Oral History Interview with Beth A. Cunningham by Matthew Crawford

December 2, 2022

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kent State University. I am interviewing Dr. Beth A. Cunningham. Today is December 2nd, 2022, and we are conducting this interview over the phone in my office at the Department of History. Dr. Cunningham, thanks for agreeing to speak with me today.

BETH A. CUNNINGHAM: Great to be here.

CRAWFORD: To start off, could you tell us your current title and institutional affiliation?

CUNNINGHAM: I’m Beth Cunningham. I’m the Chief Executive Officer at the American Association of Physics Teachers.

CRAWFORD: Could you tell us what the American Association of Physics Teachers is and what it does?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. The American Association of Physics Teachers is a professional society, a membership society. We have about 5,000 members across the world consisting of high school physics teachers and higher education faculty, all the way through the education spectrum. We offer programs and resources for physics educators. We offer two national meetings a year. We have two scholarly journals. We also have a group in physics education research, and that subgroup sponsors a conference in the summer that is associated with our summer meeting, and they produce a proceedings. We offer workshops. We have federal research grants to provide, to produce resources for physics educators. And we offer virtual gatherings and coffee hours and that sort of thing.

CRAWFORD: Thank you. I definitely want to talk about your work with this organization and your current position as CEO. But we also want to talk about your career in science as well. How would you identify yourself as a scientist and your field of research?

CUNNINGHAM: Matt, that’s a really interesting question. I feel like it has evolved a little bit. When I started off in physics and was working on my PhD, I would say that I would classify myself as a condensed matter physicist, because I worked on—in the physics world, it’s called soft materials, the major components of cell membranes. I did that as a postdoc and also when I was a faculty member, and up to the point where I fully immersed myself in administration. In a sense, becoming an administrator, I don’t do condensed matter physics, and my scientific interests have evolved to be more focused on physics education and physics educators, and also diversity, equity, and inclusion, and what that means for physics.

CRAWFORD: What was it like to make that transition from someone who was focused on condensed matter research and physics research to someone focusing on physics education? Was it difficult at all, or fairly easy?

CUNNINGHAM: That’s a great question, because I think as one becomes a scientist, there’s a certain vision of what that is. Particularly in the physics world, there’s a certain vision of what physicists do. I think as a scientist, evolving first as an administrator, and then becoming really immersed in that, certainly my interests changed. I think that establishing myself in a more mainstream physics subject was good. People recognized me as a scientist, so even moving into these tangential areas, for me it wasn’t as hard, because my interests and my job went in that direction. I felt like I still had that cachet as a scientist.

CRAWFORD: Do you think that kind of cachet is important in terms of speaking to both groups, both scientists and science educators?

CUNNINGHAM: I think it is. That’s a great point. I’ll also say, Matt, that I think as a woman physicist, having a solid scientific background and saying that I have papers published in some of the most prestigious physics journals really has [laughs]—that helps. But also I think that physics educators, to connect with them, I truly feel like I am very connected with them because of my experience teaching, primarily at an undergraduate institution. That really also bridges over to them. I feel like I have a foot in both worlds.

CRAWFORD: You're talking about your experience teaching at Bucknell University, which is where you spent most of your academic career?

CUNNINGHAM: Mmhmm.

CRAWFORD: Are you saying that being a woman in physics, it’s even more important, say, than a man who were to go into science education, for you to have published papers in prestigious journals?

CUNNINGHAM: Wow, that’s [laughs] hard to answer. I’ll just say—it helps. I think it really does help. When I talk to most women or most members of underrepresented groups, they will say that that helps.

CRAWFORD: Certainly publication is one of the main forms of credibility and authority in the sciences.

CUNNINGHAM: Absolutely.

CRAWFORD: I’d like to touch on many of these themes more as we talk about your experiences in science, but I’d like to go back to the beginning. I was wondering if you could tell us what year you were born, where you grew up, and what your early childhood was like.

CUNNINGHAM: I was born on October 17th, 1960. I was a child of the sixties and the seventies. I was born in Texas. My father actually was a physicist. He was working at Texas Instruments at the time. Anybody in physics will know that they are a huge manufacturer of chips, which is really big right now [laughs] When I was two or three we moved to Seattle, and my parents were there for a while, and he worked for Boeing. We moved several times. During that time, my father got a PhD in physics, when I was about nine, from Washington State University, and we ended up after that in Northeast Ohio, where he worked for Goodyear Tire and Rubber for a while and then ended up teaching at a regional campus of Kent State University when I was in high school. My mother, she’s a nutritionist. She was; she recently passed. She was a nutritionist and she also taught at the regional campuses of Kent State, where my father was at. I think both of my parents instilled that interest in the natural world and discovery, that idea of critical thinking, and reading, joy of reading. Just this general sense of being intellectual was incredibly important.

CRAWFORD: For the record, could you give us the names of your father and mother, and which regional campus of Kent State did they teach at?

CUNNINGHAM: My father’s name was Robert W.
Cunningham, and my mother’s name was Rose K. Cunningham. He taught at the Tuscarawas campus of Kent State, in New Philadelphia, Ohio.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like science was just part of your life as a child. Was there a particular age that you became interested in science, or was it just always there? [laughs]

CUNNINGHAM: I think it was always there. I can’t say that all of a sudden at a certain age a particular—looking at a bird, or seeing something—turned me on. I always enjoyed doing it. I think that was really solidified in high school and then going into college. I think it was putting the pieces of a puzzle together, the how do I get to that answer, and really pushing myself. Sometimes it was frustrating not understanding something. But to keep on working at it to try and understand a certain concept probably started in high school, more.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the kind of science education you received in high school. Did you know what particular areas of science you were interested in? Any particular courses that stood out?

CUNNINGHAM: I took, at that time in the late 1970s, the typical pre-college, college preparatory curriculum, where it was biology in sophomore year, chemistry in junior year, and physics in senior year. What was the question again?

CRAWFORD: I just wanted to hear a little bit about your experience studying science in high school, and if there were any particular courses or a teacher, or a particular type of science that interested you.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. I think that just going through there. Oh, and math. I think math is really important. I really enjoyed doing math, and I enjoyed doing math even as an undergraduate. I would say that maybe math—of course, the language of physics is math. And I think it was this co-discovery process as a senior taking physics, because our teacher was the chemistry teacher and she had to teach that year of physics. So it was kind of a co-discovery process for the class and for the teacher. It was the same group of friends that were taking classes at the same time, and we all worked together.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned your high school physics teacher was a woman. Were the other science teachers at your high school women as well?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, the biology teacher was a woman. The biology teacher actually had graduated from our high school not that—she got her degree and then went back to teaching biology. She went into teaching biology at my high school. So there were some, yeah.

CRAWFORD: Was this high school in New Philadelphia?

CUNNINGHAM: Oh, no, I graduated from Copley High School. Copley, Ohio is a suburb of Akron, Ohio. My parents chose the particular area we lived in, the Akron area, because the high school was known for being a really good high school. When we moved to that area, it was really important for them for us to—I have a brother; his name is Mark Cunningham. [inaudible] But it was important for my parents that we get a really good education. And that’s the thing, right?

CRAWFORD: Right. I want to jump back a little bit, before we move on to talk about your experience in college. You said that you were a child of the 1960s and 1970s. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about what that means to you.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. Maybe this could be a couple things. I remember in 1969 in the summer going to a church picnic—and my father was a physics graduate student, so this is in Pullman, Washington. He was at Washington State. We went to a church picnic and there were other physics graduate students there. Somebody brought along a TV, so that we could watch [laughs] the landing—the first manned—Neil Armstrong stepping out on the Moon. I think that era, if you talk to people my age, that is a really pivotal thing. Stepping on the Moon was an enormous, incredibly important thing for the U.S. to do, or for humankind to do, the exploration of space. I think the whole Moon program, the lunar program, was a big thing growing up. You’d see it on TV, and all the toys, and even astronaut ice cream. All those things, growing up, it was an influence.

CRAWFORD: You're saying through the space program, science was an important part of American culture of the time?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, I think so, at that time.

CRAWFORD: You identified the Moon landing as an important achievement for the U.S. Of course that was in the midst of the Cold War and the competition with the Soviet Union. Was that part of your consciousness growing up at all?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, I think so. Probably not when I was eight years old, but [laughs] certainly in high school, there was a sense of the Soviet Union and that sort of thing.

CRAWFORD: Did you ever have any aspirations of going into space-related science or becoming an astronaut or something like that?

CUNNINGHAM: No, I didn’t. I pretty much thought that that was going to be a very hard thing for me to do. I just didn’t think it was possible. I wore glasses. I’m like, “Well, I can’t be a test pilot; can’t wear glasses.” But that sort of thing didn’t interest me. Being a scientist did.

CRAWFORD: You earned your BS in Physics at Kent State University. Did you go to the main campus?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Did you apply to any other schools for your undergraduate education?

CUNNINGHAM: My father graduated from Purdue University, and so I applied there. I didn’t apply to very many different places. Maybe that has changed now. It seems like now, kids apply to a lot more places than in the late 1970s. [laughs] My only intent was to get a solid education.

CRAWFORD: Kent State seemed like a good place for that?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. And I knew financially it would be affordable for my parents and myself.

CRAWFORD: What were your goals for your undergraduate career? It sounds like you had developed an interest in physics in high school. Did you know you wanted to major in physics, or did you ever consider some other major or focus?

CUNNINGHAM: I thought for a while that I wanted to be an engineer. For even a high schooler to say, “Oh, I want to be a physicist,” it’s harder to envision what that is. It’s easier to envision an engineer. But I knew something. At one point, I think when I was a senior, I thought, “Oh, biophysics”— that blend between biology and physics would be really interesting. That’s why Purdue was interesting on the engineering side. But I chose Kent, and I thought, “Well, if things don’t work out, I could transfer someplace.” Which never happened. Then it’s pretty much, there, “Well, what’s similar to engineering?” Well, it would be physics. That’s kind of how I [laughs]—that thought process, back then. Way back then.

CRAWFORD: You said earlier one of the things you liked about science was problem-solving, but also your interest in mathematics. Is that part of what drew you into physics?

CUNNINGHAM: I think so. I think as an entry point, also, my first year at Kent I took an astronomy class, and that’s really fascinating, too. It’s something everybody thinks about—astronomy, looking up and seeing the planets and the stars. That also was a pathway that helped me decide that physics was a major I wanted to go into.

CRAWFORD: You said it was harder to envision what a physicist does, as opposed to an engineer. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that.

CUNNINGHAM: Maybe I should say—maybe it’s harder to imagine what a physicist—well, maybe I should back up. My dad was a physicist, so I kind of knew what he did. But then when I was a senior in high school, he was a faculty member. And what my father did previously as a physicist in industry really overlapped in engineering. So you can kind of think about engineering, you work for a company, you design things, you build things. That’s probably easier for—it was easier, perhaps, to think about that, to think about that sort of career. Whereas working in a lab may be a little bit more abstract because you think about high school, what you did in lab, and it’s like, “How could people do that for a career?” [laughs] It’s very much different, because the problems are—you're trying to discover the foundation, the fundamental principles, behind why things work the way they do.

