Aldo Chavez | Student Spotlight
Aldo Chavez
PhD Candidate
Materials Science and Engineering
"Whether it be my research, hobbies, or volunteering, I’ve found there are more things I enjoy doing at Stanford than time to do them."
Whether it be my research, hobbies, or volunteering, I’ve found there are more things I enjoy doing at Stanford than time to do them. In my free time I cook and bake. Sometimes I play volleyball with friends, some weekends I drive to the beach. Every Saturday morning, I put food out for stray cats that live on campus as part of an organized cat-feeding group.
Some of the most rewarding time has been spent with my peers in the department. This year I’m serving as the treasurer for Stanford Materials Research Society (MRS), the voluntary student organization that helps plan and host events like the biannual department barbecues, the matsci admitted PhD students visit weekend, and the university-wide annual Art of Science exhibition. It’s been fun and fulfilling to do the behind-the-scenes work for events that members of the department love.
In my PhD work, my research revolves around pushing the limits of the spatial precision we can achieve when manipulating materials. This means working with atomically thin materials and using extremely small probes to measure and change their local structure in ways that could enable next-generation sensing, communications and computing technologies. It’s deeply fulfilling to feel that every day I am learning, like I’m always at the edge of what I know and understand.
Personally, one of the biggest benefits from my graduate program so far has been developing a stronger sense of agency. People who know a lot more than myself are still coming to me for answers and putting their trust in me. That responsibility has reshaped the way that I see myself and my place in the world. I hope to be a mentor to other students who, like me, don’t have a family background in science or academia and are having to learn how to navigate it all. I think just realizing that agency can make all the difference.
