Episode 11 - Justin Lemkul: Providing technical help online, sharing expertise, and polarization in nucleic acids

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In the eleventh episode, Justin Lemkul and I talk about the motivations and challenges behind providing technical help on online forums and mailing lists. Justin shares his story of becoming a prolific technical advisor for the Gromacs community, which evolves into a discussion about automatability, the role of expertise in running and documenting simulation-based projects, and the incentives for people who contribute their time to helping the community. We then move on to discuss polarizable force fields for nucleic acids, including the problems they might help solve and the practical ways in which we might arrive at these solutions. We conclude by pointing out the need for more nuanced undergraduate curricula that reflect the current open questions in nucleic acids research to attract students who will make the future discoveries.