Adrienne Stiff-Roberts, a new assistant professor in Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, specializes in bringing light to darkness.

Stiff-Roberts develops high-temperature optoelectronic and quantum dot photodetectors for thermal imaging. A physicist and electrical engineer by training, she primarily builds imaging devices that take advantage of the infrared spectrum to illuminate dark spaces. Police officers, firefighters and others can then use these devices to see clearly at night, conduct surveillance and find people trapped in the dark.     

“I’m just getting started,” she said. “I grow materials through crystals to make the detectors.’

Stiff-Roberts, 28, jumped into the field at the University of Michigan while pursuing her graduate studies, which she completed last spring with a Ph.D. in applied physics and an M.S.E. in electrical engineering. While taking a quantum mechanics course in Ann Arbor, she learned about the pioneering use of quantum dots, tiny three-dimensional islands with special physical properties, to create better detecting devices.

“It just sounded interesting to me,” she said. “I knew it was based in physics.”

Optoelectronics and photodetectors weren’t a quantum leap for Stiff-Roberts because she had been looking to apply her physics expertise to the real world, not just conduct research in the lab.

“As I got exposed to [physics] research, I found applied research more interesting to me,” she said. “It’s less abstract. You could see everyday reasons for it.’

The thermal imaging field also appealed to Stiff-Roberts because it didn’t limit her to one narrow line of research. She could participate in the entire process of making new detectors.

“I like it because you get to look at the whole picture,” she said. “You go from materials to devices to applications.”

Stiff-Roberts will teach quantum mechanics for Pratt’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering when she starts her course load in the spring. Her chief goal is to make the subject “as accessible as possible” to electrical engineering students and demonstrate its practical use. “It’s not abstract mathematics on the board,” she said.

A Durham native who grew up in Raleigh, Stiff-Roberts fell in love with physics as a teenager. She decided on her career path while taking an 11th grade advanced placement physics class at Enloe High School.

“I had a great high school physics teacher,” she said. “Physics was my favorite course. I liked it and I stuck with it.”

Stiff-Roberts also decided then that she’d pursue a Ph.D. in physics and become a college professor. She gives her father, a math education professor at N.C. State University, much of the credit for this decision.

“He was always telling me that being a professor is a great job,” she said. “I had a bug in my ear.”

As a young African-American woman, Stiff-Roberts has had her share of struggles in a field dominated by white men. Without going into details, she noted that she has been “second-guessed” more often than her white counterparts and has dealt with issues that they haven’t had to face.

But such hurdles haven’t stood in her way. Stiff-Roberts stressed that she’s received tremendous support from her father, her schools and various foundations that have supplied research fellowships, among others. 

“I’ve always gone places where I’ve had a support system,” she said. “I’ve definitely had doors opened.”

Stiff-Roberts has also enjoyed support from her husband, a rap artist named Robi Roberts. High school classmates and sweethearts, they both attended college in Atlanta, where she attended Spelman College and he went to Morehouse College. They got married three years ago, on the 10th anniversary of their first date.  

Roberts may soon join his wife on the Duke faculty. He’s now preparing to teach a possible music appreciation course on rap and hip hop in the spring.