How Millie Dresselhaus paid it forward

Building on Dresselhaus’s far-reaching foundational research, scientists and engineers have made enormous advances at the nanoscale—with structures on the order of one hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair. Spherical carbon “buckyballs,” cylindrical carbon nanotubes, and two-dimensional carbon sheets known as graphene have already been used for energy storage, medical research, building materials, and paper-thin electronics, among many other applications. Today, these carbon structures continue to be developed for myriad novel uses that often seem taken from the realm of science fiction, including ultrafast quantum computers, efficient desalination devices, and quantum dots with applications in biosensing and drug delivery. For her work she won—among other honors—the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the National Medal of Science, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award given by the United States government.

But her journey to MIT, and to global leadership in solid-state physics, was an improbable one. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrant parents in 1930, Dresselhaus came of age at a time when women were rarely welcomed as scientists or encouraged to pursue technical fields. Yet she benefited from several key mentors who saw her potential and took deliberate steps to support a brilliant young mind. 

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One of those mentors was Enrico Fermi, the distinguished Italian-born nuclear scientist who played a leading role in the Manhattan Project and who concluded his career as a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. Fermi came to America after receiving a solo Nobel Prize in 1938 (for work on induced radioactivity) and then fleeing the Nazi regime with his Jewish wife, Laura. The story of how Fermi influenced an up-and-coming Millie Dresselhaus—and, by proxy, scores of students who would study under her—reveals how paying it forward to the next generation of scientists and engineers can yield lasting dividends. 

In 1953, with the nuclear age firmly underway and the Cold War heating up, Dresselhaus found herself, at 22, one of the new graduate students within the University of Chicago’s world-class physics department. Although a number of researchers who had worked on the Manhattan Project there had by then left for other opportunities, many luminaries remained. In addition to the renowned Enrico Fermi, notable faculty included the Nobel laureates Harold Urey and Maria Goeppert Mayer (with whom Dresselhaus lived for about a year as a boarder) as well as the physicist Leona Woods, the only woman present during the famous 1942 fission demonstration on one of the school’s squash courts.

She first encountered the unflappable scientist—who made crucial strides not only in the development of the atomic bomb but in particle physics after the war—as a student in his class on quantum mechanics. And through that class, Dresselhaus got to know his teaching style, which she recalled as patient, inspiring, and mind-opening. With a slow, deliberate, accented voice that Dresselhaus described as “halting,” Fermi expertly distilled complicated topics so that anyone in attendance could comprehend them. Brilliant at both theory and experimentation, he delighted in stripping concepts to their essence, and unlike more impatient professors who were absorbed in their own work, Fermi cherished the opportunity to review whatever he knew about a physical concept by explaining it to someone else. For this he clearly had a talent; thanks to the way he presented the finer details of quantum mechanics, Dresselhaus explained, “any youngster could think, when they heard the lecture, that they understood every word.”

One key to the eminent scientist’s clarity was the ban he placed on taking notes. Fermi demanded full attention, so he would prepare and dole out handwritten notes before his lectures, lest students be tempted to take out their pens or slide rules. “What was so impressive and amazing about it is that the lectures were very exciting, whatever the subject was,” Dresselhaus said in a 2001 interview.

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And then there was the homework, which was always tricky, but delightfully enlightening once you figured it out. At the end of every class, Fermi floated a seemingly simple problem to be solved as an exercise prior to the following lecture. These included questions like: Why is the sky blue? Why do the sun and stars emit spectra of light? And, famously, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago? “You thought it was simple until you got home,” Dresselhaus said in 2012, upon receiving the Enrico Fermi Award, a lifetime achievement award given by the US Department of Energy. These types of questions became known, collectively, as “Fermi problems” and are taught today in schools around the world, from kindergarten all the way to graduate-level courses, as examples of how to estimate and triangulate in search of an answer, even when you don’t know all the relevant—and seemingly necessary—parameters. Back when Dresselhaus was learning about such problems, all she knew was they were due by the next class, no more than a day or two away, and they took a significant effort. “I think we learned a great deal from him in the formulation of problems of physics, how to think about physics, how to solve problems, and how to generate your own problems,” she said.

Indeed, throughout her career, Dresselhaus credited Fermi with teaching her how to “think as a physicist.” A key concept behind the Fermi system, she often stated, was the idea of single-authorship research: Grad students were expected to conceive of, carry out, and publish their thesis work more or less on their own, without the guiding hand of a more senior faculty member. This required them to work with others to develop a broad understanding of physics that they could then apply to a research topic they’d generate themselves.