CRAWFORD: Would you say that at that time, maybe you were more interested in the applications of science as opposed to basic science?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, and I think that my career has been that way, because a lot of the work that I do overlaps into biology or chemistry or something like that.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned this astronomy course that you took early on, and that helped to solidify your interest in physics. I wonder if you could talk any more about any particular experiences studying science as an undergraduate that stand out. Were there any courses or professors or maybe research experiences that were particularly important to you?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. When I was at Kent getting my undergraduate degree, for the Bachelor of Science degree, one requirement was to do a research experience, a semester project. A lot of what the projects were, were to go to the library, look up things, and write a report. I approached Dr. Dave Allender and was very interested in not doing something like that. “Is there a problem I could solve?” He actually had me work on some calculations. It had to do with Cooper pairs, which has to do with superconductivity, and that was his area. It was more on the theoretical side, not experimental physics. At the end of the semester, I had read some very challenging research papers, did some calculations, wrote a report, and gave it to Dr. [David] Allender. He was apparently very impressed! [laughs]

I remember turning in my report—near the end of my second semester of my senior year, I think it was—turning it in, and the faculty member across the hallway, Dr. John Watson, was like, “Oh! What did you have her do for the project?” When Dr. Allender and I talked about it, I think that the other faculty member was like, “Oh, you really had her do something!” Not just go to the library and write a report, look up a few things. That was a really important project for me, as I was finishing up my undergraduate degree. It really stretched me. I think the first part, the first month, was really challenging, and I think that Dr. Allender wasn’t sure if I would actually get to a product. [laughs] But again, that struggling and trying to understand, and discovery, with help, with mentoring from a faculty member, and getting to a point where, like, wow, I was really understanding some incredible physics, some theoretical physics, that not a lot of other undergraduates had the opportunity to study, that was really important.

CRAWFORD: Just for the recording, you said that your project with Dr. Allender was about superconductivity and Cooper pairs?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Could you explain what those are, Cooper pairs?

CUNNINGHAM: Cooper pairs? Wow, okay! [laughs] Well, the way that superconductivity works is that there is an interaction between electrons that cause them to go down to a lower energy state, if I remember right. It’s the way the electrons pair that creates this special physical phenomena, and so the Cooper pair is this pair of electrons. Does that make sense?

CRAWFORD: Yes.

CUNNINGHAM: Did I explain it, in a way? I hope I got it right, it’s been a number of years since I’ve looked at this.

CRAWFORD: Sure, of course. [laughs] Thank you for that. You said that most of the other physics majors that had this research experience, they were doing library research as opposed to actual problem-solving.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, that was my understanding.

CRAWFORD: This work that you did for Dr. Allender, did he end up using it in any way?

CUNNINGHAM: I don’t know.

CRAWFORD: Thinking about your experience as an undergraduate, being a woman majoring in physics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were there other women as physics majors, and what was your experience like?

CUNNINGHAM: I think I was the only woman in my class. There were some graduate student women, but I was the only woman undergraduate. At that time, I think only about 12 or 13 or 14—less than 15%—of the undergraduate degrees were going to women. I believe that’s what the statistics are. So, it was pretty low. It’s not actually much higher right now; it’s like 25% of undergraduate degrees go to women, so it’s not that much higher.

CRAWFORD: You didn’t feel any particular difficulty or challenges?

CUNNINGHAM: Not overtly. Not overtly.

CRAWFORD: Just because of the focus of this project, did you learn anything about liquid crystals as an undergraduate? Because of course the Liquid Crystal Institute had been up and running for some time by the time you were a student at Kent State. Did you have any encounters with liquid crystals as an undergraduate?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. Actually, the summer between my junior and senior year, I spent at Kent and I worked in Dr. Doane’s lab. I worked in his lab, and I think I worked in another lab. I don’t even remember what I worked on, but I know I worked in the labs. I don’t remember the specific things that I worked on, unfortunately. It was a long time ago. Maybe Dr. Johnson’s lab.

CRAWFORD: Dr. Dave Johnson?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: At what point in your undergraduate career did you realize that you wanted to pursue graduate work or research in science? Did you ever consider going into industry after undergraduate?

CUNNINGHAM: When did I decide I wanted to get a PhD? Probably halfway through, maybe two thirds of the way through, I pretty much wanted to get a PhD in physics. No, I really didn’t consider going out with a bachelor’s degree into industry. It didn't interest me.

CRAWFORD: You finish your undergraduate degree at Kent State in 1982 and enroll in the MA program—was it a combined MA/PhD program?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. The MA, you could get that along the way. That wasn’t a terminal degree. There was some calculus put in, calculations, in doing that, because my senior year—actually the summer when I was working in the Physics Department, I met my future husband. He was a graduate student there. He was in the nuclear physics program. We got engaged in the fall of 1981. He wasn’t going to finish his PhD for another year or two. So, it kind of limited where I could go to graduate school if I wanted to stay with him. Of course living apart could have been considered, but we didn’t want that option. That’s when I decided to continue on at Kent. The reason for getting the master’s degree was if he got a job elsewhere and we had to move after getting his PhD, I at least had a degree beyond a bachelor’s degree for all of the coursework, et cetera, that I had finished. He ended up getting a job at one of the other regional campuses, East Liverpool, and teaching physics there, while I was finishing up my degree.

CRAWFORD: I see. What is your husband’s name?

CUNNINGHAM: His name is David Wolfe, with an “e” at the end.

CRAWFORD: Thank you. You joined the physics graduate program in 1983 with the intention of getting a PhD. You've already explained why you were going to Kent State. What was the subject of your graduate research, your doctoral research?

CUNNINGHAM: The subject was looking at the interactions between membranes, essentially the components that make up cell membranes, the phospholipids, but what causes cell membranes to be constructed the way they are. And, if you introduce different components to the cell membrane or ions, what happens? Does that impact the structure?

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could explain, what kind of components are you talking about introducing to a cell membrane?

CUNNINGHAM: If you introduce something like Vitamin E, or cholesterol, or something like that. If you've got a pure phospholipid, which is the major component of cell membrane, and you introduce these other things, how does it impact the structure? Then, say, if you put it in salt, does that impact the structure? To look at the structure, we used x-ray diffraction. We also looked at the temperature-dependence of these structures. If you increase the temperature a little bit, does the structure change?

CRAWFORD: Why were these questions particularly interesting at that time? What was the goal of studying these interactions?

CUNNINGHAM: If you think back then, even now, if there is some sort of defect or certain structure you want to create in the cell membrane, how do you do that? How do you change the cell membrane? For example, people with sickle cell anemia, the shape of the cell membrane is impacted. That’s a long whole thing, but say the shape of the cell membrane is changed; how do you get it so that the cell membrane is in a shape that doesn't have a negative health impact? Or it could have a positive health impact. The research we were doing was not even close to having any medical or biological—we weren’t going to do any sort of human subject research. But we're talking about very fundamental research. You make one little change, and what’s going to happen to the structure?

CRAWFORD: Was the structure of cell membranes well understood at that time, or what was the state of the understanding? In other words, did your work contribute to helping us understand how cell membranes are structured at all?

CUNNINGHAM: Like I said, really these are very fundamental. I doubt that there was any [laughs] person or somebody that was working on a cure for a disease that used the results of our research. But it was really from a physics perspective. Can we change the cell membrane? Or if we do, what does it look like? And can it be replicated.

CRAWFORD: To the layperson, this sounds like biological research. [laughs] What is the physics component of it?

CUNNINGHAM: What we also looked at was we were able to do experiments and consider the forces. What sort of forces are causing these structural changes? That’s where the physics comes in.

CRAWFORD: How did you come to this topic?

CUNNINGHAM: My PhD advisor, actually it was Leonard Lis, and my co-advisor was Bill Doane. It was Leonard Lis’s —he came with doing some of this research, and so when I joined his lab—he actually invited me to join his lab, and I looked at it and I said, “This looks pretty interesting.” He said, “I’m really interested in this particular project.” A project where it’s like, are different ions, how does that impact the cell membrane structure? I said, “Oh, yeah, I’m really interested.” That’s how I came about it.

CRAWFORD: You said Dr. Lis invited you to join his lab. Was that when you applied to the program or at a certain point after you had started taking coursework?

CUNNINGHAM: After I started taking coursework. Because I thought at that point maybe I’d be a nuclear physicist. [laughs] This area was much more interesting. Well, to me, obviously. But I had taken a course—actually he taught thermal physics, and we got along really well, and obviously he thought I was quality enough that he invited me to be part of his team.

CRAWFORD: What was it that attracted you to the work that he was doing?

CUNNINGHAM: I think it was that initial—when I was in high school—“Wouldn’t it be cool to combine physics and biology?” Here, four years later or five years later, is this opportunity to combine physics and biology again. It’s still really solidly based in physics.

CRAWFORD: Was that unusual at the time, this combination between biology and physics, or was there quite a bit of work?

CUNNINGHAM: It was less common at that point. I would say that if you went to the physics conferences at that time—the American Physical Society conferences—there were very few sessions. Now, if you go to those conferences, there’s a lot of biophysics sessions. As a graduate student, I went more to the Biophysical Society meetings, but there were a lot of non-physicists at those meetings. I think that was the other thing that was very exciting about this area of physics. It was very interdisciplinary. I had an opportunity to talk to many different scientists, from their perspective. That helps one look at a problem a different way.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned that this kind of interdisciplinary work in biophysics is now more common. Why do you think that is? What has changed since you were a graduate student?

CUNNINGHAM: I think a number of things. Techniques have improved, but also if you look at biology, biology has become much more looking at—how do I want to put it? Biologists are using more techniques like physicists have used to study whatever topics, subjects that they are studying. It has become much more—I’m trying to think of the word—

CRAWFORD: Prevalent?

CUNNINGHAM: Well, yeah, but biology is very much more at the micro level rather than macro. It’s very much more, like I said, using techniques that physicists and others have developed. I’d say from that perspective. Of course physicists have found this a very ripe area to do research. There’s a lot of research. Of course, there’s funding, too. [laughs] But it’s a really exciting topic. It’s an exciting area. I think there’s a lot of interest in doing this kind of intersectional research in these areas that intersect a number of different disciplines.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk more specifically about what kinds of techniques biologists are using that they have imported from physics. Are there any in particular that you are thinking of?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. MRI—and those of us in the science world would say nuclear magnetic resonance—has become really prevalent. For example, I have a friend who is a psychologist who [laughs] even in psychology, they're using this thing called functional MRI to study very specific areas of the brain. She studies memory and music, but she’s using a technique that was developed really by physicists! Does that give you a good example? I think that’s a really incredibly rich example. Neuroscience blossomed, neuroscience has exploded, because of these sort of techniques that were developed in physics, like NMR. Now we can study whole organisms but concentrated on certain areas.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned for your doctoral research you used x-ray diffraction to study these interactions between cell membranes and different components. Could you, again for the record, explain what x-ray diffraction is and how you use it? Is that also one of the techniques that is being used, or has that been superseded now by other techniques?

