A Quantum Life

A Quantum Life

Kakeem Oluseyi & Joshua Horwitz

Ballantine Books

A Quantum Life follows astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi as he grows up in poverty and has to fight to be taken seriously as a man and a student, without falling prey to the temptations of the streets.  This is a wonderfully told memoir about a man who falls multiple times, his drive to become a scientist, adn the community of people who helped him succeed.

CONTENT WARNINGS

Drug abuse, addiction, neglect of a child, death, cancer, poverty, racism

Hakeem Oluseyi

https://www.aps.org/careers/physicists/profiles/oluseyi.cfm

From 1999 to 2001 Oluseyi worked on semiconductor research at Applied Materials. From 2001 to 2004 he was a research fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working on the Dark Energy Camera and Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

From 2007 to 2019, he was on the faculty of the Florida Institute of Technology in the departments of Physics and Space Sciences. His academic rank was distinguished research professor. From 2016 to 2019. he was stationed at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC where he was the Space Sciences education manager for NASA's Science Mission Directorate via the Intergovernmental Personnel Act Mobility Program. Oluseyi was named a Visiting Robinson Professor at George Mason University in 2021, a distinction by which the university recognizes outstanding faculty.

In 2021, he published an autobiography titled: A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars co-authored with Joshua Horwitz. As of 2022, Oluseyi is the president of the National Society of Black Physicists.

His best known scientific contributions are research on the transfer of mass and energy through the Sun's atmosphere; the development of space-borne observatories for studying astrophysical plasmas and dark energy; and the development of transformative technologies in ultraviolet optics, detectors, computer chips, and ion propulsion.

In 2021, Oluseyi carried out an investigation into the role that former NASA administrator James Webb played in the Lavender Scare of the 1950s and 1960s, after a number of scientists and journalists had raised concerns about the naming of NASA's new space telescope after him. Contrary to the claims of Webb's critics, Oluseyi found there was no evidence that Webb was implicated. His finding was later confirmed by a full report carried out by NASA itself.