Success and Creativity in Scientific Research

David Sholl is the John F. Brock III School Chair of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. During an academic career of more than 20 years, he has advised more than 60 PhD students and postdocs. His research group has published more than 350 papers describing their work on computational material modeling for applications in the chemical industry and energy sector. David has given more than 200 invited seminar and talks around the world and written two previous books, Density Functional Theory: A Practical Introduction (with Janice Steckel, published by Wiley in 2009) and Polyphony, a novel. The former has been cited more than 1100 times (using data from Google Scholar). David has also participated in writing documents that defined research agendas for the US Department of Energy and the National Academies of Science. For the past seven years, David has led the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) at Georgia Tech, the largest academic chemical engineering department in the US, with 900 undergraduate students and 250 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. ChBE has recently been ranked as the #3 best undergraduate chemical engineering program in the US (US News and World Report), the #5 best graduate chemical engineering in the US (US News and World Report), and the #6 chemical engineering department in the world (Shanghai Ranking Consultancy Academic Rankings). During his time as School Chair, David’s research group has published more than 100 papers. This book is based on lectures David has given annually to the graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty in ChBE.

1. How to Become an Overnight Success. 2. Deep Work, Shallow Work and Frippery. 3. The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Researchers. 4. Generating Outrageously Good Ideas. 5. Writing for Fun, Profit and Career Advancement. 6. The Secrets of Memorably Bad Presentations. 7. How to Win the Nobel Prize and Change the World