Mildred Dresselhaus

“The main thread of my work is structure property relations and materials. If you have certain atoms, why do they attract each other? Why do they make compounds? Why do they do what they do?”

“Institutions are increasingly persuaded that political maneuvering is more important than scientific justification in securing federal funds.”

“All the leadership positions that I have had have one common denominator: none has required that I give up my science work.”

“I think women benefit from being in places and having positions where the quality of work is the criteria, not what you look like. Not every place is like that.”

“Energy is one topic on which different countries can work together collaboratively. If we can all produce energy from an element that's available in abundance on our planet, that would be a good thing, but we have to learn how to produce energy in large quantities, cheaply, efficiently and without detriment to the environment.”

“Hunter High School was a real turning point for me. I found out about its existence through the music school. Nobody I knew had gone to one of these special high schools, and my teachers didn't think it was possible to get in. But Hunter sent me a practice exam, and I studied what I needed to know to pass the exam.”

“The Bronx, I remember, was a very poor neighborhood, but that was all that immigrants could afford at that time. Life was tough. I grew up - my father didn't have a job, but there weren't too many people who did have jobs.”

“When I came to M.I.T. in 1960, only 4 percent of the students were female. Today, it's about 40 percent of undergraduates. At Lincoln Lab, they had 1,000 men and two women. But we had a very good boss, and he treated us just like everybody else.”

“The holy grail would be to turn a knob, and out comes the nanotube of the right diameter and chirality.”

“If we had improved materials that could be produced cheaply and in large quantities, certainly the thermoelectrics industry could move forward more quickly.”

“A carbon nanotube is just a graphene sheet that's rolled up seamlessly, and this happens in nature; carbon nanotubes are found in mineral deposits around the planet.”

“The best thing about having a lady professor on campus is that it tells women students that they can do it, too.”

“I think having four children made me a good mentor. As a parent, you get to know young people as they mature and grow up and to also learn about some of the difficulties they face.”

“I learned to read music before I learned to read script.”

“We're all concerned about sustainable energy. If we could recycle waste heat to generate energy, we could use it for something useful.”

“If I were not able anymore to come to the lab, that's retirement. Or if I had no more ideas of things. Every year, there's something new that comes along that's too exciting to quit.”

“One of the over-riding things for many who grow up in poverty is the simple desire to escape. I think it was sort of obvious to me that escape had to be through education.”

“My older brother was a musical prodigy, and he got a scholarship to the Bronx House Music School. We moved to the Bronx when I was 4 to be close to his music school. Then I got a music scholarship myself, at the age of 6, but that was for a school down in Greenwich Village. I had to take the elevated train and then the subway to get there.”

“The concept of graphene came along in 1947, but nobody paid much attention to it. I was fascinated because it had a linear E versus K while everything else that people were working on at that time had a quadratic dispersion relationship. I wondered why this was and what was so special about it. That was my fascination.”

“In the process of making nanomaterials, we learned that with the electronic density of states, the phonon electronic properties and everything change at the nano-level. So the thermoelectric properties would also be changed.”