THE MELODIES OF MATERIALS
Materials science is at the heart of innovation, shaping the tools and technologies of our modern world. Let's dive into the intricacies behind the materials that define the music and sounds of our lives.
05/31/2026 ⋅ By Rishi Pai ⋅ 3 min read
Local Kid on the National Stage - 39th ACS NMCS, 2026
Poster Session at the ACS NMCS 2026
This week, I stood in front of a poster at the 39th ACS National Medicinal Chemistry Symposium in Atlanta and explained my research to some of the most accomplished chemists in the country. Researchers from GSK, Merck, AbbVie, MIT, UC Berkeley. People who have been doing this longer than I've been alive. I’m just a high school student. It was a lot.
What the NMCS Actually Is
The National Medicinal Chemistry Symposium is one of the premier chemistry conferences in the US, organized by the American Chemical Society's MEDI division. This year it was right here in Atlanta, which meant I didn't have to go far, but the conference itself pulled people in from everywhere. The UK, France, Egypt, Canada, and more. Walking through the registration area and hearing four different languages in the span of thirty seconds was a good early sign that this was not a small local event.
The program ran from Sunday through Wednesday and covered everything from CNS drug discovery to AI-driven drug pipelines to antibacterial research. Heavy stuff, and genuinely at the frontier of what's happening in medicinal chemistry right now.
The Talks
I sat in on as many sessions as I could between poster hours, and a few really stuck with me.
Prof. Laura Kiessling from MIT gave the opening special plenary lecture on glycan interactions in health and disease, and it was the kind of talk that makes you realize how much of biology we still don't fully understand. She has this way of making incredibly complex carbohydrate chemistry feel almost intuitive, and I found myself scribbling notes way faster than I expected to.
Prof. Daniel Nomura from UC Berkeley talked about reimagining druggability using chemoproteomic platforms, which connected pretty directly to ideas I've been thinking about in my own work. The question of how you find new drug targets using chemistry-based tools is one I keep coming back to, and hearing someone at his level walk through how his lab approaches it was genuinely useful, not just inspiring.
And then there was Prof. James Collins from MIT closing out Wednesday with a talk on deep learning for antibiotic discovery. Antibiotic resistance is one of those problems that feels almost too big to solve, and applying deep learning to it is exactly the kind of creative approach the field needs. That one sparked a lot of conversation around me in the room afterward.
Presenting
Here's the thing about presenting at a conference like this as a high schooler. You spend a lot of time wondering whether people are going to take you seriously.
The poster session was busy and loud and a little overwhelming. Researchers would walk up, scan the title, glance at me, and you could see the slight recalibration happening in real time. And then most of them just engaged. Really engaged. Asked detailed questions, pushed back on methodology, wanted to know where the work was going next.
A few people specifically came back to say kind things after walking away, which I won't pretend didn't mean a lot. One researcher from the UK told me the work was impressive for any level, not just for my age, and I've been holding onto that one pretty tightly.
Being the youngest person in the room by a significant margin is a strange feeling. Not bad, just strange. You're aware of it constantly, and then a good conversation makes you forget about it entirely.
What It Meant
Science fairs are incredible, and I've written about them plenty on this blog. But a professional research conference is a genuinely different animal. At a science fair, everyone is presenting. At a conference like this, the people asking you questions aren't there to be polite. They're there because they care about the science, and if they're standing at your poster, it means something in your title or abstract caught their attention. That's a different standard to meet, and meeting it felt different too.
Something else I didn't expect: how much I learned just from listening to how researchers talk about their own work. Not the content of the talks, though that was excellent, but the way they framed uncertainty, the way they acknowledged what they still don't know, the way they connected their specific findings to bigger open questions in the field. That's a skill I've been trying to develop in my own presentations, and watching it done at the highest level for three days straight was more instructive than any textbook.
I also came away thinking differently about where chemistry is going. The AI and machine learning session on Wednesday made it pretty clear that the field is in the middle of a real shift. The researchers who are going to do the most interesting work in the next decade are probably going to be comfortable sitting at the intersection of wet lab chemistry and computational tools. That's a combination I want to build toward.
Atlanta hosted this one, which felt right. The Georgia research community showed up in force, with talks from Georgia Tech, UGA, Georgia State, and Emory all on the program. There's a lot of serious science happening close to home, and it was good to be reminded of that.
I cannot wait to present at the larger ACS Fall 2026 National Meeting & Exposition in Chicago (August 2026)!
So until dhin... stay upbeat, and stay tuned.