Professor Maya Bar Sadan likes to think of herself as a detective. “Every experiment is a mystery,” she says. “You don’t know who did it, you don’t know why it happened, you just have the clues. You collect evidence, you test your theories, and hope that at the end, the story makes sense.”
At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where she serves as full professor and head of the Department of Chemistry, Bar Sadan’s mysteries unfold on an almost impossibly small scale – among atoms and nanoparticles, where the laws of quantum chemistry defy everyday experience and imagination.
In her lab, she designs materials on the nanoscale, and specialized instruments measure their fascinating phenomena. “We work with materials only a few nanometers wide,” she explains. “Each one contains tens of thousands of atoms. You can’t see them, but you can design them, control them, even make them grow in a certain way. It’s like coaxing nature to tell you a secret.”
Bar Sadan’s fascination with secrets began early. As with many academic careers, her path to becoming a successful researcher was not linear nor was it guaranteed. “I started at the Technion as an undergraduate chemical engineer,” she recalls. “It was what I always wanted to study. By the end, I realized I wanted to understand the ‘why,’ not just the ‘how.’”
That realization led her to the Weizmann Institute, where she completed her master’s and PhD in chemistry. From there, she moved to Germany, to the Forschungszentrum Jülich research center near Aachen, “at the very western tip of Germany, right by the border with Belgium and Holland.”
She spent several years in Germany before returning to Israel in 2011 to join Ben-Gurion University. “I’ve gone full circle,” she laughs. “Engineering, then chemistry, then physics of microscopes, and now, back to chemistry. It’s funny where curiosity takes you.”
The detective at work
In the simplest terms, Bar Sadan describes her field as “the art and science of making materials.” But what fascinates her isn’t just making them, it’s understanding them. “You can make a lot of things,” she says, “but if you don’t know why they form, how they grow, what happens on the surface, then you’re missing the story.”
That story often begins with a question about how to create cleaner energy. “We use nanoparticles to produce alternative fuels,” she explains. “We’re trying to move away from dependence on carbon and into the hydrogen and nitrogen cycles.”
She leans forward, animated to drive home her point, “When you burn carbon, you get CO₂. But if you burn hydrogen, you get water, which doesn’t hurt the atmosphere. You can even burn nitrogen-based materials and get nitrogen gas that already makes up most of our atmosphere. The challenge is doing it efficiently, so we don’t waste energy in the process.”
Her lab experiments with electrochemical cells, passing electric currents through solutions to drive reactions. “It sounds complicated, but this is how everything around us is made,” she says. “We’re just trying to find cleaner ways to do it.”
She pauses, then smiles, “Take the process used to make ammonia for fertilizers. That single process accounts for about one percent of global CO₂ emissions. Imagine if we could make even a small improvement there. – that’s where the detective work begins. You look for where the reaction goes wrong, what element is guilty, what condition changes the outcome. It’s a bit like solving a crime.”
Like a true investigator, Bar Sadan follows the evidence wherever it leads. “You don’t always get what you expect,” she says. “Sometimes you start with one question and end up discovering something completely different. But that’s the beauty of it, you can’t force the truth, you must uncover it.”
There’s an aesthetic pleasure in it too. “Crystals are so beautifully ordered,” she remarks. “When one atom shifts, it changes the magnetism or conductivity of the whole structure. You start to realize that beauty and logic live in the same place.”
When she returned to Israel, she brought that atomic-level vision with her. Today, her lab builds catalysts – materials that speed up chemical reactions – and studies how structure determines behavior. “My students make the catalysts, then we look at them under the microscope, measure their properties, and piece the story together,” she explains. “It’s like a giant puzzle. The evidence is all there, you just have to put it in the right order.”
Science in the shadow of war
Not all of her challenges come from the lab. “There are the scientific challenges,” she says, “and then there are the human ones.” As department head, Bar Sadan has seen Israeli academia weather enormous strain over the past two years. “We keep hearing that Israel is a high-tech nation,” she says. “But technology and innovation depend on people studying physics, chemistry, and materials science. Fewer Israelis are doing that now. We’re struggling to fill the programs.”
Many of her students today come from abroad, mainly India and China, bringing their own difficulties in times of conflict. During the recent war, she says, one Indian PhD student faced unbearable pressure from her family to return home. “She was at the final stages of her PhD work, and suddenly there were rockets over Be’er Sheva. Her dorm is near Soroka Hospital – only a few hundred meters away from one of the hits. Imagine how frightening that is for someone new to this country.”
Despite everything, Bar Sadan insists that international colleagues have largely stood by her. “When I go to conferences, people are kind,” she says. “My long-time friends in Germany often say, ‘We don’t live where you live, so we can’t judge.’ I respect that. They’re careful with their words, and that’s fine. Scientists, I think, understand nuance better than most.”
Following the trail forward
Ask Bar Sadan about the future of her work, and she pauses. “If I tell you exactly what I plan to do, it’ll sound small,” she says. “I prefer to talk about ‘we,’ not ‘I.’ We have a strong group at BGU working on energy materials, people in chemistry, in materials engineering. Together, we push for change.”
“It’s not about inventing the next miracle,” she says. “It’s about small, real steps, like hydrogen fuel stations here in Israel, or recycling industrial waste into something useful. There’s so much we can reuse, so many pollutants we can turn into resources. That’s the kind of detective work I want to keep doing.”
This kind of spirit marks an unmistakable sense of purpose beneath Bar Sadan’s words. “Science isn’t about certainty,” she says. “It’s about curiosity. You follow the clues, you test your ideas, and sometimes, what you find changes everything.”
She turns reflective, drawing an unexpected parallel. “When railways were first built in England, people said, ‘Why do we need these? We already have canals.’ They couldn’t imagine what would come next. That’s how discovery works – you don’t always know the destination when you start the journey.”
Bar Sadan’s journey has been one long investigation into the invisible world that shapes the visible one. “You look at a single atom moving,” she says, “and suddenly, you gain insight into the incredible tools of nature. That’s the feeling I chase. That’s why I keep doing this. Every atom has a story, and I still have a few mysteries left to solve.”
This article was written in collaboration with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev