Quotes from Mildred Dresselhaus

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 behaved the way I was taught to behave: like a woman in the company of men. If you behaved aggressively in the company of men, they wouldn't accept you.

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

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

My entry into the field of hydrogen came as a great surprise. President Bush of the United States was interested in hydrogen for energy applications, and I was asked to chair a committee on hydrogen for the Department of Energy.

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

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.

Diversity and inclusion of women and underrepresented minorities in science should not affect the way education is handled or research is carried out. So diversity should not be a problem but rather an opportunity to involve a large talent pool.

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.

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.

I'm happy to keep doing science and being a mentor to anyone who asks for advice.

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.

If you don't have material, you don't have an experiment.

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.

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

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.

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

I've been lucky. I've been at a place that's a meritocracy. It doesn't really matter that much what your gender is if you do the work well.

Electrons are the carriers for electricity, but they are also carriers for thermal energy. This means thermal conductivity is increased when the carrier density is increased.

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.

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?

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.

I want to try to do something for women in physics worldwide.

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.