping you figure out if you like thinking about ideas, and they're also demystifying it. Because by the time you do it when you're a second year and you do two of them, they're okay; but by the time you're in your fifth year and you've already been through the process, you can write these proposals. So, I'd say hats off to Caltech. I don't know if everybody loves doing that, but if you like doing it, it's not a bad sign that you could do okay in academia. So really, by the time I applied for my postdoc, after that I had to write three more proposals. I told Overman I was going to be an academic too many times to backtrack, but I also wasn't scared of it.

ZIERLER: How did you learn about Larry Overman?

GARG: One, from his chemistry. He was very much well known to be one of these people who's a master of making complicated molecules, molecules that have nitrogen atoms in them and things that are notoriously hard to make. He was sort of a legend in the field. He also came to Caltech when I was there and gave a distinguished lecture, so I saw him speak. And he had a reputation for being a gentleman and a scholar and a really wonderful mentor, whereas a lot of the real big-wig senior organic chemists throughout the community, they were not all known for being the nicest people.

ZIERLER: Neil, when you got to UCI, did you have a good sense of what you wanted to accomplish for the postdoc? Did you have a research project already in mind?

GARG: Yes, because I had done my PhD in building these complicated molecules, I wanted to do methodology, or discover a new reaction. That was the plan, and then when I showed up on the first day to UC Irvine, Larry says, "Hey Neil, we have this molecule we've been working on for a decade or so. I'd like you to try to finish it." [David laughs] I had all these plans, and they were just thrown out the window.

ZIERLER: What was your funding for your postdoc?

GARG: I had an NIH F32 postdoctoral fellowship, and then I got that NIH Pathway to Independence Award, which is a K99/R00 grant. It funded the end of my postdoc and three years of my independent career. And now it still exists, but at the time, it was the first time the program was offered. It was really great because I had a NIH grant going into academic job interviews.

ZIERLER: What came of that quest to finish this molecule?

GARG: We finished it; that's the crowning achievement of it. It's just an incredibly complicated chemical structure that took about 50 synthetic steps to make, and I developed the last 12 or so, really standing on the shoulders of all the predecessors who worked on it. But at the end of a synthesis, you tend to have relatively little compound. At the beginning you have a lot, but as you go further in, you get a percent yield on a reaction, and you do the math, it usually doesn't end well. Usually you're working with a very small amounts of compound. And the molecule, sarain A, is so sophisticated, what we write down on pen and paper often doesn't work because the molecules may have properties that we don't have enough understanding of. So, it was really complicated. Just making the final molecule was the win.

Different Mentorship at a Different Career Stage

ZIERLER: At the beginning of the postdoc, you were talking the talk, you were saying you wanted to become an academic. At a certain point though, you have to make your own decision regardless of what your advisor thinks or wants of you. What was that process like for you? How did you land on academia yourself?

GARG: When I started with Stoltz, that's with a brand-new assistant professor going through the pre-tenure process, it offered one perspective of what it's like to run a lab first hand. Then, I went on to work with Larry Overman who was in his 60s at the time. The two labs were completely different. By the time I finished my PhD, I felt like I could do the Stoltz version, and then by the time I finished my postdoc, I felt like I could do the Overman version. So, I could at least see myself being able to do it. And, in hindsight, I had a really insightful conversation when I was a graduate student. At Caltech, they have the graduate students host the visitors, and there was a guy named Dave Gin, who was a Caltech student—then became a professor at Urbana-Champaign—I almost went to grad school to work with him. He came to Caltech to give a lecture, and Stoltz asked, "Hey, can you be the student host for Dave Gin." I said, "Sure." So, I wrote to Dave Gin. He says, "Hey Neil, why don't we get a coffee at the start of the day?" Now, I'm a third-year grad student; I say "Of course," and I go to coffee with him. And he's asking me these questions about what I want to do, and I told him, I said, "I don't know if I could see myself being a professor. That looks pretty intense, the grant writing." He says, "Neil, you don't understand. When you're a new professor, the chemistry is the easiest and main part of the job." He tells me, "Most of the mistakes students are making are rookie mistakes because they're rookies. And by the time you finish your postdoc, you can solve any of those problems. The thing they don't teach you is how to manage human beings." He encourages me and says, "But you'll have no problem with that." So, he tells me, "Just keep that in mind. That's the hardest part of the job for most people is learning how to manage their group, and to interact with them, and to be a normal human being to them. It's not the science. The science is easy." Then later, Brian said to me, "Neil, you have the resume to get an academic job, and a lot of people don't have that resume to get the job. If you get a job and find you don't like it, you can always leave and go to industry." Fortunately, I have never had to look back or really think about doing anything else.

