MIT News correspondent
When she was accepted into the undergraduate business
program at FAMU, Mareena Robinson thought she had her future all figured out:
She would go to law school and become an attorney, like her father, or else a
businesswoman.
But when she and her father arrived on campus at the
beginning of freshman year, he made an offer the self-described “obedient
daughter” couldn’t refuse: to pay a visit to the physics department, where he
had a distant connection to a friend-of-a-friend.
“I said, ‘OK, I’ll just check it out,’” Robinson says. “I
had no intention of going into physics. But when I got up there they treated me
like a football player.”
She was surprised — after all, the department didn’t know
anything about her, and had no idea whether she could cut it as a physics
major. “They were so excited about anybody who was even willing to talk about
the possibility of doing science because it is a select few people who have the
audacity to try something like that,” she says.
Her father was sold on the program, telling her: “Mareena, I don’t know anything about this physics stuff. I can’t do one equation. But I feel like this is the wave of the future and I just need you to try it. Just give it a shot.”
“I said, ‘What’s the problem? I’ll try it for a year, and if
I hate it, I’ll switch.’ And then I looked up and I was a junior,” Robinson
says.
Now a fourth-year PhD student in nuclear science and
engineering at MIT, Robinson researches warhead confirmation, a crucial
technological hurdle to international disarmament. Currently, most nuclear
arms-control agreements, such as the 2010 New START treaty between Russia and
the United States, focus on decreasing the number of deployed nuclear weapons:
weapons that are physically mounted on missile launchers. The problem with such
treaties is that they don’t address the actual decommissioning of the weapons.
The primary issue is one of verification: If the United
States claims to have dismantled a weapon, how can it prove this to Russia
without giving Russian inspectors access to a weapon that might reveal key
technological secrets? Or, as Robinson asks, “How do we verify that a country
is indeed complying to a future dismantlement regime?”
Robinson’s research aims to solve this problem by developing
a passive detection system that could be used to detect the presence of nuclear
warheads via their radioactive signatures. If successful, such work could
significantly influence policy: It could enable nuclear treaties that actually
decrease the total number of warheads, not just those that are mounted on
launchers. Robinson was recognized in 2011 with the National Nuclear Security
Administration’s prestigious Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship, which
funds her graduate work.
Now that she’s at the Institute, Robinson works voraciously
to provide others the same communal support from which she’s benefitted. She is
co-president of the Academy of Courageous Minority Engineers, a group that
serves, in her words, “to provide a community and a safe space to voice goals,
grievances, and just feel supported.” The group holds weekly “accountability
meetings” that are “just like seeing your family,” Robinson says. “Everyone
gets together and you get to check up on people.”
She also works with an organization called Grad Catalyst
that steers underrepresented minorities into science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics (STEM) fields. Members of Grad Catalyst visit other
institutions to hold seminars on graduate school — from what internships to
apply for to how to manage relations with a PhD advisor. “There are all these
little nuance things that people may not tell you, but if somebody did tell
you, you’re automatically at an advantage,” Robinson says.