Physicist Sekazi Mtingwa: A Science Advocate

Ask physicist Sekazi Mtingwa how he reached his current position, and he will begin with his religious upbringing in his grandmother's house in Atlanta. As a child, Mtingwa was convinced that he was the second coming of Christ.

“I believed that for years,” Mtingwa remembers, chuckling. However, that belief waned after a Sunday school lesson he had as a youngster, which detailed Jesus sacrificing himself for criminals. “Surveying my peers, I realized I couldn't sacrifice myself for these unruly boys in my class, let alone murderers,” he admits.

Following this revelation, Mtingwa still yearned to contribute to society. Although he remains devout today, he now views himself as an "apostle of science".

This term offers an accurate depiction of Mtingwa's career trajectory. He rose to prominence as a particle and accelerator physicist, celebrated for his contributions to the construction of accelerators and the development of the theory explaining particle scattering in high-energy beams. Besides, he also excelled as a nuclear policy specialist, mentor, administrator, activist and established numerous organizations both domestically and overseas, aiming to provide opportunities for individuals often excluded from the science landscape.

“His efforts have a direct and positive impact on people’s lives,” confirms Robbin Chapman, one of Mtingwa’s protégés, who currently serves as associate dean for diversity, inclusion and belonging at Harvard Kennedy School. Chapman suggests that Mtingwa's influence manifests “through his research, teaching, or the networks he fosters across different countries and continents."

Before he became known as Mtingwa, he was Michael Von Sawyer, a pupil at segregated schools in Georgia. His classmates playfully called him a “mad German scientist.” Prompted by these playful jibes, he replaced his childhood aspiration of being the second coming of Jesus with that of a career in science.

Following his passion for science, Mtingwa frequented the local library, absorbing all the scientific information he could get his hands on. His sheer dedication led him to win first prize in botany at Georgia’s state science fair, the first year it was racially integrated. His prize - a series of science books sparked his interest in physics.

As an undergraduate studying physics and mathematics at MIT, Mtingwa grasped the power of activism. Amid the flux of social change during the 1960s characterized by the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests, Mtingwa contributed to student advocacy groups, became a founding member of MIT’s Black Students’ Union, and participated in a faculty lounge takeover.

“That instilled a sense of duty within me to serve the community,” he recounts. He fervently believes in bettering oneself through education and career accomplishments before contributing to individual development and international systems.

Following his stint at MIT, Mtingwa completed his Ph.D. at Princeton University, specializing in high-energy particle physics. It was during this period that Mtingwa became an advocate of Pan-Africanism. Consequently, he adopted his current name with the assistance of a graduate colleague from Tanzania. He then collaborated with other Black physicists to form the National Society of Black Physicists in 1977.

Despite his achievements, Mtingwa's academic career almost ended a few years later. After participating in two postdoctorates, he faced challenges in securing a job, while his white counterparts seemed to effortlessly climb the academic hierarchy. In 1980, a Ford Fellowship rescued him. The fellowship led him to spend a year at Fermilab, a premier particle physics laboratory based in Batavia, Ill.

His one-year appointment turned into a seven-year stint, during which he collaborated with theoretical physicist James Bjorken to develop the theory of intrabeam scattering. The theory expounds how charged particles behave when pressed together into high-energy beams. This knowledge is crucial for particle accelerators as they generate high-energy beams used in various scientific experiments. The theory has since shaped the design of particle accelerators globally, including small synchrotrons and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

“Any accelerator physicist knows about the Bjorken-Mtingwa theory,” says accelerator physicist Mark Palmer of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. “This has had a very, very deep impact on broad portions of the scientific endeavors that depend on accelerator performance with very-high-energy beams.”

Mtingwa continued his work on the theoretical physics of particle accelerators. But he also started to build them.

At Fermilab, he helped design systems for producing and collecting antiprotons — the antimatter counterpart to protons — so they could be accelerated into beams. Colliding streams of protons and antiprotons in Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator ultimately revealed the existence of the top quark, a fundamental particle. Not only is the top quark an essential piece of the standard model of particle physics, but its large mass is also useful for testing the model.

And at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, Mtingwa worked out the theoretical underpinnings of plasma wakefield accelerators — a type of particle accelerator that speeds up particles using pulsing waves of plasma, which Argonne scientists experimentally demonstrated for the first time in 1988.

In 1991, after years working at some of the top national laboratories, Mtingwa made a decision that he says baffled his colleagues: He became a professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, a historically Black university that, back then, didn’t have a graduate program in physics at all.

“I had at Fermilab and at Argonne worked with students — high school and college — for the summer. And I had gotten interested in surrounding myself with the young, African American students to try to be able to make a difference,” Mtingwa says.

Mtingwa had taken care of himself. Now, he wanted to start taking care of others.

At North Carolina A&T, Mtingwa established a master’s program in physics and laid the groundwork for new Ph.D. programs. Over his many years teaching at North Carolina A&T, Morgan State University, Harvard and his alma mater MIT, he mentored countless people, including Chapman — who now mentors students herself.

“He really captured what I realized is the essence of supporting anyone, but particularly scholars of color as they are moving through their academic careers,” she says. Rather than seeing life and work as separate things, Mtingwa taught Chapman to see them as part of one ecosystem of excellence. “He’s a systems thinker,” she says, with a keen eye for how people fit into their full context and what that means for how they work.

Today, Mtingwa is in what he describes as “that third stage” of serving the world: building institutions. When he talks about this stage, his stories focus on “we” more than “I,” to the point that it becomes hard keep track of which “we” he’s talking about. Over his long career, he’s built, nurtured and then carefully entrusted to others a dozen or so programs, institutions and nonprofits.

Mtingwa helped found not only the National Society of Black Physicists, but also the National Society of Hispanic Physicists and the African Physical Society, among several other professional organizations in the United States and abroad, with a focus on places where scientific infrastructure and opportunities are more limited. He is actively leading efforts in Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia to train scientists to use synchrotron light sources — small particle accelerators that generate intense light that are vital for many types of research in chemistry and biology — and build synchrotron light source facilities.

The point, Mtingwa says, is to create more opportunities for more people in science. He’d like to see a day without discrimination, when anyone’s scientific careers could flourish — no matter who or where they are.

“I realized I wasn’t Jesus Christ,” Mtingwa says. “But I was put on Earth to serve mankind, so that’s what I’m trying to do now – to be of service.”