Tamara Dordevic
A warm, nostalgic feeling of déjà vu is how I would describe the atmosphere in Tamara’s living room the day we meet for our interview. The air that’s coming from the outside is hot and dry, the window roller shades are pulled down, and it’s quiet. Not the scary kind of quiet, but the comforting kind of quiet that happens on summer afternoons when the world around you slows down and you can only hear crickets in the distance.
Tamara has prepared a light Italian summer brunch for us: balsamic tomato basil salad, bruschette with pesto, and an assortment of burrata, prosciutto, and salami. I am drinking a cold chinotto and thinking how my most vivid memories with Tamara always follow a similar story. The story is that we are hanging out and we don’t have a particular plan of what we are doing that day, but we are somewhere. Boston, Bologna, Belgrade. It’s summertime. I am wearing shorts and Tamara is in a light, pastel-colored dress. We are either sipping on drinks, eating good food, sunbathing, or doing nothing but chitchatting.
Which is pretty much what’s happening the day we meet for our interview. We are eating the antipasti, tucked away in the scenic suburbs of Northern California, and are talking about Tamara’s adjustment to Mountain View. She moved here about a year ago with her husband Gio, after spending eleven years in Boston, where the two of us had first met. I start our conversation with the least contentious opener: West Coast versus East Coast?
“So, it took a while to adjust to life in the suburbs,” she answers, “especially the part with needing a car to go anywhere. But, I will say the weather here opens up the entire year with the sunny Mediterranean vibe. In Boston, we were definitely outdoorsy, but during the winters, which lasted practically for six months, you can’t really do anything. In the Northeast, things also happen more at night. Here, everything happens in the daytime. I think I actually prefer to do things during the day.”
I ask her if she notices any differences between the people of the two coasts.
“It does seem people are a bit more chill in California,” she answers and laughs. “I don’t know if it’s due to the sun.”
Tamara and I met twelve years ago. We were both freshmen at MIT and both from the Balkans. I saw her name on the list of admitted students and reached out to see if she was equally as anxious about moving to the US. We spent the four years of undergrad living in the same co-ed living group, we were part of the same social circles, and we even ended up as housemates in our first apartment during grad school. When my two-year grad program was done, I left for California, and Tamara stayed for another five years to complete her physics PhD at Harvard. Last year, life brought us back together again.
“Honestly, at this point, it’s a distant memory,” she tells me when I ask her if she ever thinks about those four absurdly intense undergrad years. “Everything just happened so fast, it just all moved really quickly, and I always felt like I wasn’t doing enough. With the PhD, life was a bit more balanced.”
Balanced is not the first word that comes to mind when I think of an underpaid graduate student doing a PhD program. That said, Tamara is one of the sharpest people I know, so it’s also par for the course that she would find structure and peace of mind in a seven year-long physics PhD program, which—if you are even remotely familiar with the self-flagellating nature of academia—is a solid amount of time for at least two to three major existential crises.
“The thing with undergrad,” she continues, “is that it’s not indefinite. You take a class, you take the exams, and then you move onto the next class. With a PhD, it can feel like it lasts forever. And, a lot of people get stuck because of that. And, because you’re the one responsible for the direction of your research, you feel guilty about getting stuck.”
Tamara met Gio early in her PhD because they worked in the same lab. I ask her whether meeting him made PhD a more manageable experience. “Oh, definitely,” she answers. “If you’re alone and going through an experience like a PhD, it's a hundred times more difficult.”
But how did this play out in their relationship? A part of me always wondered how they made it work, with both of them being physicists working in the same field, and having an unspoken but implicit shared goal: making a discovery and pushing the field of physics forward.
“Well, we never worked on the same thing, so that helped,” she clarifies, “but situations like that can definitely be tricky. I also think it definitely helped that I now work in the industry and Gio is in academia. I do think it’s good for couples who have the same background to not have the same jobs.”
Speaking of the transition, Tamara found corporate to be a far more collaborative environment compared to academia, which might sound contradictory. “I think collaboration in a corporate environment is actually more encouraged,” she explains. “If you think about it, you are all working toward the same goal, whereas in academia, it’s a bit of a zero-sum game. Only a few people will end up getting a postdoc and eventually a professorship position.”
