Nadya Mason  Nadya Mason is a Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She works on the quantum limits of low-dimensional systems. She is a former competitive gymnast who was a member of the US National Team. Mason was born in New York City, and lived in Brooklyn for the first six years of her life. She grew up in Washington, D.C. before moving to Houston. In 1986 she trained as a gymnast with Bela Karolyi and competed as a member of the U.S. National Team. Mason always enjoyed maths and science, and completed several science focussed science internships during her education, including a fellowship in condensed matter at Bell Laboratories. She completed a bachelor's degree at Harvard University in 1995. In 2001 she earned a PhD under Aharon Kapitulnik at Stanford University. Mason returned to Harvard as a MRSEC Postdoctoral Fellow in 2001, where she was elected to the Society of Junior Fellows. In 2005 Mason joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research focuses on carbon nanotubes, graphene, nanostructured semiconductors and topological insulators. In these systems she concentrates on electron interactions, and how to apply her understanding to quantum computing. She has discussed the limit on the size of electronics and impact of novel nanomaterials for the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign YouTube channel. In 2006 she demonstrated the non-equilibrium Kondo effect and in 2011 observed individual superconducting bound states in graphene-based systems. In 2014 Mason was appointed a John Bardeen Faculty Scholar in Physics at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 2016 she was appointed to full Professor. Nadya Mason is a General Councillor for the American Physical Society. She is Chair of the APS Committee on Minorities and was featured by the National Society of Black Physicists for Black History Month in 2017. She has two children.  2020 - Edward Bouchet Award, American Physical Society  2013 - Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign  2012 - Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, American Physical Society  2009 - Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards  2008 - Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow   2008 - Diverse Magazine "Emerging Scholar"   2007 - National Science Foundation CAREER award