Question: what chemicals or materials are you making and for what purpose?

Charlotte Slade answered on 1 Jul 2025:

What a great question! It gets right to the fun part of being an inventor and a scientist.

I don’t mix big, bubbling potions like you might see in a cartoon. Instead, my lab is more like a workshop for building with the smallest thing you can imagine: individual atoms.

Think of it like building with LEGO, but on a super, super tiny scale. My job is to figure out the recipes and the instruction manuals for creating brand new materials by arranging different atoms in very specific patterns. We build these materials up one ultra-thin layer at a time, almost like a high-tech sandwich with thousands of layers.

And what’s the purpose? By arranging the atoms in a certain way, we can give these new materials special “superpowers.”

For example, we work on:

Making things stronger and scratch-proof: We can design a surface that makes the glass for your phone screen almost impossible to scratch.

Creating better medical tools: We can build tiny sensors that are so sensitive they might be able to find one single sick cell in a tiny drop of blood, helping doctors spot illnesses much earlier.

Improving electronics: The type of work I do helps engineers figure out how to make computer chips that are smaller, faster, and use less battery power.

So, you can think of me as a “materials designer.” I figure out the fundamental rules for building these tiny, smart materials, so that engineers can then use those recipes to build the next generation of amazing technology that helps make our lives better.