One of Editor & Publisher’s ‘10 That Do It Right 2021’
Cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 75F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..
Cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 75F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Nadya Mason, incoming director of the University of Illinois’ Beckman Institute, has some fun on the furniture in the lobby of the facility in Urbana.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
University of Illinois physicist Nadya Mason, who begins her new job as director of the Beckman Institute on Sept. 1, is shown Tuesday in the atrium of the building on the northern end of campus in Urbana.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
Nadya Mason, incoming director of the University of Illinois’ Beckman Institute, has some fun on the furniture in the lobby of the facility in Urbana.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
University of Illinois physicist Nadya Mason, who begins her new job as director of the Beckman Institute on Sept. 1, is shown Tuesday in the atrium of the building on the northern end of campus in Urbana.
New Beckman Institute Director Nadya Mason at the institute in Champaign on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.
URBANA — Growing up, Nadya Mason didn’t know science was a career path she could take.
She was a competitive athlete, a gymnast on the U.S. junior national team who enjoyed math but didn’t know much beyond her basic physics and chemistry classes.
Then, the summer after her junior year, she interned at a Houston biochemistry lab. Something clicked.
“I realized I loved working with my hands and thinking about what was going on physically,” Mason said. “It was like I was playing all day long; it was totally eye-opening.”
Clearly, her wonder for experiment never left. Today, Mason is a decorated experimental physicist with 17 years on the University of Illinois faculty.
Last year, she was inducted to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors a scientist can receive.
Now, she’s embarking on a new journey: directing the UI’s biggest hub of multi-discipline research, which brings tenured members from more than 40 departments under one roof — and sometimes to the same coffee table.
“The Beckman Institute is a microcosm of everything that the university does in some sense,” Mason said. “A lot of us are in science because we like to think big and solve problems — it’s exciting to think about what new problems we can solve at a place like Beckman.”
Mason, the Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Professor of Physics, was named to the role last week, and doesn’t officially start until Sept. 1. But the legwork has already begun.
Mason said she’s spent hours talking with facilities staff, human resources and the institute’s scientific leads about what they want to see moving forward.
She’s pored over a digital folder filled with the last 37 years of Beckman history. (According to the institute, nearly a quarter of all UI patents in the last 10 years were issued through Beckman-supported research.)
Mason’s day-to-day routine will change: less teaching undergrads, more administrative work.
“One thing you realize as you take jobs with more responsibility, your job becomes busier, but also — if you’re lucky — you’ll get more staff to help you with that job,” Mason said. “I’m blessed at Beckman with really fantastic staff.”
Her “whys” for entering the new role are many. Mason sees herself as a bit of an outsider to the institute, with a set of fresh eyes and unique experience.
Mason earned her bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in physics from Harvard and Stanford, respectively, then joined the UI faculty in 2005, the No. 1 location for condensed-matter physics.
Mason researches the properties of new materials so small that they require understanding of both quantum mechanics and electronic devices to analyze.
In a world where commercial tech components, like transistors, are measured in billionths of meters, her findings have wide-ranging impact.
Another reason: She’s built her life here, and has a genuine connection to Champaign-Urbana.
“It’s big enough that there’s a robust, sophisticated international community and yet small enough that you actually see each other and know each other and value each other,” Mason said. “I’ve not seen another university that has that combination of excellence in resources, faculty and students with this very collaborative, almost homey-type environment.”
C-U’s pull is strong enough that she’s turned down offers from elsewhere, including directorships, she said.
“Moving to Beckman allows me to get a change, feel this sense of renewal, to be creative in a new way and new position, without having to give up my lab and family and friends and the things I love about this place,” she said.
Mason is the founding director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, funded by the National Science Foundation, which also pushes scientists from separate fields to collaborate.
Beckman’s mission seemed similar, on a bigger scale. An example: neuroscientists, psychologists, kinesiology specialists and more can all make use of the facility’s state-of-the-art 7 Tesla MRI scanner, the only one in Illinois. The cross-field research possibilities excite her.
“You have the opportunity to study what’s the effect of exercise on the brain in a really detailed way,” she said. “You could go to psychology and say, ‘When people are stressed or thinking of food, what parts of their brain light up?’ You can do that now on a resolution where you can understand and discover these things in new ways.”
Mason is intent on pushing Beckman toward more community involvement, and making the STEM fields a more diverse, inclusive place.
“I don’t think science is just for scientists,” she said. “Even if we’re developing technology that’s going to be used in specific applications, it’s going to be used by people, and those people should broadly understand it and be able to make choices about it.”
She echoed this theme in her 2019 TED Talk, “How to spark your creativity, scientifically.” The young participants she describes in her talk, who deconstructed a magnetic drawing board during a camp, were students at Franklin Middle School.
“Not every student has to be a physicist or a molecular biologist. But everyone should know these careers exist and have the opportunity to become interested and go in that direction,” she said.
Mason has a broad service background, locally and nationally. Alongside her award-winning teaching and research, she’s served on the American Physical Society Policy Committee, and previously led its Committee on Minorities.
“Everyone benefits from diversity,” Mason said. “To be the best community we can be, we need to have new ideas, new people coming in. We need to have people who look different, act different and think different.”
Her commitment to inclusivity, Mason said, extends to the workplace, too.
“For a long time, you had to be a certain way in the building and a certain way outside of it,” she said. “But that doesn’t allow us to do our best work. We should be comfortable and be allowed to be the people we are while doing the great things that we do.”
Ethan Simmons is a reporter at The News-Gazette covering the University of Illinois. His email is esimmons@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@ethancsimmons).
Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.
Error! There was an error processing your request.
Each day's obituaries, delivered to your inbox.
Receive local offers from our website and its advertisers.
Top trending stories from the week.