EVERYTHING took off for Marcela Bilek in her postdoc years. “It was my three-year chance to make an impact,” she says. And what an impact. She has since become professor of applied physics at the University of Sydney at the age of 32 and has published nearly 40 papers on advanced materials.
Her path to an academic position has been anything but straightforward. After graduating with a degree in physics and computer science from the University of Sydney, Bilek worked in industry for a couple of years. She then headed back to academia to do a PhD in Britain at…
