Imitating Life in the Lab

The five arms of the brittle star are covered by tiny lenses that, like transition sunglasses, are able to regulate their pigmentation in order to collect the right amount of light. Joanna Aizenberg, a materials scientist who is joining the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) faculty in July, is devising methods to apply the principles of the underwater animal’s superior lens system to man-made optics.

“It is really stealing the principle from biology,” she says.

Aizenberg, a 47-year-old mother of two who emigrated from Russia in 1991, comes here from Bell Laboratories at Lucent Technologies. She will become the McKay professor of materials science, and says the potential to further her multidisciplinary work is what is bringing her back to the academy.

“As my research becomes more and more disciplinary, the necessity for cooperation increases, and Harvard would be the best place to do that,” Aizenberg says in a phone interview from her office in New Jersey.

Aizenberg’s research focuses on the structures of biological materials. She then tries to replicate their design in the lab using engineering techniques.

“The idea is to take biologic principles, understand them, and then try to resimulate it...and come up with a new, synthetic, man-made material that replicates these biological principles,” Aizenberg says. “I am looking at these smart biological materials from the point of view not of a biologist but of a physical scientist and engineer.”

In addition to the brittle star, Aizenberg cites the example of the Venus’ flower basket, a deep-sea sponge that not only builds a “glass house” with mechanical properties superior to any man-made glass, but surrounds the house with a cloud of optical fibers, using techniques similar to those behind recent innovations in optical technology.

Federico Capasso, the Wallace professor of applied physics, says that Aizenberg’s work will fit well with Harvard’s new emphasis on an “interdisciplinary culture.”

“[Her work] is right at the interface of biology, chemistry, and physics,” says Capasso, who once headed the research department at Bell Labs where Aizenberg worked. “Joanna, coming from this culture, will very much find herself at ease.”



FROM INDUSTRY TO ACADEMIA

According to Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti, dean of SEAS, about a dozen of his school’s 80 faculty members have industry experience.

“[The transition] is fairly easy because places like Bell Labs are pretty academic and usually the people are very good researchers anyway,” he says.

Aizenberg will officially become a professor here in July, a semester after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted to upgrade the name of SEAS from a “division” to a “school” as part of an effort to raise the profile of Harvard’s engineering and applied sciences program. And her appointment comes as the former interim dean of FAS, Jeremy R. Knowles, has called for a push to boost the numbers of the natural sciences faculty.

Capasso, who came to Harvard from Bell Labs in January 2003, says that learning how to balance one’s research with new teaching duties takes an adjustment in the switch from industry.

“You are suddenly thrown into a high multi-tasking mode, where you have to teach, do your research, raise money, serve on committees, and travel,” says Capasso, adding that it is not unusual for a first-year professor to spend 10 to 12 hours preparing for each lecture. “The biggest challenge is to get organized.”

It is this challenge that Aizenberg—who spent two years at Harvard in the 1990s as a postdoctoral fellow—is excited about.

“Being at Bell Labs you are not exposed to the beauty of having students around,” Aizenberg says. She recalls enjoying having a handful of students intern in her lab there every summer. Working with students year-round, she says,

“is an experience I really want to have and something you can’t have in the industrial setting.”

Aizenberg says that next year she will be teaching material physics to undergraduates, but that she is looking to develop less traditional courses reflecting her multidisciplinary approach to science.

“I have a long-standing interest that science and music and art have a lot in common, and that one can teach science to the public in very unconventional terms,” she says.



A WOMAN IN SCIENCE

Aizenberg’s hiring is also step toward raising the gender diversity of Harvard’s scientists.

Last academic year, only 12 percent of the 231 tenured and tenure-track professors in the natural sciences at FAS were women. Among them, a total of 14 had tenure.

But colleagues familiar with Aizenberg’s work say that the invitation would have been extended regardless of her gender.

“She is the world’s best at the particular kind of science she does, so she will make Harvard a world center just by being here,” says chemist George M. Whitesides ’60, the Flowers University Professor under whom Aizenberg studied in her earlier stint at Harvard. “She is someone we would recruit completely independent of everything else.”

Capasso says that Aizenberg will remain a leader in the university setting even though, he says, women scientists confront more obstacles in academia than in industry.

“There is no question that in industry the glass ceiling is much less than in academia—in the real world you have to solve problems so you get talent from wherever you can find it,” says Capasso. “But I think she’s so damn good that this stuff is going to be irrelevant.”