Dr. Maya Chen

Maya Chen was raised in San Francisco's Richmond District, where her parents ran a printing shop. She grew up surrounded by ink, light, and the precise aesthetics of letterpress — an upbringing she believes gave her a fundamentally visual relationship with structure. At Berkeley, she double-majored in physics and studio art, a combination her academic advisor called 'eccentric' and which she describes as 'completely obvious.'

Her doctoral work at Harvard focused on near-field optics — probing the behavior of light at scales smaller than its own wavelength. The work required her to develop visualization techniques for phenomena that had never been directly imaged before. Her 2006 paper in Physical Review Letters, which included a series of false-color maps of evanescent fields, was shared widely enough to end up printed on a poster in the CERN visitor center. She didn't know until a colleague sent her a photo.

The transition to teaching transformed her. At UCSD she became known for lectures that were architectural: she drew entire electromagnetic field configurations from scratch on the whiteboard, building up the geometry slowly, narrating every curve. Students described following her drawings like watching a mystery novel resolve. She received the university's undergraduate teaching award in her third year — reportedly one of the fastest in the department's history.

In 2018 she launched a YouTube channel, Physics in Color, as a pandemic-era experiment that outlasted the pandemic. It now has over four hundred thousand subscribers. She has been a guest on three science podcasts and delivered a TEDx talk at UC San Diego — 'Why the most important thing in physics is something you can't see' — which has been viewed over two million times.

She holds an amateur radio license (callsign W6MCX) and participates in sporadic-E propagation events, which she calls 'the closest thing to playing a musical instrument with the ionosphere.' She is an experienced rock climber who has led routes in Yosemite and Joshua Tree, and paints in watercolor, primarily landscapes of the California coast.