If you’re not familiar with the impenetrable entanglement that is an academic career trajectory, it’s worth getting an anecdotal sense of how crazily competitive it can get. In Tamara’s field of research, which is atomic and condensed-matter physics, a typical PhD student will spend about six to seven years working on a project that will ideally result in a new discovery and that will also get published in a respectable science publication. That in itself is already a herculean effort.
Typically, the final-year doctoral students will then face each other head-on while universities and research institutions evaluate which of these brainiacs are deemed worthy to join their groups as postdoctoral students. Tamara’s field is so niche that all applicants pretty much know each other. Which also means there is a website, CM/AMO Rumor Mill, that’s practically the Perez Hilton of atomic and condensed-matter physics, rife with highly-accurate gossip of who will end up getting the highly-coveted tenure-track professorship positions.
“And, I guess,” I add, “with you and Gio, you yourself are also not that competitive, so that must have helped.”
“Well, yes and no. Not today maybe, but I was before. I mean, literally, I did physics competitions.”
This I find entertaining, because I do wonder how many of her coworkers today know that before Tamara, the systems engineer in the autonomous vehicles industry, there was Tamara, the bright and ambitious high-schooler from Serbia who did International Physics Olympiads (IPhO).
To contextualize the significance of that element in her character arc, what you need to know is this. IPhO is an international annual competition that brings together the five sharpest high-school students from each country to solve some of the gnarliest physics problems. How gnarly? Well, here are the three theoretical problems Tamara had to solve at IPhO in Thailand in the summer of 2011: a three-body problem, an electrified soap bubble, the scattering of an ion. For comparison, I spent that summer watching Ugly Betty.
“I had a very ambitious physics teacher in the sixth grade,” she tells me, “who would sort of vet students that had potential, and she would enroll them in her advanced, extracurricular physics class, and if they did well, she would push for competitions.”
In the twelve years of knowing Tamara, this was actually the first time I heard about this teacher, and it suddenly gave a lot of color to Tamara’s grit and resourcefulness that I have always admired. She dedicated both her undergraduate and graduate thesis to the teacher, who continues to develop young, underprivileged kids from Serbia into international physics wizards.
“She is proud,” Tamara says when I ask her if the teacher is proud of her, “and, rightfully so. She has developed a reputation for being able to send kids from this small town in Serbia into the most prestigious institutions across the world.”
It’s time for us to move to Tamara’s garden and sunbathe while we eat figs and cherries and drink our afternoon coffees. In the kitchen, Tamara puts a Bialetti Moka Express on the stove and starts brewing. “Coffee is a ritual for me every morning,” she says. “Though, to be fair, Gio actually makes it most of the time.”
“Because he's Italian?” I ask.
“No,” she replies with a smirk, “because he wakes up first.”
There is a certain effortlessness to Tamara that’s easy to feel but hard to pin down. The first ever email that I sent her was one of me panicking about on-campus food before we started college. Which meal plan are we going to choose? Do we cook? Do we not cook? What do we cook? Is she going to bring pots and pans in her luggage? I remember getting a succinct, poised reply from eighteen-year old Tamara, saying that cooking for herself on-campus was the only logical option because the meal plans were too expensive and that she would buy pots and pans once she was in Boston. Who the hell is this girl, I thought in awe.
She took and aced really advanced classes. She managed money better than the rest of us. She scored internships abroad. When I visited her in Bologna where she was doing her freshman internship (so put that in context: we were nineteen at the time), she made us pesto penne pasta dinners because my cooking skills were nonexistent, and she took care of my severe sunburns because I idiotically never applied sunscreen. She picked up running when we were housemates in grad school and did a half-marathon. She led a life rich with experiences while handling the demands of her seven-year-long physics PhD. Casually one day, she informed me that she was moving to California, closer to me, and that she got a job in the autonomous vehicles space as if it were a boring tidbit not even worth mentioning.
