Born and raised in the bustling coastal city of Karachi in Pakistan, Zubia Hasan and her family came to the United States as permanent residents in 2017. Growing up amongst some of the most politically turbulent years in the history of Karachi, Zubia’s education was often disrupted by strikes, bomb threats, and city shutdowns. In America, Zubia’s family dreamed of a future where security was not always a looming threat and basic needs not always a question. Determined to support others, Zubia has made it one of her primary goals to work towards promoting higher education in Pakistani and Afghani communities in America.
Zubia graduated in 2021 with general and departmental honors from Johns Hopkins University where she majored in physics. The most instructive part of her undergraduate education was her research at McQueen Lab under the mentorship of Professor Tyrel McQueen, where she found her passion for Condensed Matter Experiment (CME). She saw this field as the perfect marriage of application and basic science research. Zubia also took classes in writing where she found a love for poetry and fiction writing. Combining her interest in writing and physics, Zubia graduated from Hopkins with a first author paper where she wrote a story about CuTeO4, the material she synthesized and studied at McQueen Lab.
At Hopkins, Zubia also served as a PILOT Leader, a peer tutoring program for students struggling in STEM courses. Passionate about equal access to education in America, Zubia served as the undergraduate representative in the Committee for Inclusion and Diversity in physics at Johns Hopkins.
Zubia is currently a PhD student in physics at Harvard University. Continuing her love for CME, Zubia is now conducting research in Professor Julia Mundy’s lab where she works to synthesize and study novel quantum materials in the thin film limit. As an aspiring scientist, Zubia hopes to be at the forefront of materials discovery while also being connected with the larger Cambridge community through mentoring and outreach efforts towards the large immigrant population in Massachusetts.
