MAIKA TAKITA ’08

THE PHYSICIST

“I believe that if you’re a woman in science, if you’re confident of what you’re doing, then you can survive.”

Takita '08, center, flanked by fellow student scientists, Tamara Vital ’08 and Denise Napolitano '08

Maika Takita ’08 embarked on her higher education in her native Tokyo. She’d had plenty of math by the time she started university: “I think schools in Japan are more advanced in math, starting us at a younger age.” Good thing—the physics major says she likes numbers, and has always relished the problem-solving involved in her coursework. Strikingly, Tamara Vital and Denise Napolitano both singled out physics as a course of study they found too challenging in high school and beyond: “I really admire physicists, because that stuff is way over my head,” Napolitano says. As for Takita, there’s a reason she’s a budding physicist and not a biologist: “Biology was something that I wasn’t very good at or enjoyed too much. There aren’t too many numbers in biology.”

I work in an experimental physics lab. What I’m actually doing is engaging in experiments to measure electronic properties, and I make devices on silicon wafers. I also work in a clean room where there is a controlled level of contamination—you have to wear a lab jacket, goggles, gloves, caps, and shoe covers. There’s a lot of equipment in the clean room, and there are two yellow rooms. When you develop photoresists, or when you handle chips, you don’t want the chips to be exposed to regular light, so you work in the yellow room.

It’s hands-on work. We mechanically press graphene, which is a single atomic layer of carbon, onto the silicon wafers. Then, using some of the equipment in the lab, we draw on the wafers. The “drawing” is actually a pattern of metal deposits that you make on the chips. I’m still learning about semiconductors and how this applies to real life—I’m not too sure of the connection yet, but I enjoy the process of making devices.

Once I make the device I give it to someone I’m working with—a graduate student or a postdoctoral researcher working with us. Then they take the actual measurements to determine electronic properties and they analyze the data. By making the devices, we are helping them to find something new. I know it is important to their work.

We had lots of science classes in middle school and high school. I really enjoyed the physics classes in high school, but I enjoyed math more. I can sit in front of a problem for hours and try to figure out the solution—I like calculating and applying math.

During my first year of college back in Japan, I met a professor who studied solid states physics [also known as condensed matter physics, or simply the study of solids]. His lab had vacuum chambers, which I didn’t know anything about. I had seen them in pictures and catalogues, but I’d never used one. Once I started using the chambers to make devices, I understood more about what went on internally in the chamber. The experiments were very different from the projects we did in class when I was younger.
In Japan, it doesn’t really matter too much what you major in as an undergraduate. Because I enjoy numbers and physics, I decided to do something I like. I also took chemistry, biology, and math classes. My parents are both artists. They don’t really understand why I’m in science, so I don’t know where I got this ability.

When I first came to Barnard, I was actually not too sure if I wanted to continue with physics. That was because I had many ideas when I came here—I wanted to do premed and theatre. My first semester here, I took quantum mechanics and I loved it. I ended up working in a lab second semester of last year, and that drew me back to physics.

This past summer, through the Hughes internship program, I got funding to work for 10 weeks in the lab of Professor Horst Stormer,the Nobel laureate. Professor Tim Halpin-Healy was my advisor. I’ve continued with that research this semester. I’m enjoying it a lot, even though I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen to the devices.

There definitely are more male students in physics. But I believe that if you’re a woman in science, if you’re confident of what you’re doing, then you can survive. If you are not sure, if you feel overpowered, it will be harder. I don’t feel uncomfortable being around male students. One of the labs where I worked in the electrical engineering department was 98 percent male.

It has never occurred to me that I am a woman in science. I don’t feel like I am a minority—I just feel comfortable.