Michal Lipson is an optical physicist at Cornell University (video).
As she advanced through the male-dominated world of science, Michal Lipson struggled to describe the subtle discrimination she and other women faced.
“An example I always gave was, have you ever seen someone calling a woman scientist a genius?” she said. “No. You only see that for men: ‘Oh, he is a genius. He is a genius.’ ‘She is a genius’ I have never seen.”
Now, Lipson acknowledges, she will have to take that back. Tuesday, the Cornell University physics professor was named one of 23 recipients of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” She will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” money over the next five years.
Lipson, an associate professor at Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was rewarded for her work in optical physics. She and her research team are refining the creation of optical circuits for use in computer technology.
"The idea is to use optics — light — to propagate some of the information on the chip,” she said. “Today, everything is done by electronics. In the future, some of it will be done by light.”
Using light rather than electric current will make computers faster and far more energy-efficient, she said.
Lipson, 40, said she plans to use the “genius” money for research involving “bending” light around tiny objects, effectively making them invisible.
“It would make some objects completely transparent, because if light doesn’t interact with the object, you would not see it,” she said. “There’s a whole slew of opportunities once you know how to handle light.”
Lipson left Ithaca for a speaking tour before the grant was announced, and she won’t be able to celebrate with her colleagues until she returns next week. Tuesday night, she was in transit from France to Brazil, and she will have another stop in Boston before returning home.
“I’m very happy,” she said. “I got to feel the celebration a little bit from far away.”
Lipson was born in Israel and moved with her family to Brazil when she was 8. She returned to Israel for college and graduate school, then spent time at MIT. She began teaching at Cornell nine years ago.
She credits her father, Reuven Opher, an astrophysicist at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, with sparking her love of science. He also inspired her twin sister, Merav Opher, who is a physics professor at Boston University.
Lipson said she still finds that she is the only senior female scientist at many of the gatherings she attends.
“The number of women goes down as you go up the ladder,” she said. “There was definitely a sense of loneliness in the fact that you are very different from anyone else.”
She hopes her award will help change that.
“Obviously, whether male or female, I don’t think it’s justified to call anyone a genius,” she said. “But for a young female scientist to have been awarded this, hopefully it’s going to make a mark for these young women who are looking to pursue science.”
Lipson lives in Ithaca with her two sons, ages 13 and 6, and her partner, Alex Gaeta, a physics professor at Cornell.
