From ballet shoes to beakers: James Shee bridges art and science
While his peers rushed to finish their college applications, James Shee pirouetted into a gap year, trading textbooks for tights to chase his dance dreams.
“There was this one performance of a ballet called Giselle. I was sort of at the decision point,” said Shee, an assistant professor in Rice’s chemistry department. “It moved me so strongly and almost unexpectedly that I realized, ‘Wow, this is a powerful art form and something I want to do for at least a few more years.’”
Shee said he deferred his admission to Princeton University three times, spending his gap years training with the San Francisco Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada.
“The first time I deferred, the dean of admissions didn’t even blink. She actually encouraged me to do it,” Shee said.
Eventually, the time came for Shee to resume his academic career. He earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Princeton University in 2014, followed by a doctorate in chemical physics from Columbia University in 2019 and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023.
Shee said he sees parallels between his two passions, both of which require discipline and mastery of basic techniques.
“If you don’t have control over your body, you can’t really express some sort of feeling through movement,” Shee said. “It’s the same if I don’t understand some nuts and bolts of some kind of theory. I can’t further develop that theory or prove it wrong.”
Shee said some added difficulties came with his transition back to academia as well.
“When I stopped dancing, I knew exactly what my body could do,” Shee said. “But then in research … there’s all kinds of obstacles, and you don’t know what’s happening 99 percent of the time.
“In Toronto, I’d close my eyes if it was a piece of music that I really loved a lot, so I came to the realization that I love dancing, but I also love music,” Shee said. “I could survive retiring ballet and finding other career paths as long as I had that music with me.”
Shee said dance factored into his graduate school choice despite choosing not to pursue dance professionally.
“I met my wife dancing, we danced together in my freshman year,” Shee said. “But, then I didn’t actually dance too much because I had this mentality that I gave up professional dance to go to [Princeton], so why would I dance in undergrad? Then, in my last year, I realized it was pretty clear that I needed to dance, so I chose a grad school that was in the best city for dance in the world.”
Shee said the opportunities to work with a team in his own lab drew him to Rice.
“There came a time in my postdoctoral years that I had way more ideas than I could feasibly pursue on my own,” Shee said. “Leading a research group at Rice is a dream come true.”
Shee and his group develop theories and computational models to predict the quantum-mechanical properties of molecules, lattice models and materials with strongly correlated electrons — where the movement of one electron is highly influenced by others.
“My most memorable (and arguably successful) experiences doing science usually involve thinking deeply about a problem, and working persistently to make progress in solving it, with friends,” Shee wrote in an email to the Thresher. “My approach to science is collaborative; informal interactions with people – and encounters with different points of view – are critical (and enjoyable most of the time!)”
“It is fun to have James [Shee] as a colleague and collaborator,” Peter Wolynes, professor of chemistry, wrote in an email to the Thresher. “Many of us in science get tied up in details of mechanics and miss the deeper intellectual issues. In contrast, when you talk with James you get to explore the concepts and feel like you are creating something new and important.”
This spring, Shee will be teaching a new graduate course on correlated electronic structure models, teaching with a philosophy honed by his own experiences.
“I want to guide students to understand the quantum world; but only that, to appreciate the beautiful, counterintuitive, historical and wonderfully exciting aspects of science,” Shee said.
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