Growing up in a family of educators and community leaders, Jamila Eatman was encouraged from a young age to both follow her passions and consider how she could help society.
That’s how she ended up spending her high-school afternoons at Syracuse University, analyzing water samples and testing levels of mercury in local fish.
“I would stay until the lab closed,” she said. “I loved science, and I loved working with my hands. The experimental world really took hold of me.”
As an undergraduate at Spelman College, she interned as an environmental engineer at Boeing, studying water management in industrial plants. While the college itself does not offer a traditional engineering degree, Eatman took math and physics courses—and felt prepared enough to apply to engineering PhD programs.
That’s how she found the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME). “It was a place where I could merge my personal and professional interdisciplinary interests,” she said. “The university really embraces a new kind of engineering that pushes the science beyond the bench, into the world, to make a difference.”
As the first year of her program unfolded, she encountered more challenges within the advanced engineering courses than she anticipated. However, those challenges helped shape new perspectives on her research and established a thread of resiliency that has stayed with her along the way.
She found her footing as a graduate student in the lab of Argonne National Laboratory and UChicago PME scientist Seth Darling, going back to her original passion: water research. In the lab, Eatman studies the fundamentals of water transport through membranes. While many membranes work by excluding items by size—if an item is too big, the membrane won’t let it through—most membranes don’t have perfectly sized holes.
Eatman is studying membranes that have been manufactured with perfectly sized holes to better understand their behavior—whether they work better than traditional membranes—and to see if such membranes offer a glimpse of new separation capabilities beyond traditional limits.
Much of her research happens at Argonne, where Darling’s lab is located. “Not many universities have this proximity and relationship with a national lab, so it has been a great opportunity to be able to do science here,” she said. “There are so many different areas of research happening here, it inspires such a collaborative environment.”
Outside of the lab, Eatman enjoys spending time along Lake Michigan. “I am so lucky that we have the lake nearby that allows me the space to decompress and recalibrate,” she said.
In addition to her research, Eatman is passionate about science education and communication. She has thrived as a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses, and she has led a Junior Science Café as part of UChicago PME’s Science Communications Program. Over the summer, she built a curriculum and taught students in PME’s City Colleges of Chicago Summer Program.
“It’s taught me to be a better communicator, and it’s taught me a lot about the impact of my own research, too,” she said. “I’m really glad I embraced the challenges early on in my PhD, so now I can confidently approach my research and teach undergraduate students in the field.”
After her PhD, she hopes to continue her research into membranes, with the ultimate goal of teaching at a university. “I'm really proud of the work that I've done so far here at UChicago PME, and it has shown me the value in teaching. I would love to pursue that.”