When a pandemic-era experiment faces unexpected challenges, physicist Larissa Boie is forced to reconsider everything she thought she knew about the colleague she couldn't stand.
Larissa Boie is an experimental physicist at The Ohio State University, studying materials under the influence of strong light pulses. She received her Ph.D. from ETH Zurich (Switzerland), where she built a new light source in the lab and worked at X-ray free electron laser facilities around the world to investigate correlations on ultrafast timescales in crystals.
Before joining OSU, she worked at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, studying the structural changes in glasses upon laser processing using X-ray diffraction at several synchrotron facilities.
She completed her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Germany at the Freie Universität Berlin, which included stays at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Nairobi, Kenya and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.
In her free time, Larissa can be found playing percussion in local orchestras and riding her road bike named Whirlwind looking for hill challenges in central Ohio.
Story Transcript
It is the summer of 2020, the first big wave of the COVID‑19 pandemic. I need to travel to South Korea for my last experiment before graduation, and my boss determines that my nemesis, Greg, is the only person who goes with me. I am freaked out by the idea that I need to rely on my colleague Greg for this important experiment.
I study how atomic lattices in crystals change when a strong laser pulse excites them, and I trace the motion of these atoms with ultrafast X‑ray pulses. Generating these short X‑ray pulses requires a very specific electron accelerator. Access to these facilities is only possible by applying for experiment time via a research proposal, and getting it granted is rare. Having this experiment scheduled is thus my once‑in‑a‑lifetime chance to get the results I need to finish my PhD. And now my fate depends on Greg's participation in my experiment.
Greg joined the group only recently and, from the start, I really didn't like him. He brought the smell of Red Bull to my office. I hate this. He was chaotic, had the weirdest work hours, which also meant weird times for his desk lunch, and always, really always, disobeyed the meeting time limits during our weekly group meetings by far.
In addition, his questions in these meetings were more like comments to show off some special knowledge, which drove me nuts. I think he was really eager to learn, and probably never had bad intentions, but this guy was just so annoying to me.
Many things he presented were just artificially made complex, taking much longer than the easy straightforward way without adding new knowledge. And every week, I was just happy that his inefficiency didn't affect any of my projects.
Now, as I'm thinking of all the tasks during a beam time, I'm worried. Will we get the data analysis done fast enough? Will Greg find the right priorities to work on and do things just well enough instead of perfect? I have doubts.
It will also be Greg's very first beam time. I have participated in other beam times from my colleagues before, but for Greg, none of the procedures would be familiar. Everything would just be simply overwhelming. It usually takes several beam times before a person is knowledgeable enough to be very useful.
So, for my big experiment in Korea during COVID limitations, I was stuck with Greg, a newbie with zero experience and a complicated character. I'm mad at my boss for not selecting a more experienced colleague and I'm concerned about a successful experiment if I end up all by myself with no additional support.
When we get out of two weeks of quarantine, we take the train to start our first shifts, running from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, which, in reality, means something like 9:00 AM to midnight or even longer, and we start positioning the sample. This is very important because a crystal structure looks different from each angle. Orienting the sample correctly usually takes two days.
The facility is very new. We are indeed the first international users and everything looks still very clean. The control room has tens of big screens to monitor vacuum valves, beam shutters, pressure gauges and all the cameras that help us look into the experimental hatch. This lead hatch is across the corridor and the bright white neon lights illuminate tons of cables going from all the shiny new equipment to the walls, eventually ending up in our control room.
The pumps keeping the optimum conditions are running constantly, adding to the white noise of the room. The temperature is nice in the experimental hatch to stabilize all equipment, but in the control room I am freezing. While outside temperatures are in the 90s with very high humidity, the control room feels like 60 degrees.
I was trying to give correct instructions to the staff on site, think about potential issues and troubleshoot spontaneous mysteries, and, at the same time, mentor Greg so that he learns what we were doing and why and, possibly, be helpful at some point. Given his overly complicated approach to almost all scientific questions, I worry about his efficiency under time pressure and getting first results without overly detailed analysis.
After a few days, I am simply exhausted. Communication with the locals is challenging, as not all staff members speak English well, and I don't speak any Korean. There are too few people to help. Some equipment that should be on site is not available for unknown reasons, and the alternatives don't work as expected and are not connected to the control system. I find myself connecting USB cables across the entire hallway from the experimental hatch.
