My mother earned her master's degree in chemistry at LSU in the 1970s, a time when few women from a small-town Louisiana went to a university much less finished a graduate degree in science. She taught me that chemistry isn’t just a subject but a way of seeing the world. I learned that science is a lens for everything around us.  A question like "why is the sky blue?" becomes a problem in molecular scattering that connects optics, spectroscopy, and the structure of the atmosphere. This talk traces my own path from that childhood through decades of research and leadership that have repeatedly crossed the boundaries between chemistry, physics, and engineering. As a physical chemist trained at Stanford and Berkeley, I entered nanoscience at a moment when chemists were learning to synthesize semiconductor nanocrystals with atomic precision.  It was the perfect field for me because to exploit these materials demanded that we merge the language and methods of solid-state physics, device engineering, and chemistry – areas that as an undergraduate were all pivotal parts of my own studies and degrees.  Fast forward to today, and with several generations of amazing students, I work to make what we call “impossible materials” whose properties both surprise and enable.  These have included photonic crystals, catalytic antioxidants for implanted medical devices, magnetic nanoparticles for turning agricultural waste in valuable products, and porous nanomagnets whose empty space creates amazing magnetic properties.  Each of these required moving between the molecular scale where chemists are most comfortable and the macroscopic systems where engineers operate.  We should strive to develop our students to be agile and use different lenses, both scientific and applied, when seeing the world.  It is this perspective that leads to transformative science that lives in what Donald Stokes called Pasteur's Quadrant, where fundamental curiosity meets urgent human need. I will reflect on what this winding path suggests about the future of scientific disciplines, the power of use-inspired research, and what Louisiana's scientific community can uniquely contribute.

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Dr. Vicki Colvin joined LSU in 2024 as dean of the LSU College of Engineering and the Bert S. Turner Chair. A native of Baton Rouge, she earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics from Stanford University in 1988 and her PhD in chemistry from the University of California-Berkeley in 1994.

Previously, Colvin served as the Victor Kreible Professor of Chemistry and Engineering at Brown University and director of its Biomedical Engineering program. Her research explores how nanoscale materials interact with the environment and living systems. Examples of technologies developed by her research group there include electromagnetically active particles in treating diseases and the use of perpetual antioxidants for mediating the foreign body response to implanted medical devices.

Colvin has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, holds five patents, and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She has received numerous awards, including the 2015 Sustainable Nanotechnology Award, the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award from Rice University, and associate editorship for the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal Nano Letters.

Colvin’s leadership roles include decades-long directorship of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN); founding director of Rice’s Shared Equipment Authority; vice provost for research (Rice); provost (Brown); and most recently, founding director of Brown’s new Institute for Biology, Engineering, and Medicine.