Mildred Dresselhaus
All the leadership positions that I have had have one common denominator: none has required that I give up my science work.Collection: Leadership
One of the over-riding things for many who grow up in poverty is the simple desire to escape. I think it was sort of obvious to me that escape had to be through education.Collection: Education
Electrons are the carriers for electricity, but they are also carriers for thermal energy. This means thermal conductivity is increased when the carrier density is increased.
Diversity and inclusion of women and underrepresented minorities in science should not affect the way education is handled or research is carried out. So diversity should not be a problem but rather an opportunity to involve a large talent pool.
People who have it too easy in early life have a disadvantage for later on, because they get to thinking that everything is going to be easy.
The holy grail would be to turn a knob, and out comes the nanotube of the right diameter and chirality.
If we had improved materials that could be produced cheaply and in large quantities, certainly the thermoelectrics industry could move forward more quickly.
My older brother was a musical prodigy, and he got a scholarship to the Bronx House Music School. We moved to the Bronx when I was 4 to be close to his music school. Then I got a music scholarship myself, at the age of 6, but that was for a school down in Greenwich Village. I had to take the elevated train and then the subway to get there.
Hunter High School was a real turning point for me. I found out about its existence through the music school. Nobody I knew had gone to one of these special high schools, and my teachers didn't think it was possible to get in. But Hunter sent me a practice exam, and I studied what I needed to know to pass the exam.
Superconductivity helped broaden my professional phase space. When I started my work, it was already known that magnetic fields could quench superconductivity. I found that the transition was not continuous, that superconductivity was initially enhanced in the presence of magnetic fields, then it would suddenly fall off.
When I came to M.I.T. in 1960, only 4 percent of the students were female. Today, it's about 40 percent of undergraduates. At Lincoln Lab, they had 1,000 men and two women. But we had a very good boss, and he treated us just like everybody else.
At my first job as an independent researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, they told me I could work on most anything, but not what I knew something about. That is actually very good advice to a young person starting a career because you bring new ideas to the field.
The concept of graphene came along in 1947, but nobody paid much attention to it. I was fascinated because it had a linear E versus K while everything else that people were working on at that time had a quadratic dispersion relationship. I wondered why this was and what was so special about it. That was my fascination.
A carbon nanotube is just a graphene sheet that's rolled up seamlessly, and this happens in nature; carbon nanotubes are found in mineral deposits around the planet.
My entry into the field of hydrogen came as a great surprise. President Bush of the United States was interested in hydrogen for energy applications, and I was asked to chair a committee on hydrogen for the Department of Energy.
Energy is one topic on which different countries can work together collaboratively. If we can all produce energy from an element that's available in abundance on our planet, that would be a good thing, but we have to learn how to produce energy in large quantities, cheaply, efficiently and without detriment to the environment.
I think having four children made me a good mentor. As a parent, you get to know young people as they mature and grow up and to also learn about some of the difficulties they face.
I was very much taken with carbon fibers because they seemed like the perfect medium to explore transport studies in carbon-based systems.
Mentoring is about listening to people, helping them go over what the issues are and how to clarify ways to deal with any problems that may arise.
The Bronx, I remember, was a very poor neighborhood, but that was all that immigrants could afford at that time. Life was tough. I grew up - my father didn't have a job, but there weren't too many people who did have jobs.
I've been lucky. I've been at a place that's a meritocracy. It doesn't really matter that much what your gender is if you do the work well.
I think women benefit from being in places and having positions where the quality of work is the criteria, not what you look like. Not every place is like that.
In the process of making nanomaterials, we learned that with the electronic density of states, the phonon electronic properties and everything change at the nano-level. So the thermoelectric properties would also be changed.
I would say the first three or four papers on nano-thermoelectricity in bismuth went almost unnoticed, but all of a sudden when Dirac cones came along - pop! - there was huge interest in bismuth-related materials.
Commercial thermoelectrics are a reality. The automobile industry is now working with conventional thermoelectric materials. They are interested a little bit in nanostructuring because under some conditions, the nanostructures work.
If you don't have material, you don't have an experiment.
We're all concerned about sustainable energy. If we could recycle waste heat to generate energy, we could use it for something useful.
I behaved the way I was taught to behave: like a woman in the company of men. If you behaved aggressively in the company of men, they wouldn't accept you.
Institutions are increasingly persuaded that political maneuvering is more important than scientific justification in securing federal funds.
The main thread of my work is structure property relations and materials. If you have certain atoms, why do they attract each other? Why do they make compounds? Why do they do what they do?
If I were not able anymore to come to the lab, that's retirement. Or if I had no more ideas of things. Every year, there's something new that comes along that's too exciting to quit.
I learned to read music before I learned to read script.
I want to try to do something for women in physics worldwide.
The best thing about having a lady professor on campus is that it tells women students that they can do it, too.
People in academia and industry are not accustomed to people who have long lapses in their careers.
Being a woman has helped my career more than it's hindered it.
It's hard for people who come from traditional homes to take women seriously. I do it myself. We're just not used to seeing women professionals. Women have to go out of their way to prove themselves.
Follow your interests, get the best available education and training, set your sights high, be persistent, be flexible, keep your options open, accept help when offered, and be prepared to help others.Collection: Inspirational
Some people don't like competition, but competition is fine. It generates new ideas, keeps you alert.Collection: Ideas
I'm happy to keep doing science and being a mentor to anyone who asks for advice.Collection: Advice