Oral History Interview with Renate Crawford by Matthew Crawford

January 24, 2023

Location of Interview: Phone interview from Matthew Crawford’s office at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

DR. 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. Today is January 24th, 2023, and I am interviewing Dr. Renate Crawford. We are conducting this interview over the phone, in my office in the Department of History at Kent State in Kent, Ohio. Dr. Crawford, thanks for agreeing to speak with me today.

DR. RENATE CRAWFORD: Oh, it’s absolutely my pleasure, Matt.

M. CRAWFORD: Could you tell us your current institutional affiliation and title?

R. CRAWFORD: I am currently and have for the last seven years been at Miami University. That’s in Oxford, Ohio. I have a dual role there both as the University Ambassador, which is Miami’s way of saying First Lady, as my husband, Greg Crawford, is the president of Miami University. In addition to that, because of my physics background, I am also an adjunct family faculty member in the Department of Physics here, where I teach.

M. CRAWFORD: Thank you. We'll certainly have an opportunity, I hope, to talk about your work at Miami University. I know you've moved out of science, but when you were active in science, how did you identify yourself as a scientist and your field of research?

R. CRAWFORD: My field of research stayed with liquid crystals. When I was a faculty member and had both graduate students and undergraduate students working in my lab, I’ve always identified as a physicist. I know in liquid crystals, we have scientists of every kind, but I definitely identified as a physicist and worked always in a physics department, and continued my research on liquid crystals, mostly in optics of liquid crystals.

M. CRAWFORD: Thank you. I wanted to start by talking about your childhood. I wonder if you could tell us what year you were born, where you grew up, and what your early childhood was like.

R. CRAWFORD: I was born in 1968 in the Netherlands, so I’m Dutch. I’m from Holland. I moved to the United States when I was just 16 years old as a junior in high school. So, growing up I would probably identify mostly as being Dutch because that’s where a lot of my formative years were before moving to the Cleveland, Ohio, area where my dad was getting a job with—at the time it was Sohio, Standard Oil of Ohio—and then later became VP of Research.

M. CRAWFORD: What brought you and your family to the United States when you were 16?

R. CRAWFORD: That is a very interesting question. My dad was a physicist. He worked at the Technical University of Delft, and that’s close to Rotterdam, working on solar cells. He went to a conference in the United States. When he came back, he said that we would be moving to the U.S. I thought it was a joke, and went back to whatever I was doing at the time. And three months later, I was enrolled in high school in the Cleveland area, actually, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Sohio, Standard Oil of Ohio, had purchased some patents or bought the rights to some of his patents and then also asked if he wanted to accompany those patents over to the United States. My parents told me it would be for a year, and so it seemed like a great adventure. Looking back, as an adult, on that, one does not sell a house and move all of their furniture in a boat that takes two months to cross the ocean, for a one-year adventure—

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: —so it was a good move on their part to make me think it was for one year, and once I was settled and very happy in Chagrin Falls, they're like, “Oh, yes, we're staying.”

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] How was the transition for you? Was it challenging?

R. CRAWFORD: In many ways, yes, in that English clearly was not my first language. Dutch was. But the nice thing about the Dutch school system—it’s very different than the U.S. school system—but the nice thing I was referring to is that you grow up from a very early age learning a lot of languages. So growing up in already what would be I guess the equivalent of middle school, here, because the school system is indeed very different, but I think it would be about the equivalent of middle school, I had to learn English, French, German, obviously Dutch, Latin, and Greek.

M. CRAWFORD: Wow.

R. CRAWFORD: Latin and Greek being the old languages, so not the spoken Greek language. But English certainly was part of that, and that came in very handy. But still, being a junior in school, it appeared that math is the same language, and science is the same language everywhere. When it came to like my history or U.S. government classes, I think I had about three lines of notes after a class period where everybody would have like, I don’t know, maybe 30 pages—those three lines is all I got! And there’s a lot of colloquialisms. British English, which is what you learn in the Dutch school system or any European school system, is also quite different than in the U.S., especially in terms of slang and the language used by 16-year-olds.

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yes, of course. [laughs] At what age did you become interested in science?

R. CRAWFORD: I entered college as a business major. My dad always—maybe jokingly, maybe reverse psychology; I don’t know what it was—but he didn’t think that I would enjoy physics. I always I think found it interesting. It was part of my daily life. But it was never something I was interested in studying, quite honestly. I entered college as a business major, and left with a PhD in physics, so clearly I changed direction somewhere along the way, and that was after my freshman year when I got a job at LCI [Liquid Crystal Institute]!

M. CRAWFORD: You got a job at the LCI after your first year at Kent State?

R. CRAWFORD: Yes, I think it was as a sophomore. I started as a sophomore. That first summer after freshman year, I went home, held nannying and retail positions to get the needed money for college. I had already started to realize that—because I was taking some physics classes, thinking that maybe a business major and a physics minor were immediately going to make me CEO of IBM or [inaudible 0:10:32]. Those are the dreams you have as a 17-year-old or 18-year-old! I started to realize that I actually really did enjoy those science classes quite a bit and started thinking about making that switch, but it wasn’t until I was looking for a position, knowing that again I needed to have a position to help pay for college. I figured getting one on campus would be very convenient. I applied for a job in my spring semester sophomore year at the Liquid Crystal Institute, and started working there almost immediately, already in the spring semester, before the summer had started. That’s when I realized that that is really what I wanted to do and what I wanted to focus on, so I made the official change. It may have happened prior; I don’t quite remember when I officially filed the paperwork, but at least in my mind that’s when I knew I had made the right choice, the changing, and I actually even at one point dropped the business minor. I had flipped them, making a physics major and a business minor, and that business minor became a math minor at some point.

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] Did that reflect a shift in your thinking about your career at that point, in terms of were you thinking more of going into science, rather than being the CEO of IBM?

R. CRAWFORD: I don’t know why I just so vividly remember thinking something like that, where every business—and that’s probably where the influence of my dad came in, recognizing the importance of science in everyday life. Also already at that time—that was in the 1980s—in every single business—it didn’t matter what business or what area you were going into—they were all going to have a scientific component to them, and understanding that component, even if you weren’t a scientist, was going to be crucial in these business negotiations or the meetings or whatever they may be. I think that led me to that original career choice of being a business major and then having a science minor. As I mentioned, having moved from Europe with the language change, and science and math, that language absolutely stayed the same. Because, again, the Dutch or European school system is so very different, I had already had four years of physics and high-level math before graduating high school, just because I had had that already in the grades prior to moving to the U.S.

M. CRAWFORD: I’m curious about this idea that you mentioned of the importance of science in everyday life. Obviously it sounds like you saw that as part of the household that you grew up in, with your father being a physicist. But it also sounds like you're saying that that was more of a general kind of cultural sensibility of the time in the late 1980s. Is that correct?

R. CRAWFORD: Yes, absolutely. I think it was definitely talked about more at that time, and all of the things that were happening with NASA and just companies switching a bit in general, it became more of a norm. But it was also something that I grew up with, and that later, then, our daughters grew up with. You talk about, why is milk white, and if you get skim milk, it looks grayer, or why is the sky blue, and all of these things that just become part of your regular upbringing as a child. Never meant necessarily as a science lesson, but always being embedded in there.

M. CRAWFORD: I just had a couple of minor factual questions. You said you started at the LCI in the spring semester of your sophomore year. What year would that be? Also, what position did you have at the LCI at that time?

