From Ignorance to Insight: My Journey into Piezocatalysis
The Unexpected Call to Collaborate Piezocatalysis – my new favorite word. It all started when a close friend from my master’s program, an experimentalist, approached me for a collaboration. The project was titled “Piezocatalytic Hydrogen Production.” Her idea was to strengthen the paper by combining experimental results with theoretical calculations. At first glance, I wasn’t sure how much I could contribute. Hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) was entirely new territory for me. My expertise had always been in magnetic properties, and now I was being asked to explore something completely different. And then there was piezocatalysis. I was familiar with piezoelectricity, and I’d heard of catalysis, but I’d never thought the two could intersect. Feeling unsure, I decided to stick to what I knew: performing electronic structure calculations to complement her experimental results. What else could I do when I didn’t even fully understand the title? First Submission: A Lesson in Humil...