A first-year graduate student in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) in 2007, Tim Rupert was prepared to present research at a Materials Research Society conference in Boston, his first presentation since joining the lab of Professor Chris Schuh. “The slides were all ready, the story was all ready — I practiced it, and I was ready to go,” says Rupert, now a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California at Irvine. “And then the Saturday before my Monday talk, I was doing some…
