What Would Millie Do?

How the Queen of Carbon Still Inspires MRL Researchers Today

MIT Institute Professor Millie Dresselhaus, known as the Queen of Carbon, was well known internationally for her work on the element. Dresselhaus, who would have been 95 this month, also had an outsized influence on scientists working in the field today. 

These people include Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, whose lab today is also in Building 13, where Dresselhaus conducted her research. Jarillo-Herrero is the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics. He is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL). Dresselhaus herself was once director of the Center for Materials Science and Engineering, which merged with the Materials Processing Center to form MRL in 2017.

Jarillo-Herrero is well known for his work with graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure. He pioneered the field of twistronics, in which stacking individual sheets of 2D materials like graphene, and sometimes twisting them at a slight angle to each other, can give them new properties, from superconductivity to magnetism. 

“I’m a great fan of Millie,” said Jarillo-Herrero, who delivered the 2022 Mildred S. Dresselhaus lecture. 

According to an MIT News story on the lecture, Jarillo-Herrero “chose to study carbon nanotubes for his PhD after reading the book Science of Fullerenes and Carbon Nanotubes, coauthored by Dresselhaus and two others.”

“I never imagined I would be a colleague of Millie…Her office was just upstairs from mine. I would always be sitting there thinking, ‘What would Millie do?’” Jarillo-Herrero said at the lecture, according to MIT News.

In fact, Dresselhaus and others predicted twistronics, the field that Jarillo-Herrero pioneered, according to a recent article by Maia Weinstock in Technology Review. “Back in the early and mid-2010s, Dresselhaus worked on what she and others called ‘misoriented graphene,’” writes Weinstock.

Millie Dresselhaus passed away in 2017. In 2018 Physics World named twistronics the Breakthrough of the Year.