Profile of Susan N. Coppersmith

Abstract

Physics ranges from the practical to the abstruse. Susan Coppersmith, a theoretical physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has applied her talents across this span, from modeling the assembly of mollusk shells to programming quantum computers. Coppersmith was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, and in her Inaugural Article she describes and models the surprising intersecting lines and folds that appear in compressed monolayers of gold nanoparticles (1). Susan N. Coppersmith. Coppersmith grew up in Johnstown, PA. Her father was a lawyer and her mother, a housewife and piano teacher. “Not many people in Johnstown went to college,” she says. To her, it seemed that most people’s ambition was simply to move away. Coppersmith’s schooling required a lot of perseverance; sexism and a lack of appreciation for scientific curiosity were significant obstacles. “I remember in high school a teacher said to me, ‘You might be smart for Johnstown, but that doesn’t mean anything,’” says Coppersmith. Still, high school science sparked her curiosity. “I was in science class and I asked a question and the teacher said, ‘Oh, that’s quantum mechanics, that’s too hard for you.’ I knew I had to go to college if I wanted to learn what quantum mechanics was,” she adds. After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 with a degree in physics, Coppersmith spent a year as a Churchill Scholar at Cambridge University in England studying applied mathematics. At Cambridge University she met her future husband, Robert Blank, who is now on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison medical school. Coppersmith enrolled in graduate school at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) to study physics. “I had trouble at Cornell. I couldn’t find an advisor. Fortunately, because I had a scholarship from Bell Telephone Laboratories’ Graduate Research Program for …