Chemical attraction

The creators of TV programmes would be astonished by the number of career choices they influence. Take Dr Frederick "Frikkie" Malan, a chemistry lecturer in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Pretoria (UP). He is a fan of the popular TV series Crime Scene Investigations or CSI, where investigators use advanced technology to examine evidence. It inspired him to study something that required him to analyse samples before determining whether someone was guilty or wrongly accused.

"Essentially, I wanted to help people," he says. "That was my main goal. Obviously I need to sustain myself, but my hope was to help people along the way."

Dr Malan decided that chemistry was one way to get to do that type of job, and chose to study towards a BSc degree in Chemistry and Physics at the University of Johannesburg (before he transferred to UP for his PhD). But he soon started losing interest in a job in forensic investigations.

"As I started engaging with chemistry and learning more and more, I realised it was actually chemistry that I wanted to focus on," he says.

The opportunity to be a tutor and lab demonstrator in the final year of his BSc studies helped him make up his mind.

"As soon as I got that first-hand experience, I could see how I changed lives directly by helping students to understand the work," Dr Malan says. "I got to work face to face with a high-contact ratio and be exposed to a lot of different students from different backgrounds. I had to communicate concepts or theory in an understandable manner. This inspired me to pursue the academia route as opposed to working in industry."

Perhaps too, it was inevitable, considering his academic record. A top achiever at school, from the moment he set foot on campus, Dr Malan achieved one accolade after another, including being among the top 10 graduates in the faculty. He also got the Merck Award for the best third-year chemistry student, and graduate cum laude for all three of his degrees prior to his doctorate, which is not a graded qualification.

And the achievements didn't stop there. Dr Malan has the enviable record of having had 10 journal articles published and one book chapter from his honours and master's degrees, and has produced seven peer-reviewed articles from his PhD. Now a National Research Foundation (NRF) Y2-rated researcher, he is the author of 55 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Along the way, his interest in chemistry crystallised into inorganic chemistry and, in particular, working with transition metals. These are metals such as titanium, iron, nickel and copper, which have high melting points and densities and can, sometimes in the form of compounds, act as catalysts. A catalyst increases the rate of reaction of a chemical reaction, which gives it many applications.

Dr Malan's research is focused on one of the rarest-known metals, ruthenium. This transition metal belongs to the platinum group of the periodic table, and 91% of the world's supply is found in South Africa.

"That's my favourite metal," he says.

Ruthenium formed part of the subject of his PhD thesis. He is now in the sixth and final year of being the principal investigator of a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional project funded by the NRF's Thuthuka grant, exploring ruthenium complexes as catalysts for sustainable hydrogen production and storage.

"We are only scraping the top of what ruthenium can do; it catalyses so many different reactions," he says.

Dr Malan is employed in two capacities in the Department of Chemistry. Besides being a lecturer, he is also its crystallographer. The job involves studying the atomic structure of any crystalline material, from diamonds to viruses, that can form an orderly solid, by using the properties and structures of crystals to determine the arrangement of atoms and generate useful knowledge.

Like his love of teaching, he is equally passionate about this work. He talks about the "teeny, tiny crystals" they work with, and the "diffractometer, which is just the fancy name for the instrument we use to analyse crystals".

"You can imagine it as a machine that shoots X-rays at a crystal and has a camera that rotates the whole time and takes snapshots of what it sees - photos that look like a starry night sky," he says.

Together with his former PhD supervisor, Professor Marile Landman, Dr Malan also leads the department's Organometallic Synthesis and Materials group.

"We manage and train postgraduate students collectively," he says about the group. "We mainly focus on designing and making new molecules never seen before in the literature. But we do not want to design and prepare compounds just because they are new. They must have some sort of application. So we work closely with the Pharmacology Department, testing these complexes as biologically active agents, mostly from an anti-cancer perspective."

Dr Malan's research is so cutting edge, he spent just over a month at the University of Bern in Switzerland while completing his PhD, after he "stumbled" upon an unexpected result in the lab and needed to collaborate with a specialist scientist there.

Then the following year, in 2017, in the final year of his PhD, he had another opportunity to go overseas, this time, as one of eight South Africans selected to attend the 67^th annual Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting held in Lindau, Germany. It was an unforgettable experience.

"It is one of the highlights I often look back on because that was also my first major exposure to an international platform," he recalls. "I got to meet up with 400 students who were in similar positions in their careers, and we could discuss similar challenges we were looking forward to. We also met up with about 30 Nobel laureates, who were so humble. You could easily approach them and ask them for advice, whether it was related to research or just about life in general. The friends I made during that trip confirm the inspiring effect of that meeting. It fired us up to complete our degrees and to give it our all."

He has since travelled a lot for work, presenting papers at conferences in Austria, Italy, Mauritius, Denmark, Spain, Slovakia and Poland.

"You can probably see it as a perk but, and it sounds weird to say, it is also a necessity," he says, citing the importance of communicating one's work outside the boundaries of publications, to get advice and establish collaborations.

"You get to meet other people that work on similar things or have a different skill set. Then you can find ways to complement your research, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel - you can work together and get to an answer much faster."

Dr Malan is passionate about sharing his love for his discipline. He believes it is important to inspire young people, so that they can determine early on what it is they wish to study, rather than getting there by trial and error, such as the many science students who started out in engineering because their parents pushed them in that direction.

So he has been an eager participant in outreach projects that aim to enlighten and inform young people, such as those presented by the Academy of Science of South Africa. Dr Malan has also contributed to UP and Stellenbosch University's joint community outreach initiative for Grades 11 and 12 science learners from disadvantaged schools.

"We try to make learners understand that you don't need to be a superhero to be able to do maths and science," he says.

Out of the lab and lecture hall, Dr Malan maintains that he is a homebody. He jokes that he cannot taste the "cooking" he does in the lab but enjoys the challenge of home cooking, especially Indian food and traditional Afrikaans dishes, such as oxtail and bredies.

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