Scientific Optimism and Other Lessons from Nobel Laureates

Since 1951, young scientists from around the world have come together to share scientific insights and life advice with each other—and with the largest cohort of Nobel laureates outside of the prize ceremonies themselves—at the annual Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting. Among those invited to travel to the shores of Lake Constance in Germany to take part in the meeting earlier this summer was Natalie Fardian-Melamed, a postdoc working with Columbia mechanical engineer James Schuck. 

“It was like nothing I’d ever been to before,” said Fardian-Melamed, who came to Columbia on a Fulbright postdoctoral scholarship in 2021 and is now supported by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Global Fellowship, among others. “This opportunity to have frank, open conversations with Nobel laureates and talented young individuals from such diverse cultural and scientific backgrounds left me truly inspired.” 

In this Q&A, Fardian-Melamed shares highlights from both the Lindau meeting and her own scientific career so far, which is pushing sensing to new limits with a unique new class of nanoparticles that produce “avalanches” of light. 

What was your biggest takeaway from the Lindau meeting?

Besides just meeting so many incredible people, I found this common thread among the laureates about fighting through hardships. Stefan Hell, who shared the chemistry Nobel in 2014, talked to us about how hard it was to get funding for his ideas about fluorescence microscopy. Eric Betzig, who shared the prize with Hell and William Moerner, talked about how he had even left science for ten years at one point. He was a stay-at-home dad, pushing his young daughter around in her stroller, when the idea for the technique he would win for, called photoactivated localization microscopy, or PALM, hit him; he built the proof of concept system with Harald Hess in a living room.

Another laureate, Saul Perlmutter, used the term “scientific optimism,”: to describe believing in your ideas and persevering, regardless of difficulties. 

What was your science spark? 

I was always curious about how the world worked and asking a million questions, but I didn’t have a lot of scientific role models growing up in a farming area of Israel. My high school didn’t even have a physics program, but while I was there, I was incredibly lucky that our principal brought in a physics teacher for just four of us who wanted to study it. 

I went on to university to study applied physics and then got my master’s and PhD, changing a little bit of what I was focused on each time, but I knew from my encounter with that teacher in high school that physics was my passion and where I saw myself going. Physics just explains everything, with only numbers and letters.

What are you working on now?

Extremely nonlinear, “avalanching” nanoparticles. These are nanocrystals that contain lanthanides, with unique optical properties. When you shine near-infrared light on them, they emit higher-energy photons, through an upconversion process. And a small change in your input power can lead to a huge change in your output power—just like in a snow avalanche, or any other chain reaction. We can leverage this steep nonlinearity to sense the environment around the nanoparticles, optically. 

In particular, I’m exploring these nanoparticles as mechanical force sensors. If you apply even a tiny amount of pressure, their optical signal changes in a pretty dramatic way. Because infrared light is benign and deeply penetrating, we should be able to use these particles to sense tiny amounts of mechanical force, remotely. 

Why is remotely sensing force an important goal?

There is a real need for mechanical sensors in biology and medicine, for example, to study forces from within cells and tissues. So many biological processes—cancer spread, embryo development, brain signaling, to name just a few–rely on pressure changes and mechanotransduction. But we need a way to detect and monitor these forces in their real environment—where are they coming from, what’s pushing on what, and how?—in a non-invasive way. 

Biology is just one potential direction, but many different areas need optical sensors of mechanical force. For another example, these nanoparticles might help us detect the physical changes in batteries and devices that occur before they die or malfunction. 

This relates to another big lesson I learned from Lindau. This year’s theme was physics, but many of the laureates won in chemistry for developing new tools. They kept telling us how important it is for physicists to keep an open mind and listen to others in different fields. That’s how you identify problems and what people really need. I’ve been talking to medical practitioners and biologists recently, and they’ve given me a shopping list of things I need to invent for them!

What have been some other highlights from your career so far?

The moments of discovery; those help keep me going. With this avalanching nanoparticle work, I was spending long days and nights in the lab. It was during the winter holidays, and I felt like I hadn’t seen my kids for weeks. One night, I was just pressing on a single particle with the tip of an atomic force microscope, and instead of it going dark, as it usually did, it lit up. It got brighter and brighter as I kept pushing on it. 

I recorded a video and sent it to Jim [Shuck] with the message, “Happy Holidays.” And he sent back a thousand exclamation points. 

That’s just one example, but these breakthrough moments are like a wheel—you are down, down, down, then you are up! 

Speaking of your kids, how do they influence your work?

It was interesting, many of the Nobel laureates have multiple kids. I have four: three boys and a girl. When you have kids, you really have to learn to be very organized with your time. But at the same time, your subconscious can still be working while you are spending time with them—like Betzig’s was while he was pushing his daughter in the stroller. I spend as much time as I can reading and running experiments, but it’s also important to let your subconscious flow. That’s when ideas can really hit. 

Their accomplishments are also highlights for me. I can’t tell where they are heading yet, but there may be science in their future. My daughter actually said to me recently, “Mom, it’s funny that all the scientists are women.” I couldn’t believe where she got that idea from, but in her mind, she knows women as scientists. And my oldest son wrote recently for a school assignment that he wants to be a scientist, like his mom. His teacher thanked me for introducing boys to that concept. 

And what about what’s next for you? 

I would like to open my own lab and continue in academia. I don’t know where yet, but I’d like to take these avalanching nanoparticles with me and in new directions: maybe as sources of quantum light or for sensing different environmental signals. These are really cool materials with a lot of potential, and the possibilities are endless.