Shubhra Gangopadhyay is the one of the few female faculty at MU’s Center for Micro/Nano Systems and Nanotechnology. She’s also the one in charge of developing the center. In the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, of which Gangopadhyay is the LaPierre Endowed Chair Professor, she is one of three women. “There is a shortage of female scientists and female professors, in general,” Gangopadhyay says. “And in engineering, it is really not good.”

Nano-sized particles—clusters of molecules so small that 100,000,000 would fit across a single hair—can be built by attatching molecules together or by smashing apart bigger clusters. Shubhra Gangopadhyay’s lab does both. Her work will result in amazing new technologies, some of which will be used by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Though most of Gangopadhyay’s work is at the research stage, some of her ideas are already sold for commercial use. For instance, she helped develop a plasma-coated plastic, which is both fog- and bullet- proof, to be used on airplane windows. A gene-gun that blasts medicines or genes into cancer cells could revolutionize oncology.