R. CRAWFORD: I was just looking at all of the dates. I entered college in 1986, so that would have been spring of 1988.

M. CRAWFORD: What position were you hired for, as an undergraduate?

R. CRAWFORD: I think undergraduate research assistant? I don’t quite remember what the name was, but that would be the equivalent now. It would just be an undergraduate research assistant. I actually worked in the lab of Dr. John West, and that was a chemistry lab. [laughs] Especially in the beginning, it was just a lot of making samples, learning all of these techniques. But I never really had any lab experience besides what you get in your classes, and as I had switched just recently to physics, I really didn’t have any lab experience, quite honestly. [laughs] I was very fortunate they hired me!

M. CRAWFORD: What was it like working in Dr. West’s lab? Was there a whole lab group that you were working with? Were you mostly working on your own?

R. CRAWFORD: It was absolutely a lab group. I remember it very vividly. I remember interviewing with Dr. West, being completely intimidated by him. I interviewed with Dr. West and Dr. Doane. Then they gave me some reading, some papers to read, and I remember this story so well, and I relay it to a lot of the students that I have subsequently mentored in some form. They gave me some reading to do, and then I think I was starting like the next week, or two weeks after—it was very shortly thereafter—and I brought those research papers home, and it wasn’t the English that was the issue, but I really only think I could read the words “the” and “and.” [laughs] Even the verbs were things I had never heard of. And I was so intimidated. I was like, “Oh, no, I can’t do this. I should let them know I can’t do this.” Much later, speaking with them about it, they were like, “Oh, no, of course. We never had any intention for you to fully understand these papers. They were written by PhD scientists. It was just to give you a little bit of an idea.” The reason why I mentioned that story, and I’ve mentioned it to so many students since then that have come to me, and they're always working in somebody else’s lab, and they're like, “I’m not sure. Everybody knows what they're doing.” I relay this story, and I say, “Don’t worry about it. They don’t expect you to know everything. Before you know it, you'll be the one teaching the next undergraduate coming into the lab.” So, I remember that very fondly.
It was indeed a research group. Dr. West had a lab manager. Her name was Winnie, and quite honestly, I don’t remember her last name. I can totally picture her, I know her name was Winnie, and I don’t remember her last name. But she was phenomenal and really helped me out. There were also other technicians, [such as Mickey,] and graduate students. I do not recall at the time when I started that there were other undergrads working in the lab, but Winnie in particular really helped me in teaching me how to even take like basic mass measurements, like measuring out chemicals and lab safety, and all of that, how to work microscopes, and then later I moved into doing more optics work, and setting up lasers and things like that. So, they really guided me, because I came in knowing—now I can say that honestly—nothing!

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: At the time, you're not quite as aware how much you don’t know.

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] Were you mostly in this position assisting Dr. West and maybe his grad students and postdocs? Were you able to do your own research at all? Did you have your own research project?

R. CRAWFORD: It absolutely felt—and everybody will tell you—that I went into physics because there’s no memorization of any kind. Memory definitely isn’t my strong suit. But it absolutely felt that I at least had my own larger component of a research project. Since I was in that lab for several years, clearly my responsibility grew among those years. Maybe that first summer, it was indeed just making quite a bit of samples. But also not just making the samples for somebody else; I was looking at different phase temperatures, phase shifts, so it wasn’t just that I was washing the labware or anything like that. They definitely gave me the responsibility to have either my own project or like a sub-component of a project. So you definitely made your own individual contributions, which was amazing. But always there to guide you and help you. It teaches you when you should be able to figure something out on your own, or when you should go and ask for help, and give you the confidence to know the difference between the two.

M. CRAWFORD: I’m curious about something you said in passing. You said, “There’s no memorization of any kind in physics.” Could you say a little bit more about that?

R. CRAWFORD: [laughs] I tell my students, I’ve been teaching now for 25+ years, but yeah, I’m not very good at memorizing, never was. Which, by the way, in my current role [as University Ambassador,] is not that great, when you're meeting several thousand people a year. But in physics, I always felt like it was a big puzzle, and everything is logic. The equations, you may not remember every single equation, and you can certainly look those up. But understanding how the puzzle pieces fit together and the logic, I always found that to be much easier than trying to memorize like dates, like I had to do for my history courses, or my other courses.

