The best people in life are free — for a limited time only

When Houston high school chemistry teacher Ayrat Dimiev first contacted Rice Professor James Tour, it was with the kind of offer few are willing to make.

The subject line of his e-mail said simply, “Postdoc for free.”

A team of Rice University researchers has developed a way to remove layers of graphene from a stack leaving underlying layers in a pristine state. Co-authors of a new Science paper on the research include, from left: Ayrat Dimiev, Alexander Slesarev, Professor James Tour, Zhengzong Sun and Alexander Sinitskii. Missing from the photo is former Rice postdoctoral researcher Dmitry Kosynkin. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Dimiev’s brave strategy paid off; it landed the Russian native the chance to work as a “visiting scientist” with Tour’s Rice University group, take part in research and earn credit on several papers, including a Nature cover story that detailed the unzipping of nanotubes to make nanoribbons.

“He worked for free for one year in the lab in order to prove himself,” Tour said. “Then he, at great risk, accepted my offer for a postdoc while terminating his job” at the Houston Independent School District’s Lamar High School.

That paid off for Tour, too, as Dimiev’s research turned into a groundbreaking paper published this week in Science.

Dimiev said he was working to reduce graphene oxide, a focus of much research at Rice, “by different ways” when he found that sputtering zinc onto graphene and then washing it with acid could cleanly remove single-atom sheets one layer at a time.

“My first impression was that they just became transparent. I did not believe I was actually removing the layer,” he said. “At first, we thought we were making graphane (hydrogenated graphene), which might be transparent under a scanning electron microscope. We believed that story for an entire month.”

A closer look under an atomic force microscope revealed the truth.

Dimiev arrived in Houston nine years ago. He had been working as an assistant professor of chemistry at Kazan Agricultural Academy in his native Russia when HISD came calling.

“I studied chemistry at Kazan University,” he said. “At that time, it was ranked the No. 3 chemistry school in the Soviet Union; the only new chemical element ever discovered in Russia, ruthenium, was discovered at Kazan.

“So the chemistry school was famous back then. Today, it’s still operating, but it’s in bad shape, due to financial and political reasons.”

Dimiev remained patriotic. “Many of my friends and classmates defended their Ph.D. dissertations in Russia and found postdocs elsewhere, plus I was not willing to leave Russia for anywhere,” he said.

Economic and social conditions finally prompted Dimiev to look abroad. He accepted HISD’s offer and spent seven years at Lamar before realizing his true calling is in the lab.

“My mates who immigrated earlier were already associate professors at universities,” he said. “When I called one and said, ‘I would like to return to research,’ he came straight back and said ‘Dr. Tour. You’re in Houston, ask to work for Dr. Tour.'”

The rest is one for the books.