Quotes from Mildred Dresselhaus

Superconductivity helped broaden my professional phase space. When I started my work, it was already known that magnetic fields could quench superconductivity. I found that the transition was not continuous, that superconductivity was initially enhanced in the presence of magnetic fields, then it would suddenly fall off.

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

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.

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.

Mentoring is about listening to people, helping them go over what the issues are and how to clarify ways to deal with any problems that may arise.

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

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.

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.

I would say the first three or four papers on nano-thermoelectricity in bismuth went almost unnoticed, but all of a sudden when Dirac cones came along - pop! - there was huge interest in bismuth-related materials.

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.

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. (quoted 2017-12-30 in the Toronto Daily Star)