Building Better Materials, Alum Isa Pan’s Penn Roots and MIT Research 

2025 MSE Graduates, Caroline de Andrade, Nina Guo, Isa Pan and Vivek Nair | Photo credit: John Russell

By John Russell

Isa Pan still lights up when she talks about a certain kind of Penn evening, the kind that starts with a “quick check” in the lab and somehow turns into a late-night marathon of problem-solving, laughter, and music. In the middle of a senior design crunch, surrounded by the familiar sounds of a workshop, Isa and her teammates would keep the momentum going with a tradition all their own: Disney-themed songs blaring while they cut metal, punctuating the seriousness of engineering with the kind of joy that makes hard work feel shared.

That blend of rigor and spirit has followed Isa beyond campus. A 2025 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Isa earned an MSE alongside a degree in Chemistry, training that reflects both deep scientific curiosity and an engineer’s instinct to build. Today, Isa is a Ph.D. student at MIT in the Materials Science and Engineering department, pursuing research through the Program in Polymers and Soft Matter.

Isa’s path into polymers was shaped in a very Penn way: through steady, hands-on work and the guidance of a lab community that values craft, careful thinking, and learning by doing. Throughout Isa’s time at Penn, working in Russell Composto’s lab proved pivotal. Studying polymer structure and behavior wasn’t simply an academic exercise, it became a spark. Over time, that spark turned into a clear direction: a desire to dig deeper into the science of soft materials and to ask bigger questions about what polymers can do, and where they can take us.

At MIT, Isa is now working on block copolymer thin films and their role in the directed growth of metal films, research with potential impact on hard drive technology and beyond. The idea is both elegant and ambitious. By taking advantage of the natural structures that block copolymers form and growing metal seeds directly on the substrate, Isa’s work aims to create smaller domain sizes than current industrial limits allow. Smaller features can mean improved performance and efficiency, and Isa is especially motivated by the broader implications: approaches like this can contribute to more energy-efficient technologies and materials.

That focus, innovation in service of sustainability, sits at the heart of Isa’s motivation. “I’m passionate about developing new materials for clean energy,” Isa explains, grounded in a desire to help create technologies that reduce environmental impact and support a more sustainable future. It’s a calling that fits neatly with the foundation Isa built at Penn, where interdisciplinary training was not just encouraged, but expected.

A key part of that foundation came through VIPER, Penn’s program designed to bridge science and engineering. For Isa, VIPER offered more than coursework, it offered a mindset: learn the fundamentals thoroughly, respect the disciplines that came before, and then apply that knowledge to real problems with real consequences. That kind of preparation continues to shape Isa’s work today at the intersection of polymers and energy materials, where the best solutions often come from people who can speak both the language of molecules and the language of machines.

Looking back, Isa’s fondest memories aren’t only about the research breakthroughs or the impressive lab skills gained along the way, though those mattered. They’re about people. About the senior design group that became a small community. About long nights that demanded patience and teamwork. About the joy of building something together, and the simple tradition of singing while working, proof that even the most technical paths are made meaningful by camaraderie.

In many ways, Isa Pan represents what Penn does best: turning curiosity into capability, and capability into purpose. From Russell Composto’s lab to MIT’s polymer program, Isa’s journey shows how strong training, steady mentorship, and a love for the work can carry a student from one campus to the next, and from a favorite memory in the workshop to research aimed at shaping a more efficient, sustainable world.