ZIERLER: Tell me about the job talk at UCLA. What did you emphasize?

GARG: I did a crazy one-day visit where I first gave a one-hour lecture on prior research. Open to the department. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and it was packed. I was very impressed by the energy. Fraser Stoddart was there, who later went on to win the Nobel Prize, so I remember that. And then I gave a talk on my research ideas, and that was just to the organic chemistry faculty in the conference room, and that went very well. I really the environment and the people. They had a lot of laboratory space; that was attractive. Others schools where I interviewed said, "Here's four hoods." I generally had bigger visions for how big my lab would be at the time, and when I came to UCLA, they said, "Here's twelve hoods, ready to go." So, it was just different. I just felt like they knew they wanted a chemist of my variety. They had the lab space, they had the resources. And then my postdoc advisor, Overman, held UCLA in very high regard, not just the chemistry department, but as an institution.

ZIERLER: And family considerations made it good to stay in Southern California?

GARG: My wife worked in the movie business, so it was great. She not only kept her career, she kept her actual job. She just changed her commute at the time, so it worked out really well. And at that time I accepted the job, my wife was pregnant, so we figured we would work through finding housing in LA.

The Thrill of Joining the UCLA Chemistry Faculty

ZIERLER: Were there any future colleagues that you were particularly excited to work with once you joined the faculty at UCLA?

GARG: Yeah, absolutely. My next-door neighbor, Ken Houk—I mentioned him earlier—we collaborated from day one. We had these ideas for unusual molecules to make that people said you couldn't make. And I had proposed that in the proposal job talk I gave at UCLA. And then two hours later when we were going to dinner, Ken says, "Neil, I've got a surprise for you. Let's go into my lab." So, we go into his computational lab, and he has a postdoc there, and he says, "We ran computations on your idea this afternoon." And at first I was thinking, "Is he going to scoop me? What is going on here?" But he clarified. "No, no. Obviously we're not going to do anything too serious on your projects without you. I just wanted to give you some sense that we think this is viable, and that we think this would be a really exciting thing to collaborate on here at UCLA as colleagues." It was super cool to have that happen. So many of the first papers from my lab were with Ken. I think we have 29 or 30 papers together at this point.

ZIERLER: What was the startup package besides all the space and the hoods? Was UCLA really good about instrumentation, giving you what you needed?

GARG: Yeah. They gave me a million bucks to do whatever I wanted with my labs in terms of buying equipment, and they did that knowing I had three years of NIH funding as well. And then they also gave me an extra $300,000 to put toward instrumentation that anybody could use. They had the mindset of: "We're going to put in some extra money to help facilitate collaborations and interdisciplinary things, and have people interact and work together." I really loved that about UCLA.

ZIERLER: Was it valuable to think back on your own experiences helping Brian set up his lab as you were setting up yours?

