Mildred Dresselhaus

It's hard for people who come from traditional homes to take women seriously. I do it myself. We're just not used to seeing women professionals. Women have to go out of their way to prove themselves.

People who have it too easy in early life have a disadvantage for later on, because they get to thinking that everything is going to be easy.

At my first job as an independent researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, they told me I could work on most anything, but not what I knew something about. That is actually very good advice to a young person starting a career because you bring new ideas to the field.

People in academia and industry are not accustomed to people who have long lapses in their careers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I was very much taken with carbon fibers because they seemed like the perfect medium to explore transport studies in carbon-based systems.

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.