Deborah Shiu-lan Jin

"I’m just curious about how things work. I think I became a scientist because my mom had been a physics teacher and she brought home cool demos—I saw a laser and I thought that was awesome. She’d bring home dry ice and I thought that it was amazing that gas could be a solid. I’ve always liked quantitative puzzles and so it’s a way to combine, sort of, curiosity about things around me with my tendency to be quantitative about things. What I study now is materials. I’m interested in why materials behave the way they do. Much of the technology in the world around us is built upon materials that have very specific properties."