Biography
Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1940s and 50s, I found it irresistible to become enthused about engineering. I met Orville Wright on two occasions, I saw Charles Kettering frequently when I would accompany my mother to the supermarket, and the newly rebranded US Air Force flew things over our house that were amazing – some went really fast and didn’t even have propellers. Upon graduating from high school, I attended the University of Cincinnati so that I could earn a chemical engineering degree while completing their co-op program. My co-op job was at a General Motors division that made all the rubber and plastics parts of their vehicles, and that was my life-changer: After that I wanted to earn an advanced degree in polymer science. Fortunately, Case Institute of Technology had just started the world’s first comprehensive graduate program in polymers, so I attended, completing my doctorate there in 1969. By what might be divine providence, Northwestern’s young materials science department was just then looking to fill a junior faculty position in polymeric materials, “and the rest is history”.
My time at Northwestern started out with a wonderful portfolio of research projects dealing with structure-property relationships in polymer solids of all kinds: thermoplastics, thermosets, ultra-strong fibers, biopolymers, and composites. This work was sponsored by grants shared with colleagues in 7 McCormick departments and 4 Weinberg departments. Starting in 1984, I was elected director of the Materials Research Center (now called the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center), which funds groups of faculty working on complex, interdisciplinary endeavors at the cutting edge of materials science (defined very broadly). By 1992, then McCormick dean, Jerry Cohen asked me to be his undergraduate dean, and I accepted, on the one requirement that I have latitude to be creative with the undergraduate experience. This, of course, is exactly why Jerry had asked me to take this position on his decanal staff. Given the experiences of my youth — being surrounded by the way engineering leads to new technologies and to careers for those who can make them — I saw value in an education that encouraged students to have a proclivity to make new things that people will value. The upshot was the launch of Engineering First, which was two unique course sequences for first year McCormick students. It was no surprise that these courses also encouraged faculty, not just in McCormick but in several other Northwestern colleges, to include design thinking in the things they taught, the research they undertook, and the programs they launched. It also gave engineering at Northwestern a distinctiveness to the college-bound pool of young women and men interested in applying here, and over the following decade, or so, the quality of students McCormick matriculated rose substantially.
After rotating out of the undergraduate dean’s position in 2016 and going emeritus in 2021 (the start of a 52nd year here), I am now involved in several uber-interdisciplinary research programs and teaching several of my favorite courses. Of course, there are those personal projects I was postponing until I retire; when will I actually get on them?
