Surface Properties: Kaleb Hood on Graphene and Getting into Grad School

The first thing Kaleb Hood does in his nanomaterials lab with a new undergraduate researcher is hand them a piece of scotch tape. "Do you want to get a Nobel Prize?" he asks. "And they're like, what?" Then they repeat the basic steps of an experiment that eventually won the Nobel Prize in Physics for isolating single-layer graphene: pressing adhesive tape against graphite and peeling it away. The point isn't the tape. The point is what follows.

It doesn't take really expensive equipment to do really, really neat research," Hood says. "All it takes is a creative approach to solving problems.

Hood is a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Portland State University's Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, where he serves as lab lead in Jun Jiao's research group. His work focuses on growing graphene, a single-atom-thick lattice of carbon with extraordinary strength, conductivity, and corrosion resistance, directly on steel surfaces. "Instead of trying to use different steel alloys-stainless steel is corrosion resistant, but it's really, really expensive-I change just the surface of the steel," he explains. "If we can change just the top few atoms to be more corrosion resistant, then we can have a cheap steel that performs like a stainless steel."

The research is significant. The route Hood traveled to reach it, through teaching, yacht engines, and years of being told he didn't belong, is the less predictable story. In third grade, when his classmates drew firefighters and doctors, Hood drew an entomologist "because I want[ed] to study invertebrates." The curiosity was specific, early, and durable. He studied biology and chemistry at Warner Pacific College, a small liberal arts school with no research infrastructure, and graduated in 2016. The expected trajectory pointed toward science teaching, and Hood followed it: four and a half years of high school science, middle school science, and adjunct courses back at Warner Pacific.

Between teaching terms, he worked with his hands. He was a yacht mechanic "on some of the fancy yacht clubs on the Columbia River, which was a really cool job, really fun." He machined parts. He welded on projects connected to Boeing and military aerospace contracts. Those years were when materials science stopped being abstract and became tactile, when the behavior of metals under heat and stress started mattering to him in ways textbooks alone hadn't accomplished. He was working with steel long before he started trying to transform its surface.

Graduate school was not inevitable. A business professor told Hood directly that it would be a waste of his time, that he wouldn't be accepted, that his undergraduate GPA was too low. The encounter didn't just sting; it rearranged his timeline. "That's another reason I took a lot of time off," Hood recalls. "If [they] wouldn't want me, why would I go back to school?"

He sat with that for years: four and a half of them. But something older and stronger pulled at Hood; he had pictured himself as a scientist since third grade, and he wanted to show that a broke teacher with unimpressive grades from a blue-collar background could belong in STEM. Not to prove that discouraging professor wrong, but to open a door he'd been told was shut. If he "could make it into and through grad school," he observed, "then others can as well."

In 2021, during COVID, he applied to Portland State's master's program. It was the only school he applied to. He entered Jiao's group, completed a master's thesis on exfoliation-based graphene coatings for steel, published his first paper, and moved to the PhD track, where he passed his comp exams and prospectus and shifted to the bottom-up graphene growth process that now defines his research.

The scotch tape exercise, then, is not a quirk. It is the opening gesture of a mentorship model Hood built from his own experience, entirely outside formal curricular structure. "It's the model that I've specifically tried to incorporate," he notes. He pairs new undergraduates with experienced ones, deliberately leaves the room so peer relationships can form without supervisory pressure, and includes all contributing students as co-authors on publications, involving them in designing and running experiments, writing, editing, and figure development. Summer interns work full-time in the Maseeh summer Undergraduate Research and Mentorship Program (URMP) own their projects from start to finish, and present posters at the end. The goal is authorship and confidence, not observation.

He is not sentimental about it. When one student spent too much time in the lab at the expense of his coursework, Hood pulled him back. "I [advised him to] dial back the research. Focus on your classes." Mentorship has limits because it has stakes. What drives it is a conviction that the perception of who belongs in graduate school is both wrong and durable. Hood himself nearly became proof of its power. "I do everything I can to try to change that perception," he asserts because he knows what the wrong word from the right person costs. He lost years to it, but he doesn't frame it that way.

Hood's ambition after graduate school is a tenure-track faculty position, drawn to research because it changes continuously and to teaching because new students offer new challenges and bring new energy. "If you think of your life as not just one career you're building toward," he observes, "but a series of different things that you're mastering and moving on to a new thing."

By that measure, the yacht engines and the welding torches and the middle school classrooms were never detours: they were the path. And Hood tries to share that with his students, a way of reading their own paths that doesn't mistake a slow start for a wrong direction.

If we don't consider ourselves a work in progress," he reflects, "we're going to stop changing and improving.

Graphene is a single atom thick. Invisible to the naked eye, yet it can alter everything it touches. The professor who discouraged Hood from pursuing graduate school was looking at a GPA, a metric that can't predict transformation.