![]() “Which is kind of what’s happening right now.” And once I settle on it, I go for it,” he says. “I always try, at each moment, to think really hard about what is the next thing for me. None of it was what he envisioned when he arrived in Hyde Park in the fall of 1977, but he’s a firm believer that taking things step by step will lead him to the right place. A hesitant entrant into academia at Berkeley in 1988, he rose to become director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and then the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost. Nanoscience, the field in which he eventually made his mark, was brand new when he began his doctoral studies today, he is one of its stars. In the College, he went from taking classes in German and political science to majoring, somewhat to his own surprise, in chemistry. “Eighteen months later, I was a professor.”Įmbracing the unexpected has been a hallmark of Alivisatos’ career as a scientist and academic leader. But he knew one thing for certain, he told his friend: “I’m not going to be a professor.”Īlivisatos laughs as he remembers the conversation’s twist ending. Though Alivisatos, AB’81, had a postdoctoral fellowship lined up at AT&T Bell Laboratories, he hadn’t decided what to do after that. On Paul Alivisatos’ last day as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, a friend asked him where he thought his career was headed. Read more at the UChicago Magazine website. Editor’s note: This story will be published in the Fall 2021 issue of the University of Chicago Magazine.
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