SHATTERING STEREOSTYPES
Kelly Nash hopes to jump-
start her academic career
with a doctorate in physics

By PAULA ALLEN
Photography JANET ROGERS

KELLY NASH
Age: 28.

Occupation: Physics instructor/doctoral student.

Why she’s a Role Model: One of few African-American women currently pursuing a doctorate in physics, she ignores the statistics to work in a field that fascinates her.

Personal: Single-but-looking; no pets — “I can’t even keep a plant alive.”

Goals: To teach at a minority-serving institution.

Believes in: “Doing everything a little differently.”

Favorite relaxation strategies: Yoga and Pilates, done at home to suit her busy schedule.

People would be surprised that I …”Love shoes. I have to wear flat shoes (for comfort and safety) in the lab, but I love shopping for cute shoes, even if I don’t get to wear them much.”

What she’s reading: Black Women in the Academy: Promises and Perils, by Lois Benjamin; essays by academics and administrators on their professional experience.

When people ask Kelly Nash what she does, her answer shatters stereotypes.

She’s a woman. She’s African-American. She’s pretty. She dresses like a young urban sophisticate. And she’s a physicist. That is, a teaching assistant and research assistant who was one of the first doctoral students in physics at UTSA.

“Usually, people are speechless at first,” she says, laughing. “The one thing they say most often is, ‘You must be very smart.’ But I don’t consider myself extraordinary.”

She is, though, especially when you consider the statistics. A 2003 study showed that of 4,228 physics doctoral degrees awarded that year, only 12 went to African-Americans, and only a few of these graduates were women.

Things haven’t changed that much since then. In professional contexts, Nash is used to being the only person in the room who looks like her. At 28, she looks years younger. On the first day of the Introductory Physics lab she taught last year, students asked her before class, “Do you know anything about Ms. Nash? What’s she like?” mistaking her for a first-year peer.

At scientific conferences, too, Nash often is mistaken for an undergraduate, though she took a few years off to work between completing her master’s degree at the University of Michigan and starting her doctoral studies. She also is frequently the only member of a minority group attending presentations at conferences. In her master’s program, she became aware that there were professors who didn’t want to be advisors to women, whom they believed to be less competitive than male students.

“I try not to mind,” she says. “I have to keep (my minority status) in perspective. I don’t try to overextend myself, but I want my presence known, so I can serve as a living example.”

For either gender or any ethnicity, physics “is never easy.” In her freshman year of college at Dillard University in New Orleans — her hometown — there were 20 students who thought they wanted to major in physics. “Only two, the other girl and I, graduated as physics majors,” Nash says.

To those who would ask why she has chosen a nontraditional career for a woman, she would answer, “Why not?” As she says, “I can lift heavy equipment and use tools.” She doesn’t mind wearing safety goggles when she works in a chemistry lab, and she doesn’t have to wear a white coat.

Through her studies, she has met other women in the field who also defy stereotyping. “Most of the women are really hip,” she says. “They dress well; they’re not lost in the last decade. They’re busy, but they work hard to balance work and social life and family.”

Though her parents aren’t scientists, she believes they had a lot of influence on her career choice. “Education is important to my family,” she says. Her maternal grandfather, a biologist who worked in labs at a Veterans Administration hospital and at the Tuskegee University School of Veterinary Medicine, was a role model, as were her parents.

Her father, an accountant who was the first of his family to go to college, “offered us every opportunity to succeed.” Nash’s mother, a university administrator, gave her another push in a scientific direction when she signed her daughter up for computer camp one summer.

At private Catholic schools, including an all-girls’ junior and senior high school, “most of my teachers were women,” Nash says. “I got a strong science background and experience with very strong women as teachers.”

Though she considered majoring in biology or even history, Nash chose physics as her undergraduate major. “Physics is the foundation of all the sciences,” she says. “The beauty of physics is that you start with a few basic equations, from which you can devise others, to get to something completely new.”