While all of this is ongoing, my boss and other team members in Switzerland and the U.S. are waiting in front of their computers to be updated via Slack messages. No, video calling the control room was not set up at the beginning of COVID. So in every free second, I'm also typing updates into my laptop.
Greg, meanwhile, sits on his computer and does what he seems to like most, coding. He is trying to get our analysis code to work without ever having analyzed a single dataset from such an experiment before. I'm actually quite happy about this because this is work where one needs to be able to stay focused for some time and, also, I don't really like programming that much. In addition, he's busy and I can stop babysitting him for some time. I slowly start to believe that he could eventually be a helpful colleague.
At some point I'm ready to take data. Since I'm studying a phase transition across a specific temperature, where the atoms rearrange in the lattice structure of the crystal, the sample is cooled with a liquid nitrogen blower, which looks a bit like a fancy garden hose with a sophisticated design of the front nozzle with liquid and gas nitrogen pouring out at the same time. For the cooling to work properly, the nozzle needs to be really close to the sample, just a couple millimeters.
Suddenly, the operator lets out a curse. While he remotely moves the motors of the blower nozzle closer to the sample, the motors move too far and bump into our sample, a little flake smaller than the fingernail of your pinky. The sample falls off its mount and on the sample table.
I'm like, “Shit. Unbelievable.”
For a couple seconds, I think my brain stops thinking. When it resumes, the first thing it realizes is two days of work gone. I'm devastated.
I'm not sure if Greg understood the implications of this incident. I'm forcing myself to put away the frustration about the staff member and work out a possible solution.
Luckily, we find the sample on the floor, but it needs to be realigned from scratch. My frustration is huge, but, also, I try to calm down and get rid of all my negative emotions to work out a plan. We lose so much time that taking data seems out of reach for the last remaining shift. I'm so mad at the guy moving the motors after all the work we put in. Now I also have to let the team members in Switzerland know what happened. Terrible news to communicate.
But there is no time to really be upset for long. I'm still in a professional context and I am in a country where people don't show their emotions in public so much. So I bite my tongue and try to focus on correcting the mistake.
Despite being so delayed with our plan, we keep going. Giving up is not an option for me. This would mean we can pack our stuff and leave right now, wasting all the remaining beam time. Some results need to come out of this because I must publish results from these experiments. This is not only a strict condition from the facility to use the experiment at no cost. Not getting any result also means I won't be able to graduate.
A little bit surprising to me, Greg is on board. He doesn't complain a single second about his work lost, the extra efforts, the additional tasks and tries his best to help make the remaining time as productive as possible. We glue the sample back on the mount, realign it and try to take data.
While we are on our last two‑hour shift, the local coordinator comes in and offers us an additional two hours directly after our shift to make up for the mistake of bumping into the sample.
I immediately say yes. Sleeping is not a priority right now. I just hope that we can collect enough statistics in the remaining time to make meaningful conclusions for the experiment.
Greg supports my decision. He stays for the whole additional shift to help, looking at the live data coming in. I am happy about his support, but even if he didn't want to continue, I would have pushed through and worked it out by myself, probably with even worse outcomes. Had he left to go to bed, I would have understood, but I am impressed by his commitment.
And then, almost at the end of this campaign, one of the department heads comes into the control room and offers another 12 hours. We could keep going. What a crazy day. What do we do? You can't say no to such an opportunity but, also, I really need to sleep.
I'm awake for around 27 hours by now. I can hardly think anymore. I don't know how Greg is actually doing. He wasn't complaining, but I also had no idea how exhausted he was. And the remote team members in all these different time zones are planning to have normal lives again.
I decide that we keep taking data but without the remote support. It is now only Greg and I who need to monitor everything, make sure our temperature control works, we have a stable laser and a stable x‑ray beam and no computer crashes.
After this spontaneous 36‑hour shift, we are just exhausted. I can't even take a look at our data anymore because I'm too tired. Greg and I go back to the guest house to sleep, return after a couple of hours to clean up and take the sample back. I can't fully grasp what has happened.
It was then tidying up the snack wrappers and scratch papers in the control room that I realized how dedicated Greg was for my experiment. He never complained about the tasks I asked him to do, found things to do when there were no instructions, wrote good analysis code, and he stayed awake with me to monitor the experiment.
Surprising to me, Greg was actually very useful. The data, on the other hand, not so much.