On October 1, 2023, Nadya Mason became the second dean of the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. Mason, who also serves as the Robert J. Zimmer Professor of Molecular Engineering, specializes in experimental studies of quantum materials. Much of her research has focused on the electronic properties of small-scale materials, such as nanoscale wires and atomically thin membranes. Mason came to UChicago after 18 years at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
An elite gymnast from age 7 to 16, Mason was a member of the 1986–87 US junior national team. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a PhD from Stanford, both in physics. This interview has been edited and condensed.
How did your interest in science emerge?
I didn’t have a strong science background in a traditional sense. It was more an interest in nature and in understanding how things work. I also liked math a lot—I would do math word problems just for fun.
I honestly didn’t think about becoming a scientist until, after my junior year of high school, I got an opportunity to work in a research lab at Rice University. That was revelatory. I loved going in and solving problems and fiddling around with things. It was a lot of fun to think about how to design something that would access the answer to the question we had. The whole process of being in a lab group where people are thinking about solving problems, being creative, experimenting—I knew within a few weeks that this was something I could do for life.
You were an elite gymnast growing up. What was your favorite event?
My favorite event and my best event was the uneven parallel bars. It feels like it looks—you’re just flying through the air and everything’s engaged. It was super fun.
Do you see connections between your athletic background and your scientific career?
Gymnastics fed some natural tendencies I had that are really useful in science. Perseverance is one—being willing to fall and get back up, realizing you just have to keep trying again.
Also, and this is something I often tell students, knowing not to accept that you can’t do something until you’ve worked as hard as you can to try to achieve it. Hard work in the gym is 30 hours a week of intense training. Hard work in the lab is being in the clean room for 50 hours a week sometimes, or studying for that problem set. That doesn’t mean you beat your head against a wall. There might be some things you just can’t do, but you don’t know that until you’ve worked as hard as you can to get at them.
What drew you to the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering?
While at the University of Illinois I had interacted with the University of Chicago over many years. I’d watched from a distance, but with a lot of interest, as PME developed. I was incredibly impressed that UChicago was investing so much in building an engineering school and that they were doing it the right way. They were hiring great faculty, they had great new facilities, they had excited students, they had great staff.
The previous dean, Matt Tirrell [D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering], did an amazing job of building an institute starting with him alone to a place with 50 faculty and a thriving research portfolio. The opportunity to step in as the second dean and sustain that level of growth and impact, to develop something that was going from founder phase to start-up phase to sustainable phase, was really interesting to me. I like thinking about making efficient structures and creating communities where people can do their best work.
I was also attracted by the fact that it’s not a traditional engineering school. We’re interdisciplinary. We don’t have departments, we have research themes. People work together here in a different way. It seemed much more exciting than just, here is your department of electrical engineering and here are the faculty. That’s important, but what we have here is unique and exciting.
What would you like to accomplish during your time as dean?
I’m hoping that we can double in size under my tenure. We probably need to triple in size at some point. In the long run, we need to have a robust faculty working on all the most important topics to have broad global impact.
I’m excited about the new engineering and science building, which will give us the space to grow that we really need when it’s completed in four years.
Having more strong partnerships across campus would be a mark of success for me. I want everyone to see the value of having engineering at UChicago and to see that we partner in solving problems that matter. I hope that people in the humanities and social sciences will want to work with us so we can leverage our collective strengths.
In the last 18 months, UChicago PME has helped catalyze almost a billion dollars in regional investment to Chicagoland. We also want to have more partnerships across the state, across the nation, and across the globe. For example, we already partner with the UChicago Center in Delhi to produce and distribute water sensors that clean the rivers in India. We partner with the state at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, where the goal is to bring jobs to Chicago through new quantum companies. Entrepreneurship is one of the priorities of an engineering school—especially ours.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, I hope we develop a cohort of great engineers and engineering leaders who will further this work. We want all of our students to have the best interdisciplinary training they can get here, and then go out and help solve the world’s problems.
Of all your scientific publications, which is closest to your heart and why?
The title of the paper is complicated: “Approaching Zero-Temperature Metallic States in Mesoscopic Superconductor–Normal–Superconductor Arrays.”
Rolls right off the tongue!
That’s right! In the paper we looked at something called superconductivity, which is when electrons pair up in such a way that they can move through a material without bumping into anything. They have zero electrical resistance, and that means you don’t lose any energy to heat. Systems like MRI magnets are superconducting, because you have to put very high currents in them to get high magnetic fields. If you did that in a normal metal, it would get so hot it would just blow up. So you use a superconductor because it doesn’t heat up.
For this paper I was trying to understand superconductivity in two dimensions. I decided to create a model superconductor where, instead of having a solid film, I put little islands of superconductors together and then controlled how the islands interacted. We were able to induce new sorts of behaviors and see how the material went from a superconductor to a metal to an insulator.
I came up with the idea for this experiment in graduate school, and I first tried it when I was a postdoc. The technology wasn’t good enough yet to make these small islands. By the time I started as a professor, it took less time to make the samples. I talked to some senior colleagues I was close to—and we laugh about this today—but they said, “This is just not interesting. Don’t do this experiment.”