After earning her master’s, she decided to work for a while, teaching math in a New Orleans high school for a year and a half. As a teacher of Algebra II and other math courses, Nash often heard students protest, “Why do we have to learn math? We’ll never use it.”

That gave her the idea to “integrate things we see in life into a multidisciplinary approach to math,” she says. “Math is everywhere — art, business, even the weather.” She encouraged her students to keep journals and bring in examples of hidden math in action. “If we want more people to become science majors,” she says, “we have to consider the way we teach math, and that needs to start at the elementary level. We need to be creative to keep kids interested.”

When Nash was ready to return to graduate school, once again, she wanted to try something new. Although she had been accepted to a doctoral program in physics at Louisiana State University, when she saw a flyer for a new Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at San Antonio, she decided to apply. “I liked the idea of studying at the secondlargest campus in the UT system, and I wanted to be one of the first students to graduate from a new program,” Nash says. “I wanted to have a chance to leave an impression.”

Her current research interest is in fabricating nanocrystals — clusters of atoms that are less than the thickness of a human hair. She’s in solid-state physics, which means she studies elements in their solid form, and the ones she works with are the rare-earth elements. The laboratory study of crystals has more than one purpose, Nash says. There’s the pure-physics aspect, delving into the true physical nature of these materials that are between molecules and bulk solids in size and are nearly all surface, with physical and chemical properties that change as the crystals grow larger. “Studying them at the true atomic level,” she says, “may lead to discoveries that will help other scientists and to develop new technologies.”

The most practical application may be in optics, where nanocrystals have potential for use in new laser systems and as biosensors. Because these crystals give off light for a long time, it may be possible someday to devise a way to attach them to human cells — such as cancer cells — to aid in medical diagnoses. “If the crystals can be successfully integrated with biological media,” says Nash, “they may someday be more effective than injectable dyes.”

The field of optics is “a huge area,” she says. “I’ve been to two conferences since January, and there were many more people attending than in previous years.” Both the medical and military communities look to optics for advances, Nash says, and the discipline has demonstrated commercial potential. “Innovations such as plasmascreen televisions started in a physics lab,” she says, and such well-publicized successes have drawn interest from students, funding agencies and corporations.

Nash hopes to stick with optics for the time being, perhaps continuing with some aspect of her current research topic. After she graduates next year, the next step is to go on to a postdoctoral fellowship at UTSA or another university. Her research area is “inexpensive to monitor and doesn’t require a lot of equipment,” she says. During a post-doc year or two, she hopes to publish papers and apply for grants. With those accomplishments in place, she can apply for a university teaching position, with her research already funded. “That makes (a candidate) more attractive to the institution,” she explains.

Not every female scientist who makes it to a tenure-track position chooses to stay on it, Nash has learned. “I’ve met women who have chosen to start their families before getting tenure,” she says, “and I’ve met others who have put off getting married and having children until they have achieved that goal.”

She’s not sure which path she wants to take. “I’ll deal with that (decision) when it comes up,” she says. She’d also like to teach at a minority-serving institution someday — “maybe after I retire (from another academic post), or maybe sooner.”

Right now, Nash doesn’t have a lot of time for a personal life. Her adviser publishes a lot of papers, as many as 10 to 12 a year, and she has been credited on a few. Now she’s working toward publishing her “first first-author paper.” In a typical day, she keeps up her e-mail correspondence, reads the most recent liter- W ature in her field, checks on the progress of her crystals, records and analyzes data, teaches a lab, goes home and prepares for the next day’s work.

Some days, she says, “I work so hard, I can’t think anymore, but when I wake up, I’m ready to start over again.” Though being an instructor adds to her workload, she says, “I love teaching basic labs! It refreshes me, and if you can teach fundamentals to people who might not have encountered them before, you can explain anything to anybody.”

However she progresses, Nash is comfortable in the role of a trailblazer. She declares it subtly in the tagline to her email messages, a quote from The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference.”

Her correspondents often remark on the lines, she says. They admire the poem’s spirit. Nash lives it.