CUNNINGHAM: X-ray diffraction is still pretty common. How does x-ray diffraction work? X-ray diffraction is part of what we call the electromagnetic spectrum. We all know visible light. Our eyes see it. We see things because of visible light. But for very, very tiny objects, nanometers in scale, this light has a wavelength that is so large that there isn’t really an interaction between visible light and very, very small objects. What you need is a wavelength on the order of the size of an object in order for that object to be detected. That’s why you need very, very small wavelengths, and that’s the wavelength of an x-ray when we're talking about, say, cell membrane-sized objects.

CRAWFORD: It’s the same kind of idea with an electron microscope, right?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: If you want to study things that are even smaller than cell membranes. [laughs]

CUNNINGHAM: Right. Some of the techniques that we used, we needed an intensity of x-ray that—we had a cell membrane that we were changing, like heating up. We had components. We had phospholipid membranes that we were heating up, slowly, and we wanted to see how the structure of that phospholipid cell membrane, phospholipid membrane, changed as we were increasing the temperature. Most, at that time, lab x-rays didn’t have the intensity of x-ray to be able to get a diffraction pattern, a photo [laughs] essentially, of what is happening dynamically. We ended up going to what we call synchrotron sources, either in the U.S.—well, we were going over to a—we had a colleague in the United Kingdom that we would go over there and do our experiments. There are several of those—they're national laboratories, so we have a couple in the U.S. There are some in the U.K. There is actually now one in the Middle East and they're building one in Africa, and there are some in Europe, and so on and so forth. It does take a team of scientists to come together and do these sort of techniques. But it allowed us to see dynamically what was happening to the phospholipid membrane as we were applying heat. And, there are other things. You can change other things, but we were particularly interested in thermal properties.

CRAWFORD: A synchrotron is something that allows you to do x-ray diffraction and study a dynamic living system. Is that correct?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. Our systems weren’t living, but yeah, you could possibly do that. Basically what happens in a synchrotron is it’s a huge ring. I’m trying to remember how big it is. Not a kilometer, but it’s big. Let’s just say football field sized, probably even maybe a little bit larger. You accelerate a charged particle like an electron. It’s near the speed of light, and it’s going around in a circle. Magnets do that. They've got these huge magnets. As a charged particle bends, it gives off electromagnetic radiation. Depending on how fast it goes, basically it gives off a spectrum from x-rays all the way up to visible light. We're able to pick off or focus, get a particular wavelength of x-ray, tune that beam to a particular wavelength that we would then shine on our phospholipid membrane, to then get a diffraction pattern from. You have probably heard of Fermilab, right?

CRAWFORD: Yes.

CUNNINGHAM: That’s a different particle—they're accelerating, but it’s a similar technique.

CRAWFORD: I’m curious if you could tell us a little bit about how one gets access to a synchrotron, because as you mentioned, although there are more in the world today, there are only a few of them, and I imagine many scientists [laughs] want to use this tool. How do you get access to that resource?

CUNNINGHAM: Writing grant proposals! [laughs] You write grant proposals. If you do x-ray diffraction and need time on a major synchrotron source, you write a grant proposal for what we call beam time. Usually then you're allocated so many contiguous days of beam time. Like we say, “We need three contiguous days of beam time in order to complete this series of experiments.” You go through an approval process, and then hopefully you get funded so you can continue with your work.

CRAWFORD: This may sound like a question of ignorance, but why do the days have to be continuous?

CUNNINGHAM: Because when you set up an experiment, you don’t want to have to set it up and take it down for one day, and then set it up another, and take it down another. You want to have enough time that you can complete a series of specific experiments so that you can go back to the lab, analyze the data, and determine if you need to do anything else. If you want to complete a set of experiments, if you have a hypothesis of what is going to happen, you want that complete.

CRAWFORD: It took some effort to set up these experiments and then you want to have the time to do follow-up experiments if other questions come up, or there’s unclear results or something like that?

CUNNINGHAM: Or for some reason, equipment breaks and you've got to fix it up with [laughs] tape and whatever, you want a little bit of flex time built into that. Sometimes, the beam is down; something happens to the synchrotron itself. You want to be able to have enough time. Sometimes when the beam is down, they will reschedule your time; it’s like the whole time gets wiped out. But yeah, so you're always [laughs]—yeah. But as you can tell, it’s exciting to go to the national lab, and do these experiments, three days in a row, and you hopefully have enough team members that you're not up for three days straight! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] You work with other people, because the experiments are literally continuous, in other words 24 hours a day?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: Hmm! Who was the team that you went with? Was that all Kent State people, or was it scientists from other schools?

CUNNINGHAM: I went with Leonard Lis and we met up in England with our colleagues there, and that was Peter Quinn and Patrick Williams, and they taught at King’s College London. The synchrotron course was at Daresbury Laboratory, which is near Liverpool. Sometimes we would meet up at the lab at Daresbury. Sometimes we would meet just in advance to try and narrow down some of experiments that we were going to do.

CRAWFORD: Could you spell the name of the lab in the U.K.?

CUNNINGHAM: Daresbury. D-A-R-E-S-B-U-R-Y.

CRAWFORD: Peter Quinn’s collaborator was Patrick—?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, Peter Quinn and Patrick Williams. We collaborated with both of them.

CRAWFORD: Great. Moving from the U.K. back to Kent, Ohio, what were your interactions with the Liquid Crystal Institute? I know you said Bill Doane was your co-advisor. Did you have other interactions with the Institute?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, I actually did some static x-ray diffraction work at the Liquid Crystal Institute, because there was an x-ray diffractometer there that we just were able to stick a sample in. It took hours to accumulate enough of the diffraction pattern to analyze it, so, kind of static, so we weren’t changing the temperature. Or if we did, it would be change the temperature, hold it at that temperature for hours, while we took the x-ray diffraction of it. That’s what I was doing there.

CRAWFORD: That’s different from the synchrotron. Is the synchrotron producing like a series of snapshots, or a continuous like a video recording?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, it’s kind of a photo versus a video. The intensity of the x-ray in the synchrotron was so high that we could get this video, of the diffraction pattern.

CRAWFORD: Also a higher resolution, or—?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: Did you have other interactions with the Liquid Crystal Institute? In other words, did you have interactions with the grad students? Did you consider yourself part of the Institute?

CUNNINGHAM: A lot of the graduate students also worked in the Physics Department. It’s hard for me to separate the Liquid Crystal Institute from the Physics Department, at that point. The Liquid Crystal Institute was across campus. It was near the front part of campus. It was a small building, so most of the work was being done in the Department.

CRAWFORD: I see. This was when the Liquid Crystal Institute was over on Lincoln Street, right?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: Did you go over to the Institute to do work?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. That’s where the x-ray diffractometer was.

CRAWFORD: I’m just curious about understanding the Institute and its relationship to the different departments. You said that the LCI[1] was a major part of the Physics Department but they were physically separated. Did that make that relationship difficult, that physical separation?

CUNNINGHAM: I don’t think so. Like I said, I think that it might have been a separate Institute, but most of us that were graduate students—like Bill Doane’s lab was in the Physics Department. Even though it was physically somewhere else, I don’t think we thought of it as being very separate.

CRAWFORD: Okay, so even though the Institute had a particular home, in terms of the community, it was more nebulous than that?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: It was in Physics, but probably also in Chemistry as well, to a certain extent, I imagine.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: What would you say was maybe your most important experience in your graduate career?

CUNNINGHAM: I would actually say that interaction that I had going over to the U.K. and doing experiments there, interacting with this really broad group of scientists. Because Peter and Patrick also had other scientists from, for example, Sweden, that would come in during the time, the four days that we had the beam time. They allocated that time, like this group could have this amount of time, and that group could have that amount of time. It was getting together and talking about what we were doing and learning from each other. I just thought that was fascinating. It really did make a big impact. And of course, talking to the scientists that were permanently associated with the laboratory there. It was a whole different experience. It opened up this whole different world of what science is all about. It’s not just at Kent State in a lab; it is a community.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could say more about that. To you, what is the community of science?

CUNNINGHAM: I think that good science can’t be done without—some people might think it’s alone in your lab or whatever, and maybe the theorists—I’m an experimentalist. As a theorist, it’s kind of pen and paper. But you need that opportunity to share what you are discovering, and if you are stumbling, at a dead end or need some help, that you have that experience of talking with other scientists. Also sharing what you've learned and having other scientists ask questions about how did you get there, what does this mean. I think that science isn’t good science unless you have that community looking at the discoveries and asking questions and so on.

CRAWFORD: Just to make sure I’m understanding, you're saying you felt like that kind of community existed more at this synchrotron lab in the U.K. than it did at Kent State, or did you feel the community at both locations?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, there’s a community at both locations, but I think it expanded my idea of what that community consists of. It’s not just the scientists at Kent State. It’s not just the scientists in the U.K.

CRAWFORD: A more practical question—how many trips did you make to the synchrotron for your research? Was it just one or—?

CUNNINGHAM: As a graduate student, three, maybe?

CRAWFORD: It was something you did several times?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: In your discussion about the community of science, you talked about sharing what you are discovering and so forth. As a graduate student, were you also encouraged and did you publish papers and go to conferences and that sort of thing?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. Again, that’s part of the process of science, is going to conferences, sharing results, getting feedback, but also publishing papers. I think another part of science, in order for science to be done, another process, which I was not as involved in—I wasn’t as involved in my years as Leonard Lis was—that is getting funding for it, through grants. After I left Kent State, after I got my PhD, and really after my postdoc experience, started really seriously writing proposals to be able to do what I needed to do. But there, it did kind of start, because I was able to provide feedback on grant proposals, co-write research papers and so on.

CRAWFORD: You're saying basically your advisor would write grant proposals and you’d provide feedback on them but you weren’t necessarily a coauthor or a co-PI or anything like that?

CUNNINGHAM: That is correct.

CRAWFORD: To what extent did that prepare you for writing your own grants once you became your own PhD scientist?

CUNNINGHAM: I think it did to some degree, but I think it’s always a learning experience when you do it yourself. What it’s really like when you do it yourself.

CRAWFORD: Do you think it would have been helpful to have applied for some grants on your own? Was it even a possibility for a grad student at that time?

CUNNINGHAM: Less so. Back then and even now, for a faculty member, they usually write in graduate students and postdocs and on, so it’s never solely a graduate student writing a grant proposal. That’s probably not very common. Certainly there are smaller grants, but they're very small, that some graduate students get. The National Science Foundation does have a graduate research fellowship program. I don’t think it was in existence when I was a graduate student.

CRAWFORD: Which is to say that it was probably more common at the time that you were a graduate student for grad students to be funded by grants written by their advisors.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: I know from your CV you also worked for a short period of time at a company called the American Liquid Xtal or Crystal Chemical Corporation as a staff physicist. Was that experience significant in any way? If so, would you be willing to discuss it?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. I wasn’t sure whether I was going to get funded as a graduate student. I have to say—I’ll say this—I think I’ll say this; this is going to be recorded—but, both my husband and I were in the Physics Department at that time. The chair said, “Well, you both can’t get necessarily graduate stipends.” I’m like, “Well, wait a minute. That’s not right.” [laughs] I was a little bit annoyed. Then somebody approached me about this job, and so for six months or so, I worked there, instead of being a graduate student. Then they got back. I think they realized that I really did mean what I—that they really needed to fund both of us. We are separate people. It didn’t matter if we were married. Can you believe they did that? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Well, yes and no, I guess I would say. [laughs] Do you have a sense of why they said that? Is that because they were thinking in terms of—? Well, do you have a sense of why they said that?

