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posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 02 2015, @02:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the carbon-queen?-more-like-awesomeness-queen dept.

ArsTechnica interviewed Millie Dresselhaus, professor emeritus at MIT:

Millie Dresselhaus, Institute Professor at MIT (and the first woman ever so honored). The occasion was her receiving the IEEE Medal of Honor (again, the first female recipient), but a look at her Wikipedia biography shows that awards are nothing new for Dresselhaus. Highlights of a long list include the National Medal of Science and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and her Kavli Prize in Nanoscience was the only Kavli awarded to a single recipient, an indication of how pioneering her research has been.

She also has administrative chops. She headed the Department of Energy's Office of Science, was president of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and held the post of treasurer at the National Academies of Science.
...
Ars: Your thesis advisor didn't think that women should be doing science. Why stick with science despite that level of discouragement?

Dresselhaus: Encouragement is always useful, but it's not necessarily the rate-limiting step. Luckily for me, Sputnik came along, and there was funding available for basic science research. My advisor wasn't so happy with me, but I could just work for myself. My thesis was very, very cheap. There was all this surplus equipment that was left from World War II that was lying in a bin someplace, and you could pick it up, renovate it at almost zero cost. So that was my thesis.

Ars: So you adopted the hardware to your needs?

Dresselhaus: Yeah, pretty much, and I built a few other things for myself. Which helped me learn how to build things, design something. This is valuable experience. Maybe if I had more spoon-feeding like we do today, I wouldn't have benefited as much. On the other hand, people think that they wouldn't survive if they didn't have a great deal of support. And maybe that's necessary today. Science is moving so fast, and you can't linger too much.

Very cool that she got started recycling surplus equipment for her thesis.


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  • (Score: 1) by bequalsa on Sunday August 02 2015, @08:06PM

    by bequalsa (2107) on Sunday August 02 2015, @08:06PM (#217093)

    This is more common than you'd expect, at all tiers of science-doing, from funded PIs to undergrads.