GARG: Absolutely. The Stoltz setup mentality was, "Let's go. Let's hit the ground running. Clock is ticking. We have cool chemistry to do. Let's do it." So, that's how I started my lab, definitely, hands down, complete mimic of the Stoltz lab. I even ordered all the same—, I got the supply list from him, and then I engaged the vendors, and I ordered the same brands of the vacuum pumps, the same brands of the stirplates, the same glassware, talked to the same sales reps that I talked to when I was a student. So, it worked out great, but I definitely followed Brian's model in terms of how aggressive to be in starting and setting up a lab. We were able to publish our first independent publication in about one year after I started at UCLA.

ZIERLER: Those three years without the teaching, was that valuable just to get your bearings, to get your focus?

GARG: Yeah, absolutely. And I tell everybody I think it is so valuable to have that teaching relief. The only thing I would say is that it's important to no have this, "Teaching sucks, it's a distraction from your research" type of mentality. I tell this to people when they interview for faculty jobs at UCLA and they talked about teaching, "Oh, how much teaching is expected?" When I was department chair, if I got some sense that there was some resistance to teaching, then I tell them, " this is a campus that actually really values teaching, and it is important. I would say it is one of the most important things we do here." And for the department chair to be the one saying that, I think has helped some of them have realizations like, "Maybe I shouldn't be going around saying things that sound negative on teaching." And I think that is institution dependent, but certainly teaching is recognized and rewarded here on the UCLA campus. But still there was this vibe when I started that it was a little bit more of a distraction, and keep your eyes on the prize for research. When I talk with younger faculty now, I try to encourage them, and say, "When you go and you do your teaching, do it well. Don't half-ass your teaching. Don't believe any negative stuff about the students."

The Amenability of the Garg Lab to Industry

ZIERLER: You mentioned that the great majority of your graduate students go on to industry. Was that sort of baked in from the beginning, that the kind of work you did, the way you ran the lab was really amenable to industry? Or, is that sort of happenstance?

GARG: My lab's training is definitely amenable to industry. The pharmaceutical industry, it lives and dies based on the molecules they make. Most medicines are made by and can only be made by synthetic organic chemists. A well-trained organic chemist should be able to design what might be the next drug, and then go into the lab and be able to make it, and then make derivatives. The students from my lab are really well trained to synthesize molecules. And because that pharmaceutical workforce is so large in the United States, many students from my lab go that direction.

Lessons from Administrative Leadership

ZIERLER: Neil, as prelude to becoming department chair, tell me about some of your foreshadowing experiences and administrative responsibilities at UCLA.

GARG: [laughs] I was very much shielded from administration my first five years. But the person who became chair in 2012, Professor Miguel Garcia-Garibay, was a good friend of mine—we used to have lunch everyday—and he became the chair, and he asked me to be the education vice chair. There were, at the time, three different vice chairs, and there was one responsible for education. And knowing him and how well I worked with him, I was like, "Cool. Why not? Let's improve education." At that point I'd gotten tenure. I did the vice chair of education job for four years, covered everything for undergraduate students and graduate students. For example, we talked about graduation plans earlier. So, I could ask questions like, "how can we help students plan their exit and graduate in a timely way?", and then take action accordingly. So, that was the type of stuff I was able to do as vice chair. And then a few years later, I became department chair. The chair position is not the most popular one and was challenging for me, but I am glad I served.

ZIERLER: What did you learn about the department as a whole, serving as department chair?

GARG: How much are you quoting here?

ZIERLER: [laughs] I mean about the science, about what UCLA is strong in.

GARG: That's one of the best parts about it. When you're chair, when there's good news—somebody has a discovery—you usually hear about it. Sometimes we are asked to write quotes on it or something like that, and then you get to engage further with the science. So, even if something is out of your field, you usually get the gist of what somebody did or discovered. And then we have a very transparent promotion process in the University of California. Basically, every two or three years, most faculty are getting evaluated, meaning they're putting in their dossier and describing what they have accomplished. And as chair, you're very involved in that. Scientifically, that was very awesome to see all the cool things people were doing. I'd say the downside is seeing all the other things people are doing, meaning, if there's a problem, you hear about the problem and must figure out how to address it.

