Anna Balazs is a polymer physicist at the University of Pittsburgh. For decades, she worked with Steven Levitan, a Pitt electrical engineer — who also happened to be her husband. He was her closest collaborator, in life and in science.
In 2016, Balazs became the first woman ever to win the prestigious Polymer Physics Prize. But only days before she was to accept the honor, Levitan died unexpectedly. And so winning the prize was bittersweet: Balazs achieved a lifetime accomplishment, but she was missing the person she most would have wanted to celebrate with.
I interviewed Balazs in 2021 as part of an oral history initiative for the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering. Before we started the interview, she told me she would prefer not to talk about her husband. So I agreed to stick to the science.
But once the tape was rolling, she talked about him openly, with great joy and vulnerability. Her science was so intertwined with their life together — and their life was one of deep love for their science and each other.
Here is a transcript from our conversation: her story of accepting a tremendous honor in the midst of a devastating loss.
Anna Balasz:
I was very fortunate in my marriage. It was a real love affair. And I was very fortunate in my choice of career that also is a love affair — that every day I do like what I'm doing. And I realize that’s exceedingly fortunate.
There was a dinner party my junior or senior year, and we had a friend in common, so [Steven] showed up at the dinner party.
It was lust at first sight. He had long blond hair and he had just come in a Volkswagen van. He was just exquisite. I mean, truly exquisite.
I kept thinking of him for a year, two years. I knew he lived in Boston, so when I got to Boston [to start graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], I called him.
I said, “Did [you] want to go out for a date?”
And he said, “No, not particularly.”
So I just kept running after him. That was a very large preoccupation of my life at that time.
Steven had started graduate school two years after I did. [He] was at [University of Massachusetts Amherst] and I was in Cambridge [at MIT]. We commuted on the weekends. I took the Peter Pan bus for an hour-and-a-half. And that was good, because it let me work all night long. But I missed him terribly. So he said, “We’re never going to do that again.”
We interviewed [for faculty positions] at a bunch of places, and Pitt was wonderful about saying, “Oh, we'll take two. You two? Fine. You come as a pair? Great.”
And that was such a great thing to have two jobs in the same place. After being separated for so long, it was a very wonderful thing.
To this date, the best work I did was with Steven. There's this amazing material: It looks like a piece of Jell-O, and you put it into a Petri dish. Then, you add certain reagents, and it suddenly starts pulsating. I just became fascinated with this material because I was interested in blurring the boundary between living and non-living. And here was something that was pulsating all by itself — just like a little human heart.
And so I was looking at oscillating gels — gels that beat like a little heart — and [Steven] had been looking at oscillations to encode computer information. And so one day we said, “Oh, I do oscillations. Oh, you do oscillations? Yes, yes!”
So we applied for this grant together, that was really quite fun. We designed a material where the material itself does the computation.
He was just quietly good at everything.
I was the first woman ever to get the Polymer Physics Prize. That was a big thing. And my husband had died shortly before I — literally like a couple of days before — I was meant to receive it.
The tradition is that the person who receives the prize gives a plenary lecture in front of large numbers of people. But I couldn't. I just couldn’t.
One of my [post-doctorate students] very, very kindly gave the lecture. And we explained to people why.
So there's a sadness and a pleasure but tinged with — I wish Steven had been able to celebrate with me.
I've been living without him for five years so there isn't a day when I don't think of him. Every once in a while, I’d go, “Thanks for marrying me, Levitan!”
And he’d go, “You’re welcome, Balazs!”
So we both were very conscious that it was extremely fortunate that we found each other.