That is not to say that she doesn’t get worried or that she finds everything easy. But she handles challenges with elegance, never losing her cool in the process, and makes it seem as if she had somehow seen all these problems before. By now, I have learned to recognize that fleeting moment, the split second when Tamara’s visceral reaction to a situation is softened by her grace. Her light blue eyes briefly look up, she makes a pause in her speech, and her gaze quickly recenters with determination, a sign that she has made a conscious choice to see the situation in the most levelheaded way.
In her garden, the fallen linden flowers from her neighbor’s tree are scattered around the concrete, which I find oddly coincidental given how prevalent linden trees are in the Balkans but rare in Northern California. There is a piece of Tamara’s connection to the Balkans that has always been a bit of a mystifying feat to me, and that’s the fact that Tamara—even after having been out of Serbia for twelve years—has preserved close friendships with her entire razred (literally translated as “high school class,” but it’s actually a subset of the entire high school class that takes the same courses, on the same schedule, for the entirety of the high school experience). Tamara was part of the nerd razred, the outcasts of all the razreds in their school.
“Because we were the nerd class in our high school, that experience brought us together,” she explains, “and maybe I was lucky, but all the people in my class were really nice. We all got along well.”
Lucky or not, it’s definitely unusual. Aside from Tamara, I have not met anyone who kept tight relationships with an entire high-school class. Last year, when Tamara got married, almost everyone from her high school class came to celebrate her and Gio’s wedding.
“I mean, I definitely put very conscious effort into maintaining those relationships over the last decade,” she says. “We’ve had a Facebook group for our class, so whenever I would go to Serbia for the winter or summer break, I would post in the group and everyone would come to kafana.”
An experience both of us did share was the volatile adjustment to the money situation once we moved to the US. “Before moving to the US, I never really thought about class,” she says. “In Serbia, I never felt poor, and I think it’s because largely everyone around me was neither notably richer nor notably poorer. Whatever you were doing, everyone else was doing it as well. If we went to the seaside, everyone went to the same seaside.”
It’s the commonality of almost all kids who were raised in the post-socialist Balkans. Parents pack the car with pots and pans of food that can last for two weeks. You drive for hours to a remote town on the Mediterranean coast, camp out in a trailer or, if gods of fortune are good to you, find an elderly couple in a backyard sitting behind an inconspicuous sign that says there is a room or two available. You do know a kid from your neighborhood whose parents somehow own a house by the coast, and they are always there for the entire summer, but you learn that kid is an outlier not even worth paying attention to.
“College was the first time I realized I was poor,” Tamara adds. “To be clear, there were people around us who were in way, way worse financial situations than we were. But there were also so many people with movie-like lifestyles. The way you hang out, the activities you do, it all started being segmented by class. I tried not to pay attention to it, but stratification by class was already happening in college.”
It was a growing pain that both of us had to go through as fairly sheltered kids, but in retrospect, it was also a critical foundation of our own friendship. Even today, we will often spend time together just walking around and talking, the same thing we did twelve years ago, and that is exactly what happens after our garden siesta. We were originally supposed to go biking along the Stevens Creek trail in Mountain View, but one of Tamara’s bikes had broken down during the week, and I think Tamara could tell that I was secretly happy about that unfortunate sequence of events.
“Now we can talk more,” I tell her slyly.
The first time I actually asked about the details of Tamara’s research was last fall, at 11.30 pm on a Friday night, when Gio, Tamara, and I sat down for cocktails at Churchill in San Francisco. Really bad trap was blasting above our heads while the two of them patiently explained the principles of quantum mechanics and quantum computing. The basics were about as much as my brain could process that night, so I figured, I might as well use our interview to now actually understand what she worked on.
“Okay, so how would you explain your research to someone who doesn’t do physics?” I ask once we sit down on a bench along the trail.
Unsurprisingly, Tamara already knows how to answer this.
“For my research, I was working with single atoms. I wanted to control everything about a single atom. Because if you can control it, you can then encode the atom as a qubit.”
“A qubit?”