ZIERLER: And then of course in the middle of all of this, a pandemic hits. What was that like?

GARG: The pandemic was really tough on us here in Los Angeles because we're in a big city and were subject to LA County restrictions. We had to shut down the place very quickly. The department of chemistry and biochemistry is probably the largest experimental scientific research workforce on the campus. So, all of a sudden we had to shut down all these labs and tell people to go figure out how to do research from home. Then, we were able to open up at 25 percent capacity, figure out what that means, and help everybody go through that administrative process that also allowed for people to be safe and feel okay. It was not easy, but I was happy to be in a position to be able to help. Let's not forget that the pandemic also overlapped with the George Floyd situation, where, I think, previously, it was pretty common for academic departments and institutions to some extent avoid what was happening in the world or in the country. I think with the buildup of everything, students were having none of it. The students were saying, "No, we need to know that the department cares about things beyond science." And this was nationwide, this wasn't just UCLA. I held a town hall where about 400 people showed up over Zoom. Everybody from the department came: faculty, staff, students. They wanted to talk about George Floyd and the world, and talk about whatever was on their minds. As chair, you jump in and you facilitate that dialog. You add that into COVID and everything else that's happened around the time I was chair. I certainly learned a ton and there was never a dull moment.

ZIERLER: From your own lab and from just as department chair, learning about the challenges that your colleagues were going through, what were some of the big takeaways from remote science, what you could do from home, what really stopped dead in its tracks?

GARG: For me it ultimately was really good, because in experimental chemistry like ours, you can run a lot of experiments all the time. During the pandemic, that changed when lab capacities were reduced. The students had to be really careful about choosing what experiments to do and why. So, the intellectual design of what they did improved. And we spent more time just thinking about what's important and why, so that's the biggest change that happened. It became less about how many reactions you could run, and it became, for the students, more about what do you do with the limited time you have. It was a good thing. So, now people in may physically spend a little less in the laboratory, but they are smarter with how they use their time.

ZIERLER: Neil, what about on the teaching side? For all of your interest and passion in teaching, what are some of the takeaways for remote learning? What is worth keeping now that, hopefully, most of the pandemic, at least, is behind us?

GARG: My personal take, if we're talking about classroom teaching, I think for most people, community is still an important driving concept. Remote teaching, with community, can be very valuable, but it can also be very hard to design. I do some work with the Gates Foundation on designing remote coursework, and it is hard to incorporate that stuff. I think there are really nice examples where people have gamified science education. Gaming or group work can be cool and make online classes feel more like a community or classroom. And then of course there are people that just fundamentally learn better on their own, and that's okay too. But by and large, most people have felt like we need to come back to being in person. When we rely on students to watch videos, half of them don't even watch the videos, or maybe they watch it in two times speed.

Old Problems and New Solutions

ZIERLER: Neil, will bring the story right up to the present. What are you currently focused on?

GARG: Where to start... We have something really exciting for us. There's something in organic chemistry called Bredt's rule. Bredt's rule was written in 1924. It is still in the textbooks. It says you can't make certain types of structures, so we've spent the last year making what are called anti-Bredt olefins that you're not supposed to be able to make. The study will be published soon in the journal Science. I think that will redefine the textbook of what can and cannot be made. That's very important for my connection to research and teaching, but it is also very high-level science.

ZIERLER: Let's hold on that for a second. First, going all the way back to 1924, on what premise can't this be done?

GARG: There's a concept called ring strain. So, you can take six carbons and put them in a ring; that's a hexagon shape or we call it a cyclohexane. You can do the same with five, and then that's a pentagon shape or a cyclopentane . Four of them, we call it a cyclobutane. You make cyclopropane, that's three. The smaller they are, the more strained they are. There are other different variations. So, what an anti-Bredt olefin is, you take what is called a double bond, and you put it in a position that messes with how the atoms should be oriented around it in 3-dimensions. A double bond is just two bonds between two atoms, and the substituents that come off of a double bond should be pointed in certain ways, all in the same plane. In an anti-Bredt olefin, instead of those atoms being in the same plane, they lie out the plane in specific ways and the molecules are strained. The geometries of the alkene are unusual compared to what we have learned, and for that reason, people say you can't make them.

