About a Professor

“See that pattern. It seems so weird? Why is it so? Does anyone know the answer?” the professor said, looking at the diagram and laughing. It was a gathering of research scholars, postdoctoral fellows and their supervisor. One student was presenting his experiments on some specific materials.

Mind you, this was said by a person who has about 80 patents in his credits among which 50 are in active use by reputed companies. In addition to many prestigious awards, recently he received the Lemelson-MIT prize, one of the biggest awards in the world for innovation and creativity. This is none other than my faculty associate, Prof. John Rogers in the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).

In another meeting he said, “I don’t know the answer; you change the design and make it a device.” Only a person with utmost humility can say like this. Because further discussions revealed that it was a mere statement. He described where the students went wrong and gave them guidelines for future experiments. I was so amazed at this sort of approach as I met another faculty member quite recently boasting, “I’m a full professor. I know everything.”

Wherever I go, when I see something different or if I face a peculiar situation, I start comparing it with my past experiences. I know it is a bad habit. People are having entirely different culture, character, education, life style, economical status and family background. How can we expect the same outcome from dissimilar conditions? I know it is not even reasonable to compare different situations with one another. But I can’t help avoid this comparison anyway.

I started my research work in a few days of my arrival at the UIUC. It has been a highly productive time in my research career. I learned a lot from Prof. Rogers, my group members Kazuki, Debashis and Rico. Prof. Rogers is so stimulating saying, “Looks fine” or “Good thoughts”. I know these are mere words of encouragement or courtesy, but it matters a lot to me. I’ve learned many lessons from my Fulbright life, especially as a faculty member. I will try to practice it, though I might not succeed fully.

I am a faculty member in my country. The experience in this lab and the knowledge I gained helped me preparing the syllabus for a new subject in our curriculum. If I am the person who is going to teach this subject, I’m pretty sure that I would be more confident than I was.