“A quantum bit,” she adds. “It’s kind of like a binary bit, when you have a zero and a one, but a quantum bit can be a superposition of both states.”
This simple statement, it turns out, is actually the essence of everything quantum. Tamara would “trap” a single atom and then interface it with a photon, a single quantum of light. By introducing a photon to the atom that she was controlling, she was able to change the atomic state. What that really means is that the atom became encoded with information as a quantum bit, and the photon became a messenger that could relay the encoded information to another atom—another qubit.
Where things get trippy is that this single-atom stuff now suddenly becomes a way to scale central processing units (CPUs). By increasing how many qubits can interact with each other thanks to the photon messengers, it becomes more possible to make a distributed system of quantum computers.
Where things get really trippy is that this can be applied to quantum networking, especially for increasing security and preventing eavesdropping. By having qubits relay information to each other through photon messengers, it actually would become impossible to intercept a communication without the parties knowing that the communication was intercepted, because all the information would be encoded in the photons. In Tamara’s words, this would be the first system that would be truly unhackable.
“Early on, I thought I wanted to do particle physics,” she adds, “like the stuff at CERN. But it’s much harder to feel your influence on projects like those. With my research, I was able to move quickly. If something wasn’t working, I would try something else, I would order other parts online. It was very scrappy, creative, and innovative.”
This would explain why an academically trained physicist like her ultimately ended up at a company like Waymo, where—despite the fact her work is now practically the opposite of atomic physics—there is still that same element she had always looked for: a leap forward with technological innovation. It’s definitely one of the coolest jobs I’m aware of. Tamara is the one who is figuring out how to design scientific testing for those weird situations that autonomous vehicles find themselves in. What will they do if it’s raining? If there is fog? Stop signs being reflective? What’s the right thing to do? What’s the right math, and how do you translate that from software to hardware and vice versa?
Tamara wants to get moving again, so we embark on our final stretch of the walk that ends up being magical, and in that special kind of way that you get only by pilgrimaging through arid landscapes of the West Coast.
The image of it is piercingly memorable. We are walking up the Stevens Creek trail, and aside from one gentleman wearing a braided straw hat and a short-sleeve shirt tucked in worn out jeans, there is not a single soul in our eyesight. Warm wind is whipping through the dry shrub along the perimeters of NASA Ames Research Center, the tall power lines around us are buzzing in unison, and the whole vibe looks like something straight out of a sci-fi Western movie. I keep thinking about St. Vincent’s “Rattlesnake” and how it would be the perfect soundtrack for this moment, as long as we don’t actually see a snake—Tamara’s greatest source of fear.
We start talking about the speed of light and Tamara mentions something that I never thought about before. Because the celestial bodies we see in the sky are lightyears away—in other words, trillions and trillions miles away—and the speed of light is approximately 186 thousand miles per second, what we see when we look at those stars shining late at night is actually the past.
Theoretically, in an extreme case, a distant star could collapse, and by the time we observe it on Earth, the collapse could already have become a long gone event. For a brief moment, I feel an unnerving sense of existential dread, thinking about all the things happening out there and this light thing being too slow at 186 thousand miles per second and how there is no way to make it faster because all the physics equations governing our existence would no longer make sense and, if there was a way, would Mariah Carey have still named her eleventh studio album E = MC².
“So,” I ask, “is the reason you and I perceive each other in the present right now just the small physical distance between us?”
“Yeah, if you think about it,” Tamara points out, “it’s like the very fast frame transitions in the movies that give you a sense of continuity. You and I are, what, two feet away from each other? And if light travels hundreds of thousand miles in a second, it will travel the distance between us in a super tiny fraction of a second. Our eyes probably can register things at a limit that’s slower than that, so you get a sense of things happening in the present.”
I discover later, on the train ride back home, that our retinas can register new visual cues on the order of milliseconds, which is definitely slower than the order of nanoseconds that light would take to travel between me and Tamara. But, in that particular moment, on the Stevens Creek trail with Tamara, I don’t worry about the calculations yet and instead think about the fact that the two of us walked more than four miles and that it’s been two hours on the trail, but that it felt like just a few minutes.