ZIERLER: So, it's 1924. A century later, why did it take this long, and what were the developments that allowed for the breakthrough?

GARG: One, why did it take so long? I think that when something's been a problem for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, now 100 years, people just assumed that's the law. However, there were also decades of research where people spent efforts on making anti-Bredt olefins and some efforts were in fact successful at showing the possibility. The other advance is that in the 1970s, a Japanese chemist named Kobayashi developed a method that allowed chemists to make different types of strained molecules, not these. And that method, we call it the Kobayashi elimination. We wondered if you could use that technique to make the anti-Bredt olefins. And to do that, you have to make precursors to them. And the syntheses of those are not entirely straightforward, but a group like mine that knows how to make complicated structures. Our mentality was: "We don't really know how to make those precursors, but let's figure it out." The first route we figured out was about 15 steps, and then we fixed it and made it a 5-step route. We also had to develop some pretty sophisticated chemistry in order to do the key steps. So, the first pass of that chemistry was pretty involved, but I think the second pass is more elegant and practical.

ZIERLER: This being high-impact science, what do you think the impact is going to be? What will this mean for the field?

GARG: It is a good question, and that is the million dollar question. "We will see" is the answer. I hope it gets people to just question "Bredt's Rule" and, hopefully, decide it needs to be rewritten or updated. But my message to the students is, "Don't believe anything." The whole organic chemistry textbook is a bunch of rules: you can do this, you can't do that. You should be questioning every one of those, and then see what's already been done. That's probably the biggest take-home. If something is known for 100 years and still textbook wisdom, and we can crack it in 2024, maybe there are other things like that. And now that we can make anti-Bredt olefins and use them in reactions. And now we can make new types of products too. It's not just developing the chemistry, it's asking, "Are the things you make actually useful to people who would care?" And I think they are. The molecules, the products we make are things that people in the pharmaceutical community will be attracted to because they have some 3-dimensionality and rigidity to them, as well as nitrogen and oxygen atoms. These are the types of chemical scaffolds that are commonly seen and are very desirable to people who are trying to make new types of structures in the medicinal chemistry space. So, I hope our chemistry may also be useful beyond academia.

ZIERLER: So, ultimately, this might be a breakthrough that's relevant for drug development?

GARG: We hope so, for sure.

ZIERLER: But the big takeaway, besides the particularities of this research, is, there should be no dogmas in science.

GARG: Absolutely. And you said you have training in physics, right? I went to Los Alamos National Labs, and they have all these pictures of Oppenheimer, and all of these quotes everywhere, it says, "There is no place for dogma in science." That's the type of message we should be teaching.

The Lasting Importance of Personal Relationships

ZIERLER: Neil, for the last part of our talk, I'd like to ask a few broadly retrospective questions about your career, then we'll end looking to the future. First, let's bring it back to Caltech. I love hearing that you had coffee with Brian just the other day, so obviously you're still connected. Looking back to your graduate-school experience, what stays with you? What has informed your approach to science, your approach to collegiality, your approach to the scientific community?

