Experiments often yield unexpected results. In research and in life, MIT Associate Professor Cem Tasan has learned to embrace that uncertainty.
"Very often we start with an idea or a hypothesis, and to test that idea we design experiments, and when we run the experiments, we see something totally different," says Tasan, the newly tenured Thomas B. King Associate Professor of Metallurgy.
Tasan has used those surprises to explore the boundaries of metallurgy and solid mechanics, gleaning new insights into how metals break and deform, and designing new kinds of damage-resistant alloys.
"As they say, science is like taking a walk in the hills," Tasan says. "You see the mountain far away, and that's where you want to go, but as you head toward it, you see a beautiful flower on a different pathway, so you check that out. That happens so often to [my group]. It's exciting."
Tasan has extended that approach to his career, leading him to take a faculty position at MIT despite not seeing the campus until his first job interview.
"Being at MIT, or even in the USA, was never on my radar," Tasan says. "It just wasn't part of a plan."
That mindset has also helped him mentor students, whom he's learned never to judge based on initial impressions.
"I had a really bright student reach out and say 'Everything is great, we have funding, we are productive, but I'm not sure I like what I'm doing,'" Tasan recalls. "We talked and identified another direction closer to the student's interests, but that would mean we might not have secure funding or the necessary know-how, so there were all these disadvantages.
"But we went down that road and it was amazing, because now this student was doing the research they really liked, and that successful student became an amazing student. Mentoring is complicated because on the outside things can seem fine, but the key idea is to pay attention to small details and keep communicating with these young people, who are on their own journeys. There's no easy way other than communicating and observing."
A winding path
Tasan grew up in Turkey and studied metallurgical and materials engineering at the country's top college in the field, the Middle East Technical University.
"What intrigued me about metallurgy is that it's an engineering field, but it's also strongly related with basic sciences," Tasan says. "That connection exists in other engineering fields as well, but not as strongly. In materials science, it's fair to say one leg is almost always in the fundamental side of things."
Tasan also travelled a lot as a young adult, backpacking with friends across Europe on a shoestring budget.
"Early on, my personal goal in life was to move to Spain and eat tapas all the time and have fun," Tasan jokes.
During one such trip, Tasan packed a suit in the bottom of his backpack just in case he landed an interview with a graduate program. The preparation paid off in the Netherlands, where he met with members of the mechanical engineering department at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Tasan would go on to earn his PhD at the school, studying how damage and cracking takes place in metals.
After earning his PhD in 2010, Tasan joined the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Germany, where he eventually led a research group that continued studying metal behavior and worked on creating new metal alloys that were more damage-resistant and had other unique properties.
By 2015, Tasan was settled into a comfortable life in Germany. Then a position at MIT opened up.
"At MIT, I could suddenly do much more on these topics that excited me, so my research could create a bigger impact," Tasan says.
