In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Magalí Lingenfelder from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland about her group’s discovery of the switching mechanism behind H-bond-linked two-dimensional networks. The hydrogen bonding ability was tuned by comparing carboxylates to aldehydes. Lingenfelder’s group found that the ability of the structure to switch between an open structure to a close-packed one is governed by a synergistic combination of energetic contributions from both the adsorbate/adsorbate and absorbate/substrate interactions. This work was published in a recent issue of ACS Nano.