GARG: One is that the environment I was in when I was a grad student. I had great friends, but it also felt very intense. And Brian always used to tell us, "Guys, it's normal to be competitive. You guys are all just very bright people, but remember, when you fast forward, in 20 years, you are going to be close friends." And it is true. Those people I went to grad school with, many of them are still my closest friends. Two were groomsmen in my wedding. And with several of them, we still get together regularly, sometimes by ourselves and sometimes with our families. That's number one. You are with these people that are very smart, and it's natural to feel competitive in a competitive environment, but look past that. Look down the road later. That's something Brian encouraged, and it is definitely true. I try to pay that forward to the students now. It actually has not been a big problem at UCLA, but I still like to have that dialogue with students to just remind them of how important their relationships are in the scientific community. And in life, right? And I won't go too far down the rabbit hole on this, or I will try not to—but I think that my experience at Caltech was special because of Brian. I think that the Caltech way is to be kind of hands-off. A lot of the faculty are fairly hands off and let the students really be creative, and there's an enormous amount of value to that. But, for where I was at the time, that's not what I needed. I just needed help at first and a lot of it. I needed somebody to guide me, but then to give me enough room to then go and [laughs] hang myself, but I at least needed a ramp up. I needed on-boarding. I needed that type of support, and I needed that right away.

And then as you fast forward through grad school, I kept on getting that support because I had the relationship with Brian built from my first year of grad school. And I had no problem going to talk to him, whereas somebody who would join two years later might be a little bit more reserved about doing that. So, long and short is that I always praise Brian how important his proactive mentorship was for me. When I interact with students in my own group now, it's very casual. And now, for example, almost every week I have a lunch with members of the group: first-year students, second-year students, third-year students, fourth-year students, et cetera because that type of connection with the students, that makes or breaks whether or not they interact with you and defines what relationship you want to have with them. So, I got a lot of individual mentorship from Brian, and I try to pay that forward, and I do that with everybody in the group.

You can probably find this stuff online, but everybody in my group graduates under five years. Not one PhD student has quit after officially joining the group. The personal relationships are important, and that also helps create a support system internally, within the lab. The group members of my lab are all looking out for each other and there are elements of community that are built into the lab. People help each other and every new grad student is assigned a graduate-student mentor. There are a lot of systems in place like that just to help. I was mentored by Richmond Sarpong who's now a Berkeley professor. What would I do without that? But scientifically from my Caltech days, it's really the rigor, the depth of which you look at a problem from every possible angle and learn to think about it critically. There are few places on the planet where you can get anything close to that—that I've seen—that type of rigor that we had at Caltech. That's the scientific magic of Caltech; it is that depth of science and depth to think about really complicated problems that are really high level.

ZIERLER: Neil, in all the ways that you've been honored and awarded in your career, without looking at that long list, are there any that really jump out in your memory that are most personally meaningful? Either because of a door that was opened as a result of that recognition, or that really spoke or recognized some aspect of your career that you really cherish personally.

GARG: I have been very fortunate. UCLA has been very supportive, and people like Brian, by the way, have been incredibly supportive of my career. So, I always tell people, "Mentorship is long term. It's a long game." Brian still helps me quite a lot. But yeah, for me the teaching has been very valuable, and it was nice to be recognized at UCLA. At some point UCLA nominated me for something at Baylor University called the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, and it's unique because it's a competition for all fields for the English-speaking world and there is a lot of money at stake, 250K. They get three finalists, and each one spends a week at Baylor teaching. You're competing against other—not at the same time; people visit different weeks—but you're competing, so it's not just like you can get through the door with your recommendation letters or whatever. You have to compete, and they're getting input from faculty and students on how you teach and if you inspire. So, that was really a very satisfying win for me.

Another thing that was really special about that is, while I was down there competing, six of the undergrads from my class flew down there. It was just super cool to have that support system and to have that work out. The David Evans Award, recently announced, gave me a really warm reaction to when somebody called me to tell me the news, because it's one of the few awards that recognizes both research and education. And Evans was an absolute giant in the field. He's also somebody who helped steer me to UCLA, and we also have this Caltech connection. I really was appreciative that something exists that says both research and teaching are important, not just the research. And then the last is that the Royal Society of Chemistry gives things called the Horizon Prize, and those are really special because they give them to the whole team, not just to the professor. All of these awards usually go to the professor, but what we do is almost always a pretty massive team effort. The Horizon Prizes are given to teams, and my lab fortunately has gotten three of those, and they're all team awards. For one of them even my daughters are on it for writing these coloring books, so it was pretty awesome for a four and nine year old child. Somebody's probably getting fired for having these international prizes given to kids!  Also, one of my closest friends, Dan Caspi -another wizard from the Caltech days we talked about earlier- was also a co-recipient of the prize, which brought things full circle. The fact that the award recognizes everybody who contributed, I think that's unique, and that's very cool, and I'd much rather see that than to have another faculty award.