CUNNINGHAM: No. And it might have been just one person, the person who was there at that point.

CRAWFORD: But you did end up getting a graduate assistantship or stipend or something, eventually?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. I came back as a teaching fellow and research assistant, yeah.

CRAWFORD: I know you only worked at this company for a short period of time, but there’s almost no record of it, as far as I can tell. Do you know if it had any relationship with the Liquid Crystal Institute? Because it sounds like it was a liquid crystal company.

CUNNINGHAM: The person who was president of that company had been associated with the Liquid Crystal Institute previously. I don’t know when he left the Liquid Crystal Institute, but he did leave it to create his own company.

CRAWFORD: Who was that?

CUNNINGHAM: That was Jim Fergason. Then the reason why it ended in November is that his company was bought out by another company. I don’t remember who it was bought out by. [inaudible] Something like Raytheon? I don’t remember, don’t quote me on that, but it was bought out by another company.

CRAWFORD: Did you ever meet Jim Fergason?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. He was my boss.

CRAWFORD: Oh, he was, okay. It was a fairly small company at that time?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. There were probably ten employees, or something like that.

CRAWFORD: Interesting. Thank you. Part of it is just understanding the relationship between the Liquid Crystal Institute and industry but also companies that spin off from it or are related to it, so thank you for that. So, you finish your PhD in physics from Kent State in 1987, I believe, or is it 1986?

CUNNINGHAM: Right before I got my PhD, I did go off to do a postdoc [laughs] so I kind of started early.
CRAWFORD: You started your postdoc before you had officially finished your PhD?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could tell us about your postdoc experience. Where did you end up going and what kind of institution was it, and what was your place in that institution?

CUNNINGHAM: It must have been the spring of 1986 that I was looking for a postdoc. I applied for positions. At the Biophysical Society Meeting, I think I interacted with Howard Brockman who ended up being my postdoc advisor. He was at this institute called the Hormel Institute. It’s associated with the University of Minnesota, and it is located in Austin, Minnesota. Indeed, it is right across the street from the international headquarters of Hormel, the company [laughs] but not associated with it. Had the name, probably was established by a foundation associated with Hormel, the company, but it was associated with the University of Minnesota. That Institute, at that time, they were very focused on lipids, the study of lipids. My postdoc advisor was looking at again kind of the physical forces between phospholipid membranes or molecules, but this time on a monolayer. So, it was a slightly different physical setting, but very similar in some of the questions he was asking. It was just like the Liquid Crystal Institute; it was a separate institute, had a very interdisciplinary team of scientists working there. It was fairly small. There were probably 30 scientists, maybe?

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the kind of research that you were doing. You said your postdoc advisor, Dr. Brockman, was focusing on phospholipid membranes that were a monolayer. Could you explain?

CUNNINGHAM: Monolayer, yeah. Basically, when you think of a membrane, it’s two molecules thick, stacked on top of each other. Maybe we need to back up and talk about phospholipids. Phospholipids have a hydrophilic and a hydrophobic part. The hydrophobic part is like oil and water; it’s going to separate. The hydrophilic part likes water. So, when you put a whole bunch of phospholipid molecules in water, they form this envelope that the hydrophilic part faces the water, and the hydrophobic part, they're like tails; the tails face each other. It’s hard to describe without drawing a picture. But it’s like an envelope. Think of it as a balloon, where the balloon skin is two molecules thick, and they're kind of opposite of each other, the molecules. If a molecule has a head and a tail, then the outside would be a head; that’s where the water would be. Then you would have a tail of that molecule. Then the next molecule would be the tail, and then the head, and then there would be like water in the inside. The technique he used—we would just take our phospholipid membranes when I was at Kent State and mix it with, say, salt water, and it would form these phospholipid membranes that are two molecules thick. The technique that we used at the Hormel Institute is that we would lay one molecule on top of a trough of water, and we were able to squeeze down the molecules until they folded on each other, and we could measure the force that way. I hope that makes sense.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. It sounds like a monolayer, if I’m correct here, serves the same kind of function as a phospholipid membrane made of two layers, but it’s just in one layer because of the way the molecules are oriented?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. The way that we put them on the trough of water so that we could get where one molecule fit.

CRAWFORD: Do monolayers occur naturally, are they a completely artificial creation?

CUNNINGHAM: I am not aware of any monolayer.

CRAWFORD: What was the particular interest in studying these phospholipid monolayers? Was it just to understand more about the forces involved and so forth?

CUNNINGHAM: Right. We were particularly looking at the insertion of cholesterol in the membrane and how that impacted the forces.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little about the process of how you got the postdoc. I know you mentioned going to a conference and talking to Dr. Brockman. Was there a formal interview process?

CUNNINGHAM: I actually went and had an interview at the Hormel Institute, yes. So, interviewed, and then offered the job.

CRAWFORD: That process was fairly straightforward?

CUNNINGHAM: Fairly straightforward, yes.

CRAWFORD: I know you were at the Hormel Institute for two years, I believe, until 1988?

CUNNINGHAM: Mmhmm.

CRAWFORD: Was this just a research position?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Were you doing any teaching or anything?

CUNNINGHAM: No. It was just a research position.

CRAWFORD: Then in 1988, you take an assistant professor position at Gettysburg College. You're there for a year, and then move to Bucknell, as an assistant professor, in 1989.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this transition from the postdoc into an academic position. Was that your intention all along?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. Many postdocs, it’s a really interesting position where it’s like an apprentice position, although you don’t have your own lab, you can’t make your own decisions, and so you're still, like I said, an apprentice. You're still learning about science. At some point, you say, “Okay, I’m ready to go off and do my own thing and explore what I want to explore, do my own science.” I saw my postdoc advisor—I should step back. I loved being in the lab. I loved working on experiments. I liked looking at data. I love data! [laughs] I love analyzing data. I still do; it’s just different data, financial data or membership data, or [inaudible] data or whatever. But I still—I love data. [laughs] I loved doing that sort of thing. I looked at my PhD advisor, and he was in his office writing grant proposals, and writing papers, and never really—and I’m like, “You know, I can’t see myself doing that forever.” I wanted to be more engaged with other people. I loved interacting with other people. So, I said, “I don’t think I can go to—I think if I went to a research-intensive institution, I wouldn't enjoy it as much as being with students, interacting with them, helping them learn, and having a lab of my own, even if it is smaller.” That’s kind of the transition to Gettysburg College. I kind of made a decision late to start looking for faculty positions, and Gettysburg College had an opening at the last minute. They had intended to hire—actually probably I think they did hire somebody, but he wasn’t able to start his position in the fall of 1988 because his wife had an illness, so they were looking for somebody temporarily for a year, possibly longer. I happened to step in at the right time. Was interviewed for the position. I think they interviewed several people-and I got the job.

CRAWFORD: I’m curious to ask you about what you said about your postdoc experience and looking at the kind of work that your advisor was doing. You talked about how you were very interested in data and research, but also it sounds like you wanted something that was more social, more engaged with other people. But it sounds like you had kind of had that experience in your graduate work at the synchrotron, unless I misunderstood what you were saying.

CUNNINGHAM: But as a graduate student, I taught some courses.

CRAWFORD: I see.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. So, I taught some courses, and so I had a sense of that. And to go on and see faculty make [inaudible] courses and so on. So I wanted that blend.

CRAWFORD: Of research and teaching?

CUNNINGHAM: Mmhmm.

CRAWFORD: Again you move into teaching positions. Just for the record, you talked about moving from Hormel to Gettysburg. Why did you decide to move to Bucknell after one year at Gettysburg?

CUNNINGHAM: The position at Gettysburg really was just a one-year position. They were hoping it would be more than just one year. You know, administrations; what can we say? [laughs] The person that was going to step into that position, he was able to step into it a year later. They told me far enough in advance that I was able to look for another position, and I interviewed at several different places including Bucknell, and the offer at Bucknell came along. How could I turn down a—? It’s a top-30 liberal arts institution, you know? [laughs] It’s a great institution.

CRAWFORD: Would you say you were particularly interested in going to a liberal arts university as opposed to like an R1 university, like an Ohio State?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. I was really interested in undergraduate interaction.

CRAWFORD: What was your experience as a faculty member at Bucknell?

CUNNINGHAM: The first few years, oh my goodness, it was tough! [laughs] I think it was tougher than at Gettysburg College. I don’t know what the difference is, how to explain it. I think then it really hits you that you have to be really good at teaching and have an active research program. There’s still expectations for publications at Bucknell. So it was finding the right balance and becoming a good teacher. And also contributing to the service part, but particularly the research and teaching. It took me a while to be able to say that I was a better teacher. I don’t think I was very good at the beginning. [laughs] But I learned a lot. I found a community that could help me. It’s harder finding that community inside a small university, so I found that community beyond, with the organizations I belonged to.

CRAWFORD: The professional organizations that you were a part of?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: And that would be the American Physical Society, or—?

CUNNINGHAM: Actually, I would say it would be this organization called Project Kaleidoscope, which is now part of AAC&U[2], and the Council on Undergraduate Research. Actually I did not get involved as much with the American Association of Physics Teachers like the other organizations. There are local sections of AAPT; I knew people at the local sections. But I would say that I started going to the American Physical Society meetings to present my research at Bucknell. That’s when I think biophysics-type stuff—interest was starting at the American Physical Society. But that wasn’t really as much in terms of the teaching community that I associated

CRAWFORD: You said the first few years at Bucknell were challenging. Was that primarily because of the challenges associated with teaching?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: What types of courses were you teaching, just generally, at Bucknell at that time?

CUNNINGHAM: Everybody was involved in helping to teach the introductory physics course, teaching a lecture to like 300 students, many of them engineering. Because Bucknell has an engineering program. Everybody taught maybe a section of the lectures, like a month of lectures, but also we all taught recitations and labs. Then we also would teach an upper-level class like a Modern Physics. I taught Thermal Physics. I did teach a Condensed Matter Physics course at one point. And, junior/senior lab; we all taught that. It was a very collaborative department. It was a fabulous department, very collaborative. We could disagree with each other very much in department meetings, but we were all colleagues and friends. It was a really good place to be.

CRAWFORD: Was it a large department? Medium-sized?

CUNNINGHAM: When I started there, I think there were seven or eight of us, and then when I left, there were 11 or 12 of us. That was because there were several dual hires where we hired one of a couple and then hired the other one. It was like two-thirds/two-thirds position each. That increased the number—when I left, there were four women in the department out of 11, so that was pretty good.

CRAWFORD: How many women were in the Department when you first arrived?

