Paul Alivisatos: ‘Physical chemistry brought me back into the fold’

I grew up in Chicago and my family moved to Greece when I was 10. Suddenly I was immersed in a school where everything was in Greek, but I didn’t speak the language so I had to have my own compass and stick to learning the things that I could at each point. That really has served me well, later in life.

My dad was an immigrant who came to the US after the really ruinous civil war in Greece in the 1940s. He was a refugee and made his way to America and studied medicine there as a doctor.