The credo of the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher adept at molding young minds, is “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.” Lena Fitting Kourkoutis was surrounded by science at every age—impressionable and otherwise—and the decision to study applied and engineering physics came naturally. Kourkoutis grew up in northern Germany, the daughter of a physicist and a thermal engineer. Now working on her Ph.D. at Cornell, she wants to make sure that other girls feel as comfortable as she does in the historically male bastions of math, science, and engineering. “There are still discrepancies between the numbers of males and females in science,” says Kourkoutis, 27. “Girls are not exposed to it early on. Girls who don’t have parents like me who were in engineering or science, they just don’t know about it. There’s a misconception that it’s too hard, so they’re scared to try it.”

Lena Fitting Kourkoutis demonstrates for a group of high school science teachers how she uses a kit to explain atomic force microscopy to students. Shai Eynav Photography

Each year, Kourkoutis and dozens of her female colleagues—from undergrads to full professors—work to combat that stereotype through a program called Expanding Your Horizons. Held almost every year since its founding in 1978, the daylong, student-run conference is intended to pique interest in math, science, and engineering among girls in the seventh to ninth grades. “The idea is to give them hands-on experience,” says Kourkoutis, one of the conference’s three grad student co-chairs. “We try to point out what career opportunities there are, because a lot of girls don’t know what’s out there.”

The event, which draws some 200 girls from around New York State, includes a keynote address and a panel discussion for adults, as well as communal meals, a raffle, and other activities like science demos and a book sale. But its most important element is a series of workshops on a wide variety of topics held all over campus and beyond. The girls choose three from a menu of three dozen, ranging from The Science of Soap to Babies, Babbling, and Brains to Fabulous Fossils. (Though they can rank their preferences, assignments are made by a computer program.) Participants parse the math behind the game Nim, wade through the waters of Cascadilla Creek, make ice cream without a freezer, mix chemicals to create their own perfume, explore the surface of Mars via computer simulation, even solve a crime with forensic science à la C.S.I. Parents tell us that they’re blown away to see all the different things you can do with math and science, says nutritional science Professor Joy Swanson, the conference’s longtime faculty adviser. They themselves had no idea what possibilities there are for their daughters. And just the opportunity to be on the Cornell campus is awe-inspiring for the girls.

On any given day, the Human Power Lab in Kimball Hall seems more fun than your average engineering research facility, with its shelves full of motion toys and carcasses of mutant bicycles hanging from the ceiling. But on the most recent Expanding Your Horizons day last April, when the lab hosted one of the workshops, it had the heady air of a miniature carnival, complete with scientific sideshows. Step right up and see the robot walk down a ramp! In this corner, a fork and spoon teeter on the rim of a glass—balanced on a flaming toothpick! Across the room, a disk spins on a concave mirror; as if by magic, it gains speed rather than slowing down, getting louder and louder as it goes. Conference volunteer Megan Berry ’07 ME coaches 14-year-old participant Kiki Jones as she tries to master an old-fashioned toy that involves twirling two red balls on a string.

“You’ve got perfect phase going there,” says Berry, who’s clad in a Cornell mechanical and aerospace engineering T-shirt that declares YES, I AM A ROCKET SCIENTIST. “How often you pull on it is going to change what the toy is going to do. Different frequencies give you different characteristics for a system. You have to time everything—all the parts have to work together.”


Despite the professional advances that women have made since the conference began—back when Jimmy Carter was in the White House, the Bee Gees topped the pop charts, and hopes for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment were fading—organizers say that encouraging girls to embrace science and math is still vital. “Things have changed a little bit,” Swanson says. “But, in general, there’s still a disparity in wages between males and females and in the number of women in leadership positions in math and science. People feel that there’s equality, but in actuality there isn’t. Even in industry, there are still glass ceilings.”

Although the conference draws a significant number of girls from the Ithaca area, students come from as far away as Long Island, leaving home long before dawn to get to Ithaca in time for the 8:30 a.m. start. And the demand is acute: the 200 slots have been known to fill up in as little as three days. Organizers have been weighing the pluses and minuses of expansion; in the mid- ’90s, Swanson notes, the event grew to about 300 girls and an equal number of chaperones, necessitating that it be held in cavernous Barton Hall. “The intimacy and collegiality were missing,” she says. “It was just a big mass, without as much interaction. People were starting to get exhausted. It was getting so huge, there were communication problems.” But then there’s the pull on the other side of the equation: the desire to satisfy the enormous hunger for the program among the girls of New York State. When an event sells out in three days, in other words, it’s clearly a hot ticket. “Whether to expand is definitely an internal debate,” says Lindsay Batory, a Ph.D. candidate in organic chemistry and one of Kourkoutis’ co-chairs. “There are a lot of factors we need to consider.”

Funded by the deans of the Cornell colleges as well as grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, the conference costs some $20,000 to mount but charges participants just $10 each. Kourkoutis and her fellow organizers start planning for the April event the previous August—soliciting funds, scheduling workshops, arranging meals, and recruiting undergraduate “buddies” (female science and engineering majors who pair up with participants attending without a parent or teacher), among myriad other tasks. By the time the day itself rolls around, the event is a well-oiled, women-run machine.