CUNNINGHAM: It was me. [laughs] I was the only tenure-line position.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

CUNNINGHAM: A woman, yeah. I was really—it was me. The other thing is when I went there, the research part wasn’t as active, but there was a real desire to have a much more robust research program in the Department. In 1995—I guess it was right about when I was getting tenure—we had applied for a research experiences for undergraduates grant from the National Science Foundation which mostly funded those summer research experiences for undergraduates at large universities. But we kind of said, “Look, we're a small university. We have been building our program up”—since I’d been there, even a little bit before. We had a number of recent hires in the mid-1990s that we were starting to get a more robust summer program. So, we applied for the funding, and we got it. Because we said, “Look, we are different than an R1, a research-intensive institution, and we could provide a very close relationship between the faculty member and the undergraduate.” Undergraduates that needed that, that didn’t want to be thrown into a large lab, would have a smaller lab experience with us. Most of the Physics Department participated in that program and it became a really active department even during the summer.

CRAWFORD: I know from your resume that you were co-administrator of the summer research program in physics, I think basically from 1995 until you left Bucknell.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: What was your role in getting the grant? Were you one of the PIs[3]?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, I was one of the PIs.

CRAWFORD: The Department supported that, because they were interested in ramping up research experiences?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Great. I just had a couple of follow-up questions from what you were saying earlier. First, when you earned tenure and promotion to associate in 1995, were you the first woman ever in Bucknell’s history to be tenured in the Physics Department?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. A trailblazer! [laughs] A lot of these, yeah, it does seem like it, yeah. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: I’m sorry, you cut out there a little bit. It seems like what?

CUNNINGHAM: It seems like a little bit of a trailblazer in some of these cases, yeah.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. Well, and 1995 [laughs]—you know? Then I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Project Kaleidoscope and what that was, and how that fit into your career as a teacher and this period of transition at Bucknell for you.

CUNNINGHAM: Project Kaleidoscope is an organization, or at least back in 1995 it was a separate organization, that really looked at STEM faculty development. Like how do you make a faculty member—help them become good teacher-scholars, but also prepare them to be teacher-scholar leaders. That was a really big component of that. I think the thought is improving STEM undergraduate education, that was kind of the foundation. How do you improve STEM education? Well, it’s having good teacher-scholars in colleges and universities, but also building the capacity for leadership. Because to drive change in departments, you have to build leaders. So I got involved—I was just about to be tenured, I think. I think it was the summer after my tenure. Actually, I think I got involved—maybe it was the fall before I got tenure. Anyway, in I think the summer of 1995 or 1996, Project Kaleidoscope had a Leadership Institute that they brought for the first time, and the Leadership Institute was bringing together faculty in similar positions that I was in, so just about being tenured or just after being tenured, so right around that tenure decision, together with college administrators, so we're talking deans, provosts, and presidents, for a week, in a remote location, to talk about change, change management, building leaders, how to be a leader, and improving STEM education at the undergraduate level.

I was part of the first cohort that met in the mountains of Colorado [laughs]—there were about 20 of us—in this Leadership Institute. And it was really life-changing for me. It was an experience that I’ll never forget, and I have friends from that experience that I’ve been friends with them for over 20 years. It was really an opportunity to talk with a president, a real high-powered president. I’ve gotten to know other presidents. I’ve been involved with this Institute up until [about three years ago, just before the pandemic]. Not only was I a participant but I came back and was one of the facilitators for it for many years. Like I said, it was life-changing. It made me really reflect on what I did as a scientist, as a faculty member, and where I wanted to go as a faculty member.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could say more about that. How did it change your thinking about your work as a scientist and what you saw your trajectory in academia being?

CUNNINGHAM: I’ll put it this way. I don’t know if it really solidified during that first leadership institute, but I met people there who mentored me over the last—I mean, one person I met there who is still one of my mentors. I haven't talked to him lately; I need to call him up. These were people I would go to, saying, “I’m at this juncture. What should I do?” Or, “I have this opportunity.” Or, “What do you think my opportunities should be?” They helped mentor me over the past I think 20 years in that respect. Does that answer your question?

CRAWFORD: Yeah. I think also it would help if you could say a little bit more about who is behind Project Kaleidoscope. Is it funded by a particular organization or a federal grant? What were its origins or who was behind it?

CUNNINGHAM: The person who founded Project Kaleidoscope is Jeanne Narum. She’s an interesting person. If you ever have a chance to interview her—she must be in her eighties now. I haven't seen Jeanne for a couple of years.

CRAWFORD: I’m sorry, could you—?

CUNNINGHAM: Jeanne. [J]-E-A-N-N-E. Narum. N-A-R-U-M.

CRAWFORD: Thank you.

CUNNINGHAM: She started her life—she actually said she was originally a church organist, not in science at all. But she ended up at I think it was St. Olaf. She was like a development officer there, I believe. Then, she saw that there was a real need to help STEM faculty, science faculty, be better grant writers and learn where they could get funding to support their research. Particularly at primarily undergraduate institutions; that’s where she started. How do you help the faculty provide those experiences, authentic research experiences, to undergraduates at primarily undergraduate institutions? So she went off and formed this organization called the Independent Colleges Office, and that program brought together development officers from primarily undergraduate institutions to help them procure funding for the faculty, science faculty. Then she realized, it’s not just the development officers; there’s scientists. That she wanted to build faculty leaders in science. Then she created Project Kaleidoscope to really build the faculty leaders of the future. It’s a really interesting organization. And, about ten or so years ago, Jeanne was getting a little bit older, and she knew that she wanted to step down from this position, and so she found a home for Project Kaleidoscope with the American Association of Colleges and Universities. They took over the project. It is still going. They still do a STEM faculty leadership institute. And they run an annual conference to share undergraduate STEM education reform.

CRAWFORD: Great. Again, forgive me if this seems like somewhat of a simple question, but what does it mean to be a faculty leader?

CUNNINGHAM: That’s a great question. To be a faculty leader—and Project Kaleidoscope really took this perspective—is you could be a leader as—you didn’t have to have the title of dean or provost or even department chair to bring about reform in your department. That you could take it as somebody who has the first-year physics course, or runs an undergraduate physics summer research program, or that sort of thing. But, also equipping those faculty to seek out administrative positions, as a department chair or a dean or a provost. Because really, we need administrators that have had that experience being a science or STEM faculty member. It’s not just the humanities that should be [inaudible]. That there really are great leaders that can come from the science and STEM disciplines.

CRAWFORD: I have a few follow-up questions. One is, when you joined Project Kaleidoscope in the mid 1990s—1994, 1995—and it’s specifically targeted to developing STEM faculty to become leaders in these various ways that you have suggested, but also to bring about reform—was there a particular kind of reform that the project or that you as an individual felt was needed at universities or in science departments?

CUNNINGHAM: The reform really—and I think many of us that have been around since the 1990s or so—it’s how you go from—and I’ll say it this way—"the sage on the stage,” to “the guide on the side.” How do you go from, “Here’s the information you're supposed to learn” to really engaging students in the learning process? That’s the reform that we're talking about.

CRAWFORD: So there was a sense in the mid 1990s that this kind of flipping the classroom, student-centered learning, that that was a necessary reform?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Why was that? I know it sounds kind of obvious, because we think [laughs] in this way now, but why did the “sage on the stage” model seem no longer sufficient? Because that had been the model for decades, centuries.

CUNNINGHAM: Centuries, yes. And there are some places it still is [laughs], unfortunately. We all think that the best way to learn is by doing. That model of the sage on the stage works for some, but really it excludes a lot of students [laughs] from meeting their potential.

CRAWFORD: Was this a kind of reform that you were interested in bringing about before you joined Project Kaleidoscope?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: How did you hear about Project Kaleidoscope?

CUNNINGHAM: My dean nominated me to be part of Project Kaleidoscope.

CRAWFORD: Oh, okay.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah! She said, “I think you would be really good for this. Would you like me to nominate you?” I’m like, “Oh, that sounds really fascinating. Yes!”

CRAWFORD: Was your dean a STEM faculty at that time?

CUNNINGHAM: She’s a psychologist. It was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Yeah, she had the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences.

CRAWFORD: At that time in the mid 1990s, was there a sense that there—? You had talked about this sense that there was a need for administrators that have experience in the sciences or in STEM. Was it the case that there weren’t that many STEM faculty going into university administration at that time, or was that your perception?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. I think it may be still true. I don’t know the statistics. But definitely then, for sure.

CRAWFORD: I can say from my experience at Kent State, every dean that I have had has been a scientist. [laughs]

CUNNINGHAM: Really!

CRAWFORD: In the 13 years I’ve been here, yeah.

CUNNINGHAM: Because Dr.—who was the previous—not the current dean of Arts and Sciences—

CRAWFORD: Jim Blank. Yeah, he was a biologist. I think his predecessor may have been in the social sciences, maybe. Was maybe a psychologist or something. I know the guy who hired me was also in the Biology Department.

CUNNINGHAM: I’m trying to remember who—I don’t remember who was before Jim. Now, it’s Mandy.

CRAWFORD: Right, who is in geography. I don’t know if that falls in the sciences or not. [laughs]

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, I didn’t think about that. It’s funny, because when I always went to the provost—there’s a group of—the Council of Independent Colleges—when I became provost at Illinois Wesleyan, there was a gathering of provosts every year, chief academic officers meeting, and it was very highly humanities. [inaudible]

CRAWFORD: I know you've moved into this position at the American Association of Physics Teachers, but would you say that your impression is still the case that administration is dominated by humanities faculty?

CUNNINGHAM: I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the case or not. I can’t say.

CRAWFORD: Now, there are programs where you can get degrees in higher education. You can get a PhD or an educational doctorate in higher ed. Again, just given your experience, I’m curious what you think about those sorts of programs. Do you see those as vehicles for developing the kind of faculty leadership you’d like to see, or the kind of leadership we need at universities?

CUNNINGHAM: I will just say that I think going through the traditional science PhD provides that—I’ll step back. When faculty look at administrators, there’s this amount of respect that comes if the administrator has a similar background. That’s my experience. So I think somebody getting a PhD in higher education administration, I don’t—even now, I do interact with a number of administrators—I don’t know anybody that has gone that route. Having an administrator like a dean or a provost that has been through the tenure process, that has gone through that whole thing, people—other faculty—faculty will maybe have more respect for [laughs] somebody like that. I think that’s true.

CRAWFORD: I know we've been on this little bit of a sidebar here, talking about Project Kaleidoscope and so forth. I just wanted to return briefly to your work with students. You established this REU[4] program. I wonder if you could talk about, then, the kinds of research opportunities that that created for students. What kinds of research were you doing with your students at Bucknell?

CUNNINGHAM: I was doing very similar research that I was doing when I was a graduate student. Not similar to my postdoc experience, but as a graduate student. I actually did travel to England a number of times to work at the synchrotron sources, and also here in the United States. There’s a source here in the U.S. I kind of went back to what I was doing. It was easier to do it there, to do that research, and use a couple of other techniques that were at Bucknell, but mostly x-ray diffraction.

CRAWFORD: Did undergraduates accompany you to the synchrotron?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Oh!

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. And there were a number of times when my colleagues would say, “They're just undergraduates?” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Was that unusual for someone to bring an undergraduate to the synchrotron?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, I would say more so back then. I don’t know what it’s like now, but definitely then.

