Nadya Mason | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater |
|
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Superconductivity
Quantum Computing Nanomaterials |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Superconductor-metal-insulator transitions in two dimensions (2001) |
| Website | http://people.physics.illinois.edu/mason/ |
Nadya Mason is the Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a condensed matter experimentalist, she works on the quantum limits of low-dimensional systems. Mason is the Director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC)[1] and, since September 2022, the Director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.[2] She is the first woman and woman of color to work as the director at the institute.[3][4] In 2021, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.[5][6]
Mason was born in New York City, and lived in Brooklyn for the first six years of her life. She grew up in Washington, D.C. before moving to Houston.[7] In 1986 she trained as a gymnast with Bela Karolyi and competed as a member of the U.S. National Team.[8] She currently lives in Urbana, IL, where she is a faculty member at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.[9] She has two daughters.[10]
Mason always enjoyed math and science, and completed several science-focused internships during her education,[11] including a fellowship in condensed matter at Bell Laboratories. She completed a bachelor's degree at Harvard University in 1995.[12] In 2001 she earned a PhD under Aharon Kapitulnik at Stanford University.[13]
Mason returned to Harvard as a MRSEC Postdoctoral Fellow in 2001, where she was elected junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.[12] In 2005, Mason joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[14] Her research focuses on carbon nanotubes, graphene, nanostructured semiconductors and topological insulators.[15][14] In these systems she concentrates on electron interactions, and how to apply her understanding to quantum computing.[8][16] She has discussed the limit on the size of electronics and impact of novel nanomaterials for the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign YouTube channel.[17]
In 2006 she demonstrated the non-equilibrium Kondo effect and in 2011 observed individual superconducting bound states in graphene-based systems.[18][19] In 2014 Mason was appointed a John Bardeen Faculty Scholar in Physics at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[18] In 2016 she was appointed to full Professor.[20]
Nadya Mason is a General Councillor for the American Physical Society.[14] She is Chair of the APS Committee on Minorities and was featured by the National Society of Black Physicists for Black History Month in 2017.[21]
In November 2019, Mason gave a TED talk called, "How to spark your creativity, scientifically."[22]