Resilience in materials and in life | ASU KEDtalks®️ featuring Aditi Chattopadhyay

[MUSIC PLAYING] ADITI CHATTOPADHYAY: I still remember my first day as a freshman in aerospace engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology. It was orientation day. And as I was going up the stairway, I saw the words, “Aerospace engineering is not for women” written on the walls. There were upperclassmen, all male, hanging around, waiting to get a reaction from me. It was the mid 70s in India, and there were not many women in the field. I just took out a handkerchief, erased the letter “W” and the letter “O” from the word “women,” and went on my way to attend the orientation meeting. Nobody bothered me anymore after that.

00:49 - Throughout my career, I have encountered a great deal of resistance, gotten a lot of no’s. I just haven’t taken “no” for an answer. The big question that interests me is how and why structures fail, and how that failure is linked to the deformation of the material, even at the atomistic scale. This led me to different disciplines, uncharted territories. But had I stayed in my lane and taken the path of least resistance, I probably would not have been able to make the contribution that I have made so far. It is only through my interactions with different disciplines that I’ve been able to get a more holistic understanding of why materials fail, how damage initiates, and how they can be detected and diagnosed.

01:37 - Venturing into these uncharted territories has helped my team design and develop novel multi-functional nano-engineered materials with unprecedented properties, such as self-sensing, self-healing, as well as increased resistance to damage. And they provide early warning signals to impending damage in the form of changes in electrical conductivity, changes in thermal signature, or even color. Only by looking at these materials and then observing its impact in the real application, such as an aircraft wing or a satellite structure, can we really optimize their properties for specific applications. This leads to truly smart, integrated, adaptive structures and systems with improved properties that can also monitor, assess, and control damage and degradation in service life. So interdisciplinary connectivity is vital to my work.

02:39 - And I’ve tried to pass this idea onto my students. There is no preset boundary in research. Now they’re trying to solve challenging problems by looking outside their field of expertise. They’re learning new things, they’re pushing boundaries, and they’re challenging convention. Just as I had refused to accept who belongs to aerospace engineering all those years ago, they’re refusing to accept the prevailing perception of what research in aerospace engineering is. They are redefining the field, they are pulling in new influences, and they’re refusing to take “no” for an answer. [MUSIC PLAYING] .