CRAWFORD: I noticed from your CV you are careful to point out publications where you have undergraduate coauthors and so forth.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: How common was that for the research you did with undergraduates to translate into publishable research, and how important was that to you to give them that experience?

CUNNINGHAM: It was really important for me to give that experience to students. It was common, of course, at Bucknell, to do that. [laughs] Maybe less common at a research institute, at Ohio State, or Penn State, or those places. It’s becoming more common now, I think, even at places like University of Maryland or whatever, to involve undergraduates. There’s one faculty member, one person I know at Maryland, who is a pretty powerful researcher there, and he has been involved in some projects with AAPT.[5] He is a string theorist, and he has undergraduates working with him!

CRAWFORD: Wow, wow.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: What is his name?

CUNNINGHAM: His name is Jim Gates. James Gates.

CRAWFORD: James Gates. Okay, great.

CUNNINGHAM: He was president of the American Physical Society last year. He was at University of Maryland, went to Brown, but I heard now he’s back at University of Maryland. The building where I’m in is very close to University of Maryland.

CRAWFORD: Just one other small question about Project Kaleidoscope—did it have any particular focus in terms of the types of faculty that it worked with, or just any faculty in STEM?

CUNNINGHAM: Any faculty in STEM. The focus is they're far enough along in the tenure. They could probably still be an assistant professor, but that tenure mark—so they have enough experience and are starting to think about their next steps.

CRAWFORD: But it’s open. In other words, it’s not targeted to underrepresented faculty or things like that?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: I know in 2000, you become associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bucknell. I think we've sort of already moved into this territory a little bit, but I wonder if you could talk about your decision to move into this administrative position.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. Right before I stepped into the position of associate dean, I had been on a couple of major university committees including the committee that determines promotion and tenure, and the dean had seen my work particularly on the promotion and tenure committee, and she knew that being the co-administrator of the summer research program in physics and my interest not just in physics and undergraduate research, but beyond. So she invited me to apply for this position. I was just like, “Well, maybe it’s something I want to explore.” So, I got the position. As associate dean of faculty, I worked really closely with new faculty, as well as faculty that were one-, two-, or three-year positions, and I really enjoyed that interaction, that faculty development. I wasn’t really involved in evaluation of faculty, then, but in helping faculty. That was a lot of fun. I helped do the new faculty orientation. I ran a couple of workshops during the year on topics. That was fun. I did evaluation of the one- or two-year positions—a one-year position, maybe if they were thinking about continuing on for a second year—but it wasn’t like tenured positions. For a negative tenure decision, that’s a pretty heavy decision.

CRAWFORD: Yes. [laughs]

CUNNINGHAM: So this was a really fun sort of position. The only part that really wasn’t so fun is I was responsible for assigning faculty offices. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Oh. [laughs]

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, I hear that laugh. Yeah. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

CUNNINGHAM: That was the least enjoyable part. But there wasn’t any sort of real contentious things with that. If we had been really space-crunched, I’m sure it would have been a lot worse. It was a ten-month position, so for two months during the summer I went back and worked in my lab. We had the opportunity—for like a half day during the week, I would work in the lab during the academic year, to try and keep things perking along. I didn’t teach during that time period. No, I didn’t teach at all, when I stepped into the associate dean position. But I worked closely with students.

CRAWFORD: The dean that invited you to apply for the position of associate dean, was that the same one that recommended you to Project Kaleidoscope?

CUNNINGHAM: Yep, same dean.

CRAWFORD: What was her name?

CUNNINGHAM: Her name is Genie Gerdes. Eugenia. And the last name is G-E-R-D-E-S.

CRAWFORD: G-E-R-D-E-S. Great, thank you. As associate dean of faculty, aside from assigning faculty offices, what would you say were the major challenges in that position? Did you have any particular goals or objectives when you took it on?

CUNNINGHAM: I think the goal—well, it was really developing further support for faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences, so, what kind of development, faculty development, could we do. Because of my background, I was interested in thinking about experiences beyond the classroom, not just in the sciences but in the humanities. What does that look like? How do you give undergraduates an authentic experience as a historian, for example? That was what I was interested in exploring and further developing.

CRAWFORD: Was part of it perhaps trying to help incoming faculty avoid some of the difficulties that you faced as a starting faculty member at Bucknell?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to experience this, but in the mid 1990s, the physics and astronomy community—actually AAPT offers now a new—since the mid 1990s— a new faculty workshop to really help faculty who—as a faculty member, at least back in the late 1980s through the 1990s, you get your training as a researcher. You might have experience teaching labs, maybe a course, but it’s like you're thrown into the classroom without really understanding what does that mean. So, what sort of things do faculty who this is their first experience teaching, what support do they need? You're right in saying that that’s really important. Also, it’s learning the community. Like mathematicians have now a new faculty experience. Geologists now—the geology community. So, there’s all of these communities starting to emerge, these experiences for faculty, to help establish them along the tenure path. Mostly teaching, but also how do you navigate the pathway, whether you're at a primarily undergraduate institution, or you're at a research institution. But at Bucknell, it was like, “Okay, how do I help faculty here at Bucknell?”

CRAWFORD: I don’t know exactly when this happened, but the demands on faculty are much greater now, or perhaps even in the 1990s, than they were when, say, your advisors were starting as faculty members. Or maybe there are different sorts of demands. I think an academic career is a difficult balance to achieve [laughs], right?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: So I can appreciate that work, for sure. In 2006, you take the position as provost and also a professor of physics, at Illinois Wesleyan University. I wonder if you could talk about that experience and your decision to move on from Bucknell and take this opportunity at Illinois Wesleyan.

CUNNINGHAM: As you can hear, I really enjoyed my experience as associate dean of faculty. It was a good experience. I said, “Okay.” There was not an opportunity for me to move up at Bucknell, so I started to explore options. Probably even a few years before that, I had started applying, and this position at Illinois Wesleyan came up. I got the airport interview, so I went there, and it went really well. I really connected with the faculty and the administrators and the students that were on the search committee. They invited me to campus and had me interview there, and it went well, and I got the offer. I decided to take it. The challenge at Illinois Wesleyan was that the provost had many different programs. It was a very complex university. Not only did they have the College of Arts and Sciences, but they had the School of Art, the School of Nursing, the School of Music. Was that it? Yeah, art, music, and nursing. And the provost also oversaw athletics!

CRAWFORD: Wow.

CUNNINGHAM: [laughs] The challenge was that it was a job and a half. And you can see that it was during the economic downturn, that 2008ish time [when I was] provost.

CRAWFORD: As provost, you were basically in charge of all the major units of the university, educational units, plus athletics?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. It was D3, though, thank god, but—you know. The football coach reported to me. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Wow.

CUNNINGHAM: The AD. I’ll actually say—the athletic director. The football coach reported to the AD, but the athletic director reported to me. And the year before I stepped into that position, a football player died on the field.

CRAWFORD: That’s difficult.

CUNNINGHAM: Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with that. I stepped in after they had put things in place to prevent it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to really know that much about it. I know some of what went on there. But it was a real tragic incident—hot day, summer, practice [inaudible], that sort of thing. So it was a lot to do, and an economic decline happened during that time period. The university didn’t have the same endowment as Bucknell, so the resources were more strained. There was a very rich medical health insurance policy that all the employees and faculty had, and the trustees tasked the president and myself to change it. So we're talking about a lot happening then. It was a real challenging time. A lot of my time also was spent on faculty issues. It was just a really hard job.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, and at a difficult time in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, I think when a lot of universities were feeling strained financially. Was that mostly what you were dealing with, was sort of the financial side of the university? I know you mentioned these faculty issues as well.

CUNNINGHAM: A lot of my time was meeting with faculty about solving some problem.

CRAWFORD: I see.

CUNNINGHAM: [laughs] But also, for example, how do we move to a health insurance situation that still retains a really good policy for the faculty and staff but ensures the financial health of the university? And you can imagine, any time when you talk about benefits to faculty or staff, they get very nervous.

CRAWFORD: I was just wondering, for the purposes of the recording, because we don’t know when someone may be reading your transcript or listening to this interview, could you explain a little bit about the role of the provost vis-à-vis the president or the board of trustees, just their function at a university? I know you've talked a little bit about it, but—

CUNNINGHAM: The provost is responsible for the academic programs in the university—that’s really pretty broad; it’s any sort of degree-granting program—and the support—students—staff that support—not student affairs, but the student side, the academic side of what students need support, for example, accommodations for classes, and advising if they are failing, that sort of thing. The registrar. And, like I said, in this particular university, athletics. It’s overseeing the hiring of faculty, overseeing the tenure-promotion of faculty, which included athletics, since [that fell on the] provost. All of that. Now, the curriculum, determining exactly what courses are taught, it’s a realm of the faculty, but ensuring that those courses are being taught really requires support from the provost, like there’s faculty to teach them. That’s really what the role of the provost is, to make sure that students can progress through the degree. Another thing that falls under the provost, for example, are study abroad programs. It’s all of that academic stuff that happens at a university.

CRAWFORD: Great.

CUNNINGHAM: The other thing that the provost did at Illinois Wesleyan is at graduation, the provost read the names of all of the students graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences. [laughs] Which is interesting. So I did a lot of practicing of names before graduation.

CRAWFORD: Was that a long graduation ceremony? In other words, were there a lot of students graduating?

CUNNINGHAM: I’m trying to think of how many students graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences. I’m trying to remember—at that time, enrollment at Illinois Wesleyan was 2,100 students, for four years. So, divide that by four, so probably 700 students, or 600 students. 600, maybe. 500 or 600 students. So reading that number of names. So, yeah, 500 or 600 students would graduate a year, something like that.

CRAWFORD: Your work in university administration, being the associate dean of faculty at Bucknell, being the provost at Illinois Wesleyan, obviously it sounds like your experiences with Project Kaleidoscope were probably very important to molding you as someone being prepared to go into university leadership. Did your experiences as a scientist inform your work as a university administrator in any ways?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes. Because I think there’s all of that that comes into being a scientist, like critical thinking, problem-solving. Problem-solving, there’s a lot of problem-solving that needs to be done. Communication. As a scientist, you have to communicate orally as well as written, so having clear, concise writing and being able to express it in front of a room of faculty, that’s really super important. Also working in teams. Because at a university, it’s about working in teams. It’s thinking about, how do you get buy-in, or how do you get consensus around a point. Working as a scientist in a team, you still have to think about, “Well, how are we going to approach this experiment? How are we going to solve this problem?” So it’s bringing different ideas in, and then coming into consensus about how you're going to move forward. The scientist that was there I think that was a really important foundation.

CRAWFORD: Great. In 2010, you make another shift and become the executive officer of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: We've already talked a little bit about the AAPT and its mission, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you decided to make this career change as well, and again some of the work that you have been doing at the AAPT.

