Our Ambassador of the Month — January 2020
Congratulations for being elected Ambassador of the month! Could you tell us a bit more about yourself?
My name is Sergey Zubkevich, I studied chemistry in Lomonosov Moscow State University as a student in 2010–2015 and then continued as a PhD student in the fields of inorganic chemistry, organo-metallic chemistry and catalysis. I have finally completed my PhD thesis and will defend it in the upcoming several months. My research interests are transition metal complexes, mechanisms of their activation and application of these compounds as catalysts for olefin coupling reactions and some other types of polymerizations. Lately I was really inspired by articles that summarize the use of novel computational methods, including machine learning, for prediction of catalyst properties, so now I hope to investigate this topic as well. I am using Researcher since late 2018 and I was glad to become one of the Ambassadors, when the chance appeared.
In what ways do you think your friends and colleagues can benefit from Researcher?
Researcher really helps save time during routine paper search. Moreover, you can simply view and add articles to your library, while travelling in public transport or waiting in a queue somewhere. Since I started using Researcher, I have significantly broadened the scope of my article library. It now includes not only the papers that are directly related to my research, but also a lot of articles on adjacent topics. A number of my friends and colleagues are now using Researcher, but even those who do not, often get new articles from me.
I can easily share my findings with them within the app or through external sources and so do they.
What changes would you like to see in academia?
I think that fundamental science has become too result-oriented and this can somewhat harm the quality of the work. An enormous amount of studies is published every year and the motto: “publish or perish” is now true more than ever. Sometimes I think that if I had more time to work on each paper, they would have been more meaningful and useful. Maybe this problem is more significant in Russia and some other developing countries. Our group has to carry out several research projects simultaneously and publish 6–10 articles per year to provide the competitive level of salary for its members. I also think that the academia would benefit from the increased accessibility of new computer methods, databases and other digital solutions. It can drastically improve the productivity of the work. Many small research groups around the world could not afford new costly programs or simply are unaware of their existence.
