By Richard LeComte 

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Beth Guiton’s talents and interests range from growing nanomaterials inside small environments to singing big choral works at Christ Church Cathedral in Lexington. Her range of expertise shows just how multi-faceted faculty members in the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts and Sciences can be.  

First the science. Guiton, Ph.D., is professor of chemistry and Frank J. Derbyshire Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Chemistry as well as the director of undergraduate studies for chemistry. A lot of her work involves solid-state, or inorganic, chemistry. She and her fellow researchers manipulate wire-like objects at the nanometer scale — about one billionth of a meter. Guiton sees a myriad applications for her research.  

"There's a really wide range of applications, but most of the applications are in things like next generation batteries and solar devices for the semiconductor industry," she said. “Also, they can be used to create high dielectric constant materials (materials highly resistant to electric current), which we need for isolating devices. If you want to make lots of small devices and make them very close together, you need a high dielectric constant material.  

One of the uses of her work focuses on materials that could help understand the processes within nuclear fusion reactors or study minuscule cracks that might affect the reactor material’s performance. The processes Guiton pursues in her lab involve testing materials to see how they are formed and if they can work at the nano-level. 

“People call it shake and bake science,” said Guiton, who earned a doctorate in material sciences and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.  "You measure powders, you grind them up, you mix them well together and you stick them in a furnace. That’s how most new materials are still made.  If you're going to find new phases, new crystals with new compositions or new crystal structures, that's how people make them.” 

But creating new materials comes with many complications; Guiton and her lab associates have many different factors to consider. 

“What temperature should I use?” she asked. "What particular composition should I look at? It's difficult to know because you're basically just sticking it into a black box. What people do is they try all the composition ranges and then all the temperature ranges, and they plot the results. It's very slow. All of these reactions themselves are governed by diffusion. Once you're in the black box, you're waiting a day or a week or a month while the atoms move around slowly.” 

Guiton has six graduate students and two undergraduate researchers working for her in her lab in UK’s Chemistry-Physics Building. In addition to the work in her lab,. Guiton uses electron microscopes in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering as well as the state-of-the-art microscopes in the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she used to work. The advantage of using these instruments lies in allowing researchers to watch the processes in real time. For example, she said, she can track the shape and size of a tiny amount of iron oxide as it becomes hollow, forming a nano-sized magnetic capsule.  

"We want to look inside that black box while the reaction is happening,” she said. “We can see things on a smaller time scale as well. If I'm just looking at one atom moving from here to here in one crystal, that's a much faster process than waiting for 100 billion atoms to diffuse slowly to the places they need to get to. It makes the processes much more efficient and much, much quicker.” 

Guiton came to her current research into nanocrystals through chemistry. She grew up in Sheffield, England, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, then went on to earn a master’s in chemistry at Harvard and finally landed at Penn, where she earned a doctorate in materials science and engineering. 

She investigated nanocrystals at Cambridge, nanowires at Harvard and nano-chessboards — “bulk solids, but with interesting nanoscale features in the grains" —  at Penn, where she earned a doctorate in materials science and engineering at Penn. 

"It looks like a big transition on paper because I earned two master’s degrees in chemistry, and then I suddenly switched and requalified as an engineer and got my Ph.D.in engineering,” she said. “But it was all solid-state chemistry. As an undergrad, I made metal oxide nanoparticles and used a transmission electron microscope to analyze them. That’s what motivated me to be interested in that area.  

“When I moved to America, I worked at Harvard, and my boss told me I could work on anything I wanted. So that's when I decided I wanted to make vanadium dioxide  nanowires. I was building on what I'd done as an undergrad, but now I was trying to make something a little bit more interesting.”  

“So that was the material I made at Harvard. When I was looking for a group that I wanted to do my Ph.D. in,. I was looking for an interesting solid-state chemistry project. I found that the professor I wanted to work with was the chair of the (Penn) Materials Engineering Department, so switched and worked with him.” 

After her doctorate, she spent two years working as a Wigner Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and then she moved to UK.  As director of undergraduate studies in the Chemistry Department, she gets to guide students down a variety of paths to careers in science. For example, being a chemistry major can be a big help on the MCATs. 

"There are so many things you can do with a chemistry degree, and I think people don't necessarily realize all the different fields that you can go into,” she said. ‘Part of my job is alerting students to the opportunities that they have, which is fun. There are all the health sciences, or you can get a job in a lab, or sales, or even patent law. I think a lot of students don't understand what it means to get a job working in either an industrial lab or one of these other fields.” 

Now back to music. When she was a girl in England, churches used mostly boy choirs, so she didn’t get to sing in a cathedral. But she loved singing, and she pursued it wherever she landed. Recently she sang with her cathedral choir in a performance of Faure’s Requiem in Lexington.  

"I got trained in the in the Anglican style, but sang in a girls’ choir until I went to college. When I was in college, I sang in two chapel choirs in Cambridge, and when I went to Harvard I sang at the Church of the Advent in Boston. I sang there for two and half years." 

On top of all that, she serves on the federal Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, a role she sees as an opportunity to help her adopted country.  

"It’s a big honor to be asked to serve on it,” she said.  "Just from a personal level, I became a U.S. citizen in 2019. It's a service to the country, and I'm proud and happy to be American. You take an oath of office when you join, and that felt pretty emotional.”