CUNNINGHAM: That last year that I was at Illinois Wesleyan, it was clear that I needed to move on. So, I started looking. I had applied for some other administrative positions like dean positions, provost, a presidency or two. I did have some interviews, and I know I made the short list for some. I just—nothing felt right. One of my mentors—the mentor that I met at the Project Kaleidoscope summer leadership institute—

CRAWFORD: Would you be willing to give us that person’s name?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, his name is Jim Stith. S-T-I-T-H. He’s a past president of AAPT. I have to say that the executive officer position opened up the same time I was interviewing for the Illinois Wesleyan dean and provost position. And I’d interviewed for the AAPT executive officer position at that same time. I didn’t get it. Instead I got the provost and dean position at Illinois Wesleyan. And so this position opened up again, and my mentor, Jim Stith, past president, said to me, “Beth, you absolutely need to apply for this position.” I said, “Look, Jim, I applied for it four years ago, and I didn’t get it.” He said, “No, you need to apply for this position. You're perfect. You're the ideal candidate.” And I said, “Okay! I will.” I applied for it and made the cut, for then the in-person interviews. I did some research.

I had another mentor, and his name is Jack Hehn, H-E-H-N. I know him through Project Kaleidoscope, also. He was previously one of the associate executive officers of AAPT, but he had transitioned to being the director of education at the American Institute of Physics. I contacted him. I’m like, “Jack, I’m applying for this position.” He could provide some really good—Jim and Jack could provide some really good information to me as I was making my way through the process. Both of them are mentors of mine. So, I went for the interview and it went really well. I really enjoyed my interaction with the small staff, a staff of 20, and with the Board. I did have an interview with the Board. And I got offered the position. Before the plane landed from coming back from the interview, I was given the offer.

CRAWFORD: Wow! [laughs] As executive officer or now as CEO, what is your role in the organization? What are your day-to-day activities?

CUNNINGHAM: My activities, my main role is to manage the executive office. I am the one staff member who is a member of the AAPT Board of Directors. I report to them, [laughs] and am the only staff member that reports to them. And I manage the staff. I have a very competent staff. They're really excellent. We run national meetings. I have staff that do that. I have somebody called the associate executive officer, and his expertise is really running programs for higher education faculty. I have another staff member, a K-12 program manager, that runs our programs for K-12 physics teachers, mostly high school. We also have a membership department, since we're a member organization, so that department helps members with paying their dues and connecting to benefits and making sure that they have access to journals. We have two scholarly journals, so I help the editors of each of those journals. My main job is really working with the Board to ensure the sustainability of the organization. I have a finance department that does all the finance department stuff.

CRAWFORD: Presumably, you also have influence and a vision for the AAPT and what its areas of focus should be. I wonder if you would be willing to talk a little bit about that.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. I’ll just say we're very strongly member-driven. We help to provide the intellectual foundation or intellectual part of AAPT. I say that because of the people in the office, of the 20 staff members, three of us have jobs that rely on us being physicists. [laughs] There’s a fourth one that has a PhD in physics, but his area is communications. That means that all of the programs that we have, we do rely on volunteers to help us do those programs. The vision is, how do we provide professional development for physics educators? Part of that is the journals. Part of that is workshops for high school teachers. Part of that is also workshops and resources for high school teachers, and also for faculty in higher education. Where is physics education going, and what sort of areas do we need to develop? For example, we have a pretty robust resource program for faculty in higher education teaching physics to students who are in the life sciences. That’s one. Also we have another program about incorporating computation in the undergraduate physics curriculum. We run a new faculty workshop. But also we're very focused on transforming physics departments to be a much more welcoming and inclusive environment. So that’s our DEI aspect—diversity, equity, and inclusion aspect.

I kind of oversee all of the activities. It’s interesting that the way that we, the three physicists, have parceled our intellectual [laughs] part, drive, of the organization is Bob Hilborn—H-I-L-B-O-R-N—Bob oversees the undergraduate faculty or I’ll say higher education faculty programs. Mark Hannum—H-A-N-N-U-M—our K-12 program manager, really oversees the programs that involve K-12 teachers. I’m very focused on the diversity, equity, and inclusion part. For example, we had a grant that supported a peer mentoring program for women in physics and astronomy higher education departments. And, we had a task force that I was on that really looked at what AAPT—where we want to go in terms of our diversity, equity, and inclusion activities. But I still oversee the whole—it seems like a lot. When we talk about governance, the Board makes the decisions but I help to operationalize those decisions. Like we have a new strategic plan we passed this year. The Board provided the high-level strategy. Now, the staff, and in many ways in partnership with volunteers, we're going to operationalize that.

CRAWFORD: When you say the organization is member-driven—you talked about I think maybe running a workshop on incorporating computation into undergraduate education. Is it the members that come to you and say, “Hey, we really need a workshop on—” or “We’d like to see a workshop on this type of topic” or “This is where we see physics education going, and we need resources or support to develop these things”? Or is your organization coming up with the topics?

CUNNINGHAM: We listen very closely to the community. We knew that the community was very interested in how they could incorporate computation in their particular curriculum. We knew that there were a handful of members that were starting to do this work at their university and who were interested in getting together and thinking more holistically about how this can be done. We're kind of the organization that convenes this group. Since this is a national-level project, anything that’s—for example, we have a grant that supports it, or we had a grant that supported this project. The Associate Executive Officer worked collaboratively with this team of faculty members to write a proposal that was submitted through AAPT to the National Science Foundation. We're kind of the convener, the focal point of where collaborations happen in many of these areas, like physics for the life sciences, computational physics, curriculum, that sort of thing.

CRAWFORD: You said you listen very closely to your members, but how do you know what members are looking for?

CUNNINGHAM: We have two national meetings a year and so we see what sort of abstracts they’re submitting. And they often let us know—“I’m thinking about xyz, trying it my classroom. Are there other people interested?” Or, “I have this idea, and I think this idea would be of interest nationally.” That’s the sort of thing. They know us. Part of the job also is to make sure people know who to approach like Bob Hilborn or Mark or, myself. When we're at national meetings, the three of us go to a lot of—we meet with members. We go to sessions when we can. We talk with people, with our members and with the community. It goes even just beyond our national meetings. We know what articles are being submitted to our journals. Also other organizations like American Physical Society and us, we know the challenges that the community is facing nationally. For example, there is a high school physics teacher shortage. So, sometimes we partner together on some of these projects. We partnered with the American Physical Society on trying to figure out how to solve that shortage of high school physics teachers.

CRAWFORD: Great. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your work with diversity, equity, and inclusion, also known as DEI, in the sciences, particularly physics of course, and it seems like with regard to gender. DEI, as we know, is a recent hot topic at many universities, although it has been a longstanding issue, of course. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what DEI means to you and what sorts of projects you've been involved in, either with regards to the physics discipline or AAPT.

CUNNINGHAM: I’ll start off with this—the American Institute of Physics has a fabulous statistical research center, and they have been tracking statistics about physics for many years. Decades. They have been accumulating data about physics basically cradle to grave. So, who takes high school physics, broken down in terms of gender and race/ethnicity. Who gets degrees in physics at the bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD levels. Who is teaching physics. Who is teaching physics at the high school level. Who teaches physics at bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD-granting institutions. Physics has not done a very good job of really being inclusive; I’ll say that. The statistics are there. As a professional society, especially a professional society that supports educators, it is really incumbent on us to provide resources to our members and to have our own value proposition and vision be such that we are an inclusive organization and we help educators to have inclusive classrooms. Hopefully that gets my vision of what DEI means to me.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you have a sense—I’m sure you do—why physics has not historically done a good job of being inclusive. Do you think physics is less inclusive than other scientific or academic disciplines?

CUNNINGHAM: Physics isn’t the only one! It’s not just in the sciences. I think philosophy is very heavily male-dominated. Economics has been, too. But in the STEM area, physics and certain engineering has been—I think computer science is starting to get better. [inaudible] so much better. Psychology has changed so much. But I think all of us are still—in terms of being inclusive to women, I think it is an improvement. In terms of race/ethnicity, I think many of us are still struggling with graduating more people of color with bachelor’s, master’s, and PhDs. Or even high schools, when they graduate from high school, getting them into thinking about careers in STEM. So I think we're not the only ones, but we're pretty bad. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Why is that the case? Why do physics and these other fields continue to be so heavily male and heavily white? Do you have any sense of what is driving that?

CUNNINGHAM: It is the way that physics is taught, very much. I don’t know if it’s wholly who teaches physics, but it’s predominantly white males. Nothing wrong with white males, but that’s not everybody. Then going back to this authentic experience in science, to provide that, and how do you provide—? It’s not necessarily how physics is taught, but some of the implicit biases happen. Who gets to talk in the classroom? Who is told, “That’s great. You’d be a very great xyz scientist”? So it’s how do you change that so that—? It’s also, instead of—here’s another really, really big thing in physics—instead of having a deficit approach, like “Well, they haven't taken calculus” or “That’s not in their background,” how do you think of what those students bring into the classroom? That’s a big thing. It’s huge.

CRAWFORD: Historically, physics has been seen as a quote-unquote “hard science,” right? In the hierarchy of the sciences, it is often at the top. Historically, science in general, but physics in particular has been cast as a male discipline. When we think about all the big-name scientists of the 20th century that people just can casually rattle off if they know them, it’s Albert Einstein, Feynman, the list goes on. But it is mostly [laughs] white men.

CUNNINGHAM: European men.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, Europeans. To what extent is this just a reckoning with this kind of long history of the way we've thought about the sciences?

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. I think it’s exposing that there are other scientists that are out there that made discoveries that haven't been recognized. Yes, physics, there is a certain attitude, an elitist almost attitude in physics, that I think perpetuates dominance by white males. [laughs] It’s just the way it is. That’s just the way it has been. But I do sense, I do feel, we're at this real pivotal moment right now, that we have an opportunity to change things. I really do see this generation coming up that they are very committed to changing the way that physics is taught, and I think there are some really exciting projects that we're doing, many of them collaborative.

I think that’s another thing. There are a number of different physics societies like the American Association of Physics Teachers. You heard me talk about the American Physical Society. Then there’s the American Astronomical Society. There’s the American Institute of Physics, which is a federation, so they don’t have individual members, but AAPT is a member of AIP.[6] But it’s a way of finding, how we can work together. Because there’s a little tension sometimes that the bigger societies are able to do more, even though the littler societies, we're the ones with the high school teachers. So we're finding ways that we can work together to start solving these problems. Part of it is finding, how do we work together?

CRAWFORD: Exactly. I wanted to ask you about one of the specific projects you were involved in, this YouTube video. You were the project lead for a National Science Foundation-funded video called HERStories: Wisdom and Encouragement from Women in Physics. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that project and the video that it ended up producing, and why that in particular seemed important to do.

CUNNINGHAM: A little bit of background about that particular project—every three years, there is an organization called the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics—they have a group that—part of the IUPAP is a Working Group on Women in Physics. Since 1999 and every three years up until the pandemic, they held an International Conference on Women in Physics. Just like the U.N., each country is invited to send a delegation to the International Conference on Women in Physics. The U.S. has been sending a delegation every three years. Then for the conference that happened in 2016, we sent a delegation, but also we wanted to figure out what we could do as a part of that experience so that we elevate women in physics in the U.S., what kind of project or product or thing that the delegates could do to advance physics in the U.S. or at least the participation of women in physics in the U.S. So, we said, “We have a fabulous opportunity that there will be about 200 women physicists at this conference from all over the world. We have this opportunity to provide a video that could be used in classrooms, in Society of Physics Students meetings, and so on, to show that there are women out there doing exciting physics.”

