Remembering Millie
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Remembering Millie By George W. Crabtree
M
illie Dresselhaus remains an enduring force in science and society. Her unexpected death in February 2017 prompted immediate recognition and admiration of her life and the impact she has had. As we adjust to living without Millie, we appreciate her influence even more deeply now. She was an icon for many virtues—science, women, truth, and service, among others. She represented these things so well and so naturally that many of us took them for granted; of course Millie would advance the frontier of carbon, champion women in science, stand for honesty and trust, lead the DOE Office of Science, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Board of the American Institute of Physics, and cochair the Decadal Study of Condensed Matter and Material Physics. She was uniquely tireless, thoughtful, and attentive all at the same time. Millie was a standout in science. Although she published more than a thousand papers, many landmarks in their fields, her first papers were not so highly cited. Like all of us, she had to learn how to write. Somehow, this is a comforting thought— even the best have to start as beginners. Her interest in carbon started in the early 1960s, with work on the electronic
structure of semiconductors, semi-metals, and graphite. She recognized that intercalation into graphite offered a new window on the interplay between electronic and atomic structure, an example of advanced nanoscience before the concept or the word was popular. Her review articles became classics in the field, finding trends across intercalants and stages of intercalation. The discovery of fullerenes and nanotubes took the subject to a new high, and Millie was among the first to ask the penetrating questions and formulate the compelling answers in this burgeoning field. Her thought experiment of rolling up a single sheet of carbon with the rolling axis oriented in various directions in the carbon plane allowed for the diversity of nanotubes—zigzag, armchair, and chiral—to be easily categorized and analyzed. Her insight proved prophetic with the explosion of work on graphene, a natural extension of her thinking to explain the special importance of the edge structure in determining electronic behavior. Millie was the founding mother of carbon science, always at the forefront and the first to understand the proliferation of new discoveries. One of Millie’s more recent interests was energy, recognizing, as usual, well before the community at large,
how important this subject would be. She chaired the first Basic Research Needs Workshop sponsored by the US Department of Energy–Basic Energy Sciences (DOE-BES) in 2003, on the hydrogen economy, which opened a new dimension in the basic science of hydrogen. Her leadership informed not only the impact of the workshop, but also the format and best practices for the approximately 20 subsequent workshops on energy and grand challenge science (workshops based on the most important and promising basic scien
