Faces of Penn State: Moses Chan

Moses Chan is the director of Penn State's Center for Nanoscale Science, which is one of twenty-eight research centers nationwide in the National Science Foundation's Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers program. Faculty members and students from four different colleges and eight departments work together in the Penn State center on applications and materials that could have an important impact in fundamental and applied science.

Evan Pugh Professor and National Academy of Sciences member Moses Chan is as much a student of human interaction as he is a student of physics.

“Physicists find out how things seem to work according to some sort of rule, probing for new rules for how things interact, how things work,” he explains. “On the other hand, human interaction, human emotions anyway, are much more interesting.”

Chan’s professional research is aimed at answering, or raising, fundamental questions about matter in its various phases or states such as liquid, solid, and gas. He is particularly interested in phase transitions —the conditions under which material changes from one phase to another—in quantum fluids, reduced dimensions, and in the presence of disorder.

“When there are many particles put together, there are surprises. Sometimes we can predict them, sometimes we cannot,” he says. “So doing experiments to manipulate the environment so those ideas can be confirmed or proved to be wrong are interesting.”

While this Chinese-American has been able to manipulate environments in the lab, he hasn’t always been able to do so in life. As an undergraduate at Bridgewater College in Virginia in the 1960s, Chan suspects he was the only Chinese person within a 50-mile radius, and the first that many of those Americans had ever met.

“Everything I did, I represented at that time, 800 million Chinese,” he says. “I was forced to behave well all the time. Looking back, it was a big burden for a 17-year-old boy.” Then he smiles mischievously and adds, “Fast forward forty years —as a senior member of the faculty of physics, again I have to be well-behaved!”

This affable man in blue jeans at first claims no time for a personal life, but eventually confesses to reading Chinese history and the New Yorker magazine and recently, attending opera performances in New York on a regular basis.

“It’s fun to see how, just like novels, it’s expressing human relations, human emotion, and passion with voice rather than words alone,” he says. “Sometimes it reminds you of your own life experiences.”

Of course, Chan’s primary focus is his work, where, as he says, he is “being paid to play games in the lab.” He and his students are currently working on experiments he hopes can provide a new way of looking at some problems in macroscopic quantum phenomena. He also is busy running the new Center for Nanoscale Science , for which he received a National Science Foundation grant.

He says he hopes to make this center a model for how interdisciplinary research should work. His study of human interaction is bound to help. “I’m continuing to try to figure out what it’s all about. What’s the meaning of life? I’m trying to see how each one of us fits into this whole scheme of interesting human relations.”

Suzan Erem