Nergis Mavalvala, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, can check off a whole lot of boxes on the diversity form. She isn’t just a woman in physics, which is rare enough. She is an immigrant from Pakistan and a self-described out, queer person of color. “I don’t mind being on the fringes of any social group,” she says.
With a toothy grin, the mother of a 4-year-old child explains why she likes her outsider status: “You are less constrained by the rules.” She may still be an outsider, but she’s no longer obscure; her 2010 MacArthur Fellowship saw to that. In addition to the cash and the honor, the award came with opportunities to speak to an interested public about her somewhat esoteric research. “That is the best part,” she says.
“One of my formative experiences in Karachi happened when, as a 10-year-old, I would take my bicycle to the bike repair shop right outside our apartment compound,” she recalls in an interview with The Express Tribune. “Rather than just repairing my bike for me, the man at the shop taught me how to do the repairs myself.” Once she learned the technique, she would just borrow the tools from the mechanic. Perhaps her formative experiences living on Karachi’s McNeil Road came in handy when she had to build laser equipment.
In the meantime, Weiss became a fixture in Building 20, identifiable by the corncob pipes he smoked until he suffered a mild heart attack in 1995. He would work until 2 a.m., says Nergis Mavalvala, a LIGO physicist at MIT who was Weiss’s graduate student from 1990 to 1997, and would stay even later to help a student. When Mavalvala failed her qualifying exams, Weiss had her attend “reform school” in his office every Saturday for weeks. “He didn’t give a damn about the exams,” Mavalvala says. “But he knew that I had to get past them.”
