In situ with Paul Alivisatos

Paul Alivisatos is president of the University of Chicago, US. He received the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award from the US government in January 2025 for his work developing the foundational materials and physical chemistry to produce highly controlled nanocrystals and polymers. Previously, he served as executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of California, Berkeley and before that as director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He was speaking with Rebecca Trager

I grew up in Chicago and my family moved to Greece when I was 10. Suddenly I was immersed in a school where everything was in Greek, but I didn’t speak the language so I had to have my own compass and stick to learning the things that I could at each point. That really has served me well, later in life.

My dad was an immigrant who came to the US after the really ruinous civil war in Greece in the 1940s. He was a refugee and made his way to America and studied medicine there as a doctor.

I still speak Greek. I learned it as a kid when thrown into that school and became pretty much bilingual. And certainly, when I go back there for a few days I can dream in Greek, which is a sign that it’s pretty deep inside me somewhere.

My family has lots of doctors and immigrants. My mother’s father was from Greece, and he studied medicine in Vienna and then married my grandmother and moved to the US and also became a doctor.

There was an overwhelming pressure on me to pursue medicine as a young person, even though that wasn’t ever really what I wanted to do. So, I had to find my way to escape from that.

As an undergraduate at Chicago, I wandered a lot. I wasn’t very focused and probably could have finished a major in five different degrees because I had so much curiosity about so many things.

There are twists and turns in life that are completely unpredictable

My time as an undergraduate was probably the most impactful in terms of how my life unfolded later. And that’s because we had this incredible core curriculum that taught us how to think as a humanist and a social scientist, physical scientist or biological scientist.

I took physical chemistry and absolutely fell in love with it. I came in thinking that I might very well be a chemistry major, but organic chemistry and I didn’t agree very well. Physical chemistry brought me back into the fold after my wandering.

I’m very comfortable with German, which I learned as a student at Chicago. That was one of my sidelines when I was not completely doing chemistry. I can read German quite comfortably, and I can follow a German TV show without the captions on. But I’m not a great active German speaker.

My Wikipedia page describes me as an etymologist. Somebody made something up there, but I do love etymology. From my days as an undergrad in Chicago I learned to always look at the origins of words and try to understand them.

My first car was a VW Rabbit that was used and had to be repaired from scratch. When I was a graduate student I bought it with three other fellow grad students, and we co-owned it. I was the mechanic; it was my responsibility to keep it running.

I love photography but had abandoned it for a while. Then, around 1990, Kodak invited me to come spend a couple of days at their headquarters, and they gave me one of their first digital cameras. I thought it was amazing, so that drew me back into photography and I’ve stuck with it ever since.

Digital cameras are nice, but the lenses don’t hold up compared to a really great more old-fashioned camera. But there’s always room for the high-end, beautiful lenses and larger sensors.

I do my best thinking during jam sessions with my students. That’s when we all get together and everybody shares what they’re doing or reading or are curious about. Thinking in that interactive way with a group is conducive to creativity – ideas come in from different places and collide with each other so you can see connections that maybe you wouldn’t have seen yourself.

The biggest threat to science is groupthink and people wanting to tell others what they should think.

It’s dangerous to do too much looking back at our own paths. They all seem to make sense at the end but when you’re on them they are all full of serendipity and choices.

My 20-year-old self would find it laughable and absurd that I would one day become president of the University of Chicago. So, there are twists and turns in life that are completely unpredictable.

Having a sense of a compass in each moment – what it is that you really think is beautiful or that you care about – will guide you to make good choices along the way.