Graduate Student Highlight: John Swartzfager
Each week, the Department of Chemistry highlights a graduate student who is doing interesting and exciting work around the department. In this installment of our highlight series, we are featuring John Swartzfager, who is a fifth-year student in the Asbury lab.
John’s research focuses on studying charge carrier dynamics in high-performance organic photovoltaic materials using transient absorption spectroscopy.
This week, we met virtually with John to discuss his life in and outside of the lab! Please enjoy our interview with John Swartzfager.
Q: How did you get interested in chemistry?
A: I had an amazing teacher when I took chemistry during my junior year of high school: Mrs. Pero. She was so enthusiastic about the subject that it was hard not to get interested. It was also one of the only subjects in school that I found myself genuinely interested in and wondering what we were going to learn next.
Q: What inspires you as a scientist?
A: It’s a great feeling when you finally figure out what a particularly complex or difficult to understand piece of data is telling you, especially if you’ve spent days, weeks, or even months working with it.
Q: What accomplishment are you most proud of? (Either as a scientist, or otherwise)
A: I’d probably have to say getting to my fifth year as a graduate student. If you had told me when I was in high school that I was going to get a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and then go get a PhD, I probably would have said you were crazy.
Q: Where did you grow up? (Tell us a fun fact about your hometown if you want)
A: I grew up in Nunda, New York. I guess the most interesting thing about my town is that we are about ten minutes from Letchworth State Park, which is known for having a few really beautiful waterfalls.
Q: Do you have any hobbies?
A: I really enjoy playing video games and board games with my friends. I enjoy cooking when I have the time, and I feel like I typically have one new random hobby that I’m learning about or trying to get into at any given time; right now that’s leatherworking.
Q: Do you have any pets?
A: I don’t have any here with me, but my family back home has a Boston terrier named Ajax.
Q: What’s your favorite way to spend a day off?
A: Just relaxing, either playing video games, watching TV, or reading a comic or graphic novel.
Q: What’s your dream vacation?
A: I would really like to go to Italy to see the sites and eat some amazing food.
Q: If you could have dinner with anybody (living or dead), who would it be and why? (And what would you eat?)
A: I think a good one would be Mark Hamill; I love Star Wars, and he just seems like a down-to-earth kind of guy who would be fun to talk to. I’m not sure what he would have, but I’d go for a nice steak.
Bonus Question: Do you have any fun science trivia to share?
A: The modern whale actually evolved from an animal that lived on land, and, for whatever reason, this ancestor evolved to spend more and more time in the water, until we got to the whales we know today. Because of this, whales are actually closely related to hoofed animals.
Thanks to John for these interesting and thoughtful answers! We hope you enjoyed this interview. Stay tuned for more graduate student highlights in the weeks to come!