So, we applied to the National Science Foundation to get funding to attend the conference but also to produce this video. We interviewed a whole bunch of women at the conference. The product is—when I first saw the—I was part of the group that produced—I guess I was one of the producers, you could say, of the video, and the first time I saw it, I know I cried. It’s such a great story. I’m one of the people that was interviewed. It’s not because of me, but just the whole thing put together. And very early-career physicists saying, “This is what I really want to do.” There’s a really cute part of the video where this early-career physicist, she might have even been an undergraduate, explains that her mother was like, “Why are you studying physics? There’s just a bunch of nerdy boys.” She’s like, “Well, wait a minute, mom, I’m nerdy too!” [laughs] It’s saying it’s okay if you're a woman and are nerdy and want to study this really cool stuff.

CRAWFORD: You said you cried the first time you saw the video. Why was it so emotional for you?

CUNNINGHAM: I think because it just put everything together. It’s the story of women in physics. The very beginning part of the video is how we're all really excited about what we do. We're physicists; we do really cool stuff. The second part is like, but we have challenges. There are challenges that happened along the way. But the last part is like, but we're really doing physics, and we're having fun doing physics, and you can, too. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

CRAWFORD: It is a quite a remarkable video.

CUNNINGHAM: You've watched it?

CRAWFORD: Yes, of course, I did. It was great. We haven't talked a lot about your experience as a woman in science. We've touched on it a little bit. Did you have those kind of experiences where people would say to you—like you mentioned the early career physicist in the video whose mother was kind of essentially saying, “Physics is for nerdy boys” or “Why would you want to do that, because it’s for boys”—did you have those kinds of experiences?

CUNNINGHAM: I have had people tell me, “You're never going to be a scientist.” Mmhmm. Yeah, I have had—I won’t go into details, but I will just say that I have had an experience of being sexually harassed—it probably could be considered even stronger than that—by a person in power. I’ll just say that, for the record. So I think it’s really important. I’m a white woman, but imagine if you're a Black woman physicist? There’s a handful of them. I can’t imagine some of the challenges that they face. We really need to make change. And so, yeah, I’ve experienced it, but probably not to the degree that some other women have. And there are some women that I know have left the profession because they have had bad experiences.

There’s one thing—and we didn’t talk a lot about this—but one particular thing that we did, action that the AAPT took, in 2016, is that we were really on the leading edge of professional societies putting in a Code of Conduct for events. This is the way that you have to behave if you're at an AAPT event. We've had to deal with incidents being reported. We did a survey in the spring for this DEI Task Force—it was a climate survey at AAPT—and it really became clear from that, even now, six years later, that the most that are experiencing incidences of harassment are early career physics educators. We need to change that.

Since we put that in place, the National Academies came out with a report on the sexual harassment of women in the Academy, and it made some recommendations. A year after that—this is around late 2018, early 2019—the report came out in 2018, the National Academy’s report, and in late 2018, early 2019, a group of STEM societies came together and created the Society Consortium for Sexual Harassment in STEMM.[7] So that society has put together model codes of conduct, model honors and awards policy. AAPT was one of the inaugural members of this Society. This Society has been working very closely with institutions of higher education. Because sometimes the harasser—they almost always come from institutions of [laughs] higher education. How do we partner with them to really solve this problem and make not only the professional societies more inviting and welcoming and supportive, but also how do we do that in the Academy?

CRAWFORD: It sounds like from what you're saying, the AAPT, with its code of conduct, which I think you said was 2014?

CUNNINGHAM: 2016.

CRAWFORD: Oh, 2016, excuse me. But still provided a model or a blueprint for other organizations.

CUNNINGHAM: Mmhmm. I don’t know how much of a blueprint, but we certainly were on more of the leading edge.

CRAWFORD: What would you say have been some of the most significant achievements of the AAPT in your tenure as CEO thus far?

CUNNINGHAM: Wow. That’s a lot to think about.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

CUNNINGHAM: One of them is when I entered into AAPT, there were some financial problems, so I would say righting the ship and making sure that we were on a pathway to sustainability. Although now it has become challenging again, because the pandemic has impacted many different sectors including professional societies. We have a really solid investment now, investment portfolio, which will help us. So I’d say that that was a real accomplishment. Team accomplishment of course; I didn’t do it by myself. None of this is done by a single individual.

I would say that our work in DEI, like the code of conduct and the progress we're making, has been—and we will continue to make—is going to be a long journey. But I think that doing that, having a grant to support women, whether it’s the video that we made or whether it’s forming peer groups of women that support each other, and our other work in diversity, equity, and inclusion. We've run some workshops on how to build an inclusive classroom. Also I would say other accomplishments are things like building this resource for faculty who teach physics for the life sciences. It’s strengthening our K-12 resources, and strengthening how we build future leaders at the high school level. It’s also continuing to think about, in the 21st century, what an undergraduate degree in physics should be. We've had a number of projects with that. And that’s going to continue. We're kind of starting the next cycle of that. I think those are some of the accomplishments that I can think of.

CRAWFORD: I just have a couple more broader questions. I know we're getting close to the end of our time here, and I want to be mindful of that. I know we've been talking a lot about where the physics profession needs to go in terms of DEI and science education and so forth, but I wanted to encourage you, as we're wrapping up, to think backwards a little bit. What would you say in your view, given your trajectory through physics and academia and higher education and so forth, what do you see as some of the most significant developments in physics or physics education? Those could be intellectual developments, or some of these social, pedagogical, philosophical developments. What do you see as some of the most significant ones?

CUNNINGHAM: Wow.

CRAWFORD: Or significant changes, even.

CUNNINGHAM: I would say that the development of the research area of physics called physics education research over the past 30 years is pretty significant. It’s really understanding how people learn physics. Even though there are a whole lot of theories about how people learn, translating that to in the classroom is still an ongoing project. But still, having that as a significant established physics research area is very important. I think that’s a really important development. I think the transformation of the classroom into one where it’s student-centered, which dovetails with the PER—physics education research—but that is significant, because I feel like that has really changed how students learn. We're starting to open up doors, but we still have a lot of work to do, thinking about the DEI stuff. But I think even having the community be more thoughtful about this problem that we have, that physics has not been an inclusive career path for many. I think even having the community think about that is important.

CRAWFORD: Definitely. What advice would you give to, say, an undergraduate student, either at the beginning of their career at the end of their career, seeking a career in science? What advice would you give to that person?

CUNNINGHAM: I would say that getting a degree—I’ll just say getting an undergraduate degree—in physics will allow you to have a fabulous career and life. It doesn't have to be a graduate student and going to a PhD and becoming a faculty member. If you want to, that’s great. Even after getting a PhD, it doesn't mean becoming a faculty member. There are many, many opportunities that are out there that are very enriching and rewarding. And it sets you up for a lifetime of learning, of always learning, which I love to do. I would say it sets up a person for that. I think that’s my advice. And, look for those special opportunities. I think that’s kind of my pathway. It has, as you see, not been a—kind of in the academic side, kind of stepping up, but then making the translation to administration, but then jumping over to a professional society—I didn’t know I was going to do that when I got an undergraduate degree!

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Right. Great.

CUNNINGHAM: And it’s incredibly rewarding work. And the thing about being in the position I am, I get to work with all the people I worked with as an administrator in many ways, or as a faculty member, but I get to work with them on all a lot of fun things. They're not my staff member; they're a colleague! [laughs] I don’t have to deal with all that staff or faculty stuff. We're colleagues. I think that’s another thing that makes it fun.

CRAWFORD: There’s one smaller question I wanted to ask you. You used this phrase several times when you were talking about physics education and some of the programs you've worked on and initiatives to enrich or improve physics or science education. You talked about this idea of “an authentic experience in science.” I wonder if you could explain what you mean by that. What is an authentic experience in science?

CUNNINGHAM: I think that can be interpreted many different ways. But it’s providing an opportunity for a student to learn and explore on their own. It’s not a cookbook lab experience. I’ve had those, when I was an undergraduate. But it’s giving them an open-ended question. Maybe—there is probably an answer, if you're an undergraduate, right? Especially in an introductory physics course. But it’s allowing the student to explore, as a scientist would, how at step one, do this, step two, do that, step three. You know? Giving them enough knowledge that they can start thinking about, well, how would I solve that problem? That’s what I really mean by an authentic experience. It doesn't have to be producing original research, but it’s authentic experience.

CRAWFORD: In the sense of maybe working on a problem that, even though it may have already been solved, you don’t necessarily know the solution.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Which is what scientists are doing. They're pushing the frontiers of knowledge. They don’t know the answers, because the answers they are looking for don’t exist yet. [laughs] Right?

CUNNINGHAM: Exactly.

CRAWFORD: I just wanted to ask one final question, which I have been asking all my interviewees. We are, and have, just lived through the COVID pandemic. Certainly it’s maybe not as intense as it was, but it’s still a part of our lives. Given this historical moment that we're in, I wonder if you could just say a few things about how the COVID pandemic had an impact on you either professionally or personally, however you want to take the question.

CUNNINGHAM: Oh, wow. Professionally, it’s kind of this stepping back and seeing what is important for the organization, and really thinking about—we had to do things very differently, especially during the height of the pandemic. It made the AAPT Board reflect on, do we do things the way we've always done it? It reframed what we did, what we're doing, professionally. Personally, I worked really hard during that first part of the pandemic. [laughs] Fortunately, I don’t have any children, no young children. That would have been really hard. Everyone talks about how hard that is, and I see that. But I think it was a time—and this is very personal, but I’m happy to reflect on this—my mother—my brother was living with my mother at that point, and it was clear that she was starting to see some—she turned 96 in April of this year, but a year or so ago, even before, maybe a year and a half ago, like right January 2021, something like that, but during—it was really hard on her, and we started to see some significant decline. We ended up putting her in a nursing home in August of 2021, and so it was a lot of going through the house. My brother and I co-own the house. My mother put it in our name many years ago. So it was cleaning up the house. Then my mother passed away at the end of June of this year.

CRAWFORD: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

CUNNINGHAM: So, just reflecting on how hard the pandemic has been on everybody. Even with that, it was a real experience to go through, through the pandemic. But also, it allowed me to spend a little bit more time with my brother and his wife, and to appreciate him and what he was doing in taking care of my mother, because she lived in Ohio, Northeast Ohio. But also that connection. I think it’s reconnecting. I know that was very personal, but that’s—the way it is.

CRAWFORD: I really appreciate that. I think certainly for many of us, the pandemic has been an opportunity both in our professional lives and our personal lives to kind of rethink things and reconnect and reevaluate.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

CRAWFORD: I really appreciate that. I want to thank you, Dr. Cunningham, for your time for this interview. I just hope you could stay on the line for just a couple minutes after I turn off the recorder so we can just discuss next steps.

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

[End]

________________
[1] Liquid Crystal Institute
[2] The American Association of Colleges and Universities
[3] Principal investigators
[4] Research Experiences for Undergraduates
[5] American Association of Physics Teachers
[6] American Institute of Physics
[7] Science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.