Emphasizing the Joy of Teaching

ZIERLER: Neil, the way that you've narrated something of a shift among research professors, that education is not a duty, it's not laborious, it's a joy, it should be important. Is there a sea change that's happening that you're a part of? How much more work is there to do? Do most people get it at this point, or is there still a big uphill climb as you see it?

GARG: I don't see any resistance. Look, I don't ever try to tell people how to run their group or things like that. That does not work with faculty, but I have become very vocal about my opinions on education in lectures. When I get invited to give a lecture, it doesn't matter where it is. It could be at Harvard. For my lecture time that would traditionally be used to talk about research, I use about half the time to talk about education, including mentoring and things like that. I do this everywhere, and I don't really think a lot about it. Nobody has come up to me and said anything negative about it. I have only heard very positive things, including from people who are the more senior folks who've retired, that may have changed their mind. I have heard a lot of the faculty say, "Your perspective is so refreshing. We have needed that for decades." So, I think some of the senior folks especially appreciate it. So, what does that mean for the younger folks? I hope it is positive for them to see that the philosophy of prioritizing mentoring and education can work. Certainly for people in my research group, I think a lot of them come here for graduate school, wanting to know that they're important, just as well as their research. Is somebody going to care about their education and their future, or are they just going to be a whipping tool for research outcomes? Because students are thinking about these things, it's becoming increasingly important for all faculty to prioritize mentoring their individual coworkers.

ZIERLER: One last question looking to the future: What's the frontier for you?

GARG: Oh, I don't know. The frontier... I'll try to give an answer you won't expect here, but it's sincere. Somebody asked me this the other day, "What are your goals now?" A former PhD student asked me this. We have plenty to do in the research space to keep us occupied for five to ten years, and it's very exploratory. I am very happy with that. I have also, for the last two years, been participating in a program called the Defense Science Study Group or DSSG. I don't know if you have heard of this, but the program takes about 15 academics in STEM—we are all about the same age, same stage of our careers—who have some interest in education and service on top of the research chops, and we spend two years going to military sites. That includes anything from the White House, the Pentagon, National Labs, Army bases, Navy, Marines, Air Force, command centers, meeting with four-star generals, traveling with retired four-star generals, and more. I spent a night on an aircraft carrier. I went on a sub. It was pretty eye-opening, David. So, whenever I get asked that question, I usually do not really answer it, but I think that it has been very good to be exposed to big problems. In this case, I got a much better and immersive sense of everything happening in the world, an understanding of technological needs, and things of that nature. And it is complicated. There's plenty of room for chemists and scientists to be involved fundamental science, applied science, and science communication. For me, the work is really just getting started. There will always be the organic-chemistry component to everything we do around here, but the parts of it that maybe a little bit stretch us out of our comfort zones, that may have pretty serious consequences for the planet, those are very much on my mind these days. I'd like to help if I can.

ZIERLER: And that includes going to Washington or going to military bases?

GARG: Absolutely. That, for me, is incredibly educational. From this program, now we understand the system; we understand how it works; we understand the science. I feel like it would just be a shame for me and other scientists not to somehow become more involved to whatever extent we can. There's more outside of the intricacies of organic chemistry, and it is incumbent upon us to get involved.

ZIERLER: And I love how you brought it right back to education in terms of the opportunities that these connections might create for your students.

GARG: It's fun to talk and reflect.

ZIERLER: Thank you so much.

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