We stuck at it, and lo and behold, it turned out to be a really interesting experiment with lots of new physics. We published it in a great journal, and the paper has been cited many times. It really opened a new field of looking at these nanoscale-connected superconductors.
It’s close to my heart because it’s a topic that I really wanted to know about, that mattered to me—and one where, as an early-career professor, I decided not to listen to senior colleagues or worry too much when my students were frustrated, and instead to just follow through on something I thought would be great.
Over the years, you’ve done a lot of work on graphene. Why is graphene such an interesting material to study?
Graphene is interlinked atoms of carbon, and it was the first two-dimensional material to be isolated and measured electrically. If you think of the graphite in a pencil, the reason that pencils write so well is that, as you draw across paper, the graphite is layered, and all the sheets spread out and smear as you write. If you can isolate one of these individual sheets by pulling it off with a piece of tape and pressing it onto something, you can get a single layer of graphite, which is graphene.
It’s remarkable to me that a single layer of graphite—graphene—is just a single atomic layer thick. Think about how big one atom is, right? You never imagine that you can put an atom somewhere and it will just stay there—you’d think you have to have it under vacuum or special conditions. But graphene is stable in air at room temperature.
When you study the electric properties of graphene, it’s not what you’re used to, because graphene is one atom thick. It’s purely two dimensional.
So what happens as we go to lower dimensions? Imagine if all of us were in Flatland—we might bump into each other more, or we might be more susceptible to being blown off Flatland. All sorts of things can happen when you reduce dimensions.
It’s the same thing for materials like graphene—their physical properties change. The electrical properties of graphene are really unique compared to other materials, and you can induce it to have lots of different behaviors. When you put a current through it and look at its response, it’s completely different from, say, a piece of gold.
Do you have a favorite lab memory?
When I was a second-year graduate student, my adviser put me in charge of this million-dollar piece of equipment he had spent years trying to get.
I spent a long time getting it set up. It had a big magnet, and it was very heavy, so we had to lift and lower it using a hoist system. A couple of weeks after we got it, I was working late and trying to load a sample, but the system was cold, and it started pulling the hoist in a way that had never happened before. One of my lab mates looked over and said, “Is it supposed to be tilting like that?” I looked over, and it was about half an inch away from the supports falling off and crashing down into a pit that was six feet deep. It was not supposed to be tilting like that.
We had to call my adviser, who was at a dinner party with some other physics professors. They all came to the lab. We got a jack from someone’s car and jacked the system back into place.
My adviser never criticized me for this. He just said, “Fix it.” That helped me to not just throw up my hands or be scared to proceed in experimental science. As an adviser, I try to inspire that level of confidence in my students, because it makes all the difference in the world.
So, bad memory, good memory!
What’s the best part of being a scientist?
There are two parts to it. One is being able to think deeply about how something works and then to test it and see if you’re right. I think many of us enter these fields because we’re curious and because we want to understand the world better. And so feeling like you can have an interest in and understand something better, and then to contribute that understanding to the world, is incredibly powerful. Even though it sometimes takes a long time to do that, the ability to follow through on your own ideas is satisfying, even joyful.
But it’s not just thinking through these ideas. It’s when you get to go out and present the ideas—so, giving a talk at a workshop, having people ask questions, going out for coffee or drinks afterward. You have a community around the world that feeds on social relationships and scientific knowledge.
And hopefully someday the work has a significant impact on our knowledge base or a technology. That keeps you going through the late nights in the clean room.
You’ve always done a lot of outreach work. Why is that outward focus important to you?
I was given opportunities when I was younger to explore my interest in science, and if I hadn’t been given those opportunities, I wouldn’t be a scientist today. So I fundamentally believe that everyone should have the chance to explore their interests. Unfortunately, especially for interest in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math], a lot of people never get that chance—because they’re turned off at an early stage, or because other people say through implications, actions, or even explicit statements that it’s not for them. This happens especially to women and people of color.
I’ve done a lot of mentoring over the years, because sometimes you need the right person to say, “It’s okay that you did badly on that test. It doesn’t mean you’re not good enough. It just means maybe you should study more.” I give a lot of hard advice, but people have told me it’s helpful, which is gratifying. Having mentors who can put things in context is really important.
I love our community college program, the PME-City Colleges of Chicago Summer Program, because it allows students who may not otherwise have the opportunity to work in cutting-edge labs to be part of some of the top research in the world. Our goal is to train great people and give them opportunities to be successful, whether or not they come to UChicago. This is part of our mission. And what I love about PME is that many people here feel this is part of their own mission.
For example, the South Side Science Festival started three years ago and now draws almost 5,000 people each fall. It’s a collaboration between PME, the Physical Sciences Division, the Biological Sciences Division, the Office of Civic Engagement, and others. Our graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff are spending their weekend and evening time organizing this event for elementary school kids to experience hands-on science. They’re doing it because they care.
Our mission is to have an impact in science and technology, and we can do that in many ways—from going into kindergarten classes to developing quantum computers.
—Article originally appeared on the UChicago Magazine website