Lena explains the principles of friction to a young girl and her Big Sister. Provided

The conference is headquartered in Kennedy Hall on the Ag Quad, where participants check in before downing a continental breakfast, getting matched with their buddies, and hearing a brief welcome speech. This year, the area outside Call Auditorium was filled with a whirlwind of activity and chattering teens and tweens. At one table, participants could shop for books with titles like Cool Stuff and How it Works and Gutsy Girls: Young Women Who Dare; at another, volunteers offered classic science-fair demos like the properties of magnetism and the creation of fake snow. Filling out a raffle ticket offered a chance to win a live butterfly garden. On the wall were posters of famous women scientists and a map showing participants’ hometowns. Buddies mingled with their charges, chatting about the science the girls were studying in school. “We’re hoping to get them excited,” Batory says, “and let them meet women in the field so we can serve as role models.”

After attending their first two workshops, the girls have lunch at Trillium in Kennedy Hall. (One of the issues complicating the expansion debate is the fact that the conference already packs the dining hall to capacity, so more students would necessitate two lunch shifts.) Then the students take in their third workshop while the adults attend a panel discussion in which women scientists offer advice on encouraging the girls’ curiosity long after the conference is over. The keynote address—this year’s was given by Stacy Kenyon, a 1999 graduate of Cornell’s vet college—is followed by closing remarks, the raffle drawing, and the all-important distribution of commemorative T-shirts. Participants and their guardians complete evaluation forms; the feedback, Kourkoutis says, has been overwhelmingly positive. “The students are excited about it and they ask very interesting questions,” she says. “Most of them really want to be here.”

Kourkoutis herself really wants to be here; she’s as fond of Ithaca as she is of Cornell. She sought a spot in the university’s highly competitive applied and engineering physics program after doing post-college research at North Carolina State University, looking for “another good school in a very small town.” The daughter of a German father and a Russian mother, Kourkoutis grew up in Rostock, located in the former East Germany. When she was seven, her parents moved their three children—Kourkoutis, her fraternal twin sister, and their younger brother—to Eritrea, where her father chaired a university physics department. They returned to Germany when she was 10, shortly before the Berlin Wall fell. (“I was young and didn’t really understand what was happening,” Kourkoutis says, when asked about her memories of the historic event. “You could see it on the TV—the wall fell and everyone was happy.”) She earned a physics Diplom—roughly equivalent to an American bachelor’s and master’s rolled into one—from the University of Rostock, where her father is on the faculty, before heading to Ithaca via North Carolina. “She’s a very good student,” says associate professor of applied and engineering physics David Muller, Kourkoutis’ adviser. “She’s mature. The line that sums it up is that when she goes to conferences, she’s frequently mistaken for a postdoc, because she has a good understanding of the material and she’s very confident in how she presents it. She’s hands-on, energetic—a natural leader. The work she’s doing is going to have a big impact in the field.”

Kourkoutis’ research is in electron microscopy, specifically its application to studying the structure and properties of nanoscale materials. Using Cornell’s highly sophisticated instruments—which offer views at the atomic level—she has been studying the gate oxides used in computer chips. “The chips get faster and faster, but that means all the layers of components shrink,” she explains. “But there’s a limit, and we’re getting there. We’re looking for replacement materials, and ways to grow very thin layers.” Kourkoutis has also been examining the atomic structure of the interface between insulators—a region that, though it may seem counterintuitive, can itself become conductive. “You start with two materials that are insulating, and you join them, and suddenly you get a layer that is conducting,” she says. “Of course that would change the property of the device dramatically.” Kourkoutis has already earned first-author credit on several papers, including publications in Physical Review Letters, Ultramicroscopy, and the Journal of Applied Physics.

Even in 2007, female scientists can still face double-barreled bias: they’re not encouraged to go into the field because they’re women, and if they do they’re assumed to be something less than feminine. Kourkoutis shatters the stereotype; she’s nobody’s idea of a geek. She’s tall and athletic-looking, with big green eyes and wavy light brown hair cascading to the base of her spine; her flawless English retains enough of a German accent to make her sound distinctly exotic. Married to City of Ithaca firefighter Christopher Kourkoutis since November 2006, she hopes to find a position at Cornell or another nearby college after completing her degree.

Meanwhile, work on next year’s Expanding Your Horizons conference is about to begin. Over the years, organizers have seen the percentage of minority participants rise significantly—from practically nothing to about 20 percent. Now, Swanson hopes to increase the number of students from underserved rural schools. “We get a lot from the Ithaca community, but in my opinion they don’t need it,” she says. “But Dryden, Newfield, Southern Cayuga [Central Schools], Candor, the Adirondacks—they need this type of program.” Although the conference has long been open to repeat visitors, due to its limited capacity organizers may give preference to girls who haven’t previously attended. “If someone already knows that they want to study science, it’s great that they come,” Kourkoutis says. “But to actually introduce someone to science…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence. Her voice trails off and she smiles, green eyes lighting up.