M. CRAWFORD: That makes sense. It sounds like you worked at the LCI as an undergraduate laboratory assistant for maybe most of your undergraduate career? You said you were there for several years.

R. CRAWFORD: Yes. Because I was very fortunate, and sort of made a path—because it was there on paper, I think, but nobody had really quite taken advantage of it—where they had the combined BS/MA program. So, as a senior—I guess I was officially a senior—in my fourth year of undergrad, I was now also a graduate student. I had moved over to Dr. Bill Doane’s lab, because I was now starting my graduate work, started on my master’s which then later became a PhD. But during my senior year, I was already working towards my master’s, so I was now going to be working in a physics lab.

M. CRAWFORD: At a certain point during your undergraduate career, you applied and were admitted to this combined BS/MA program?

R. CRAWFORD: Correct. And the reason why I say like I charted it out—and not to give myself credit by no means—what I meant more with that is that the Physics Department had it on paper, but I don’t believe too many people had quite taken advantage of that. We had a few hiccups along the way, and trying to figure things out. What courses could you double-count? What courses would count for what? I’m hoping we managed to make it work, meaning I have those degrees in hand, so—! [laughs]

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] When you initially joined the Liquid Crystal Institute as an undergraduate research assistant, in the spring of 1988—and it sounds like it was kind of at this time that you were making this turn towards physics and really embracing it—how did working at the LCI influence or inform your decision to fully embrace physics? Was there something about that experience that encouraged you to turn towards science?

R. CRAWFORD: Oh, absolutely. I would totally credit that undergraduate research experience, where I saw quite a few different things that later shaped my whole belief as a scientist, and even to this very day. The Liquid Crystal Institute, the very unique thing about it —which I, at the time, and for the longest time, thought that was the norm, but then clearly learned that it wasn’t—was very interdisciplinary. You had mathematicians, statisticians, obviously physicists and chemists, and biologists, and I’m sure there were other scientists, and non-scientists, other fields involved there as well—all working collaboratively. In the shaping of my undergrad and later graduate years, I thought that interdisciplinary research was just the way it's always done. Now people are talking about it like it’s this new novel thing that needs to happen to solve these grand global challenges, and I’m like, “Well, yeah.” [laughs] That brought a very unique experience, in that you could ask questions from so many different people who all came in with a very different academic background and perspectives. It was also very—not just interdisciplinary but also international. All of these things that clearly are incredibly important, and people are recognizing that now, that’s how I academically grew up, having a lot of different mentors and people who were willing to help you. When they found out about an opportunity that existed that I may be eligible for, bringing that to my attention, or helping me obtain those positions. It was very great to be able to be part of that.

And, the other thing that I saw there, that now, in my current role, I also really recognize the value of—seeing the importance of research funding, both funding from companies and foundations. At one point, I remember very specifically as an undergrad working under a General Motors grant, so my pay in a way came from GM, which I thought was like the coolest thing, because I was working on sun roofs for cars. In my mind. I was making a very small contribution, but hey, in my mind, this was working towards the sun roof in these really fancy cars. I definitely did work on things for heads-up displays. It probably took me another 30, 40 years to be able to afford a car with a heads-up display, but—now I can explain to everybody how those work! If they happen to have one. Seeing the importance of funding, both government funding, whether it was from NSF[1] or DARPA[2] or DOE,[3] and from foundations, and companies. I saw the importance of collaborations and also working with government officials, and working with different companies in different states. That was my everyday norm, and now I see how people are really talking about that, so I think they were really very much on the forefront of all of that.
The other big component, and probably shaped me just as much, is that they had the K-12 education outreach. I became very involved in that, because I was personally very interested, and that probably is what led me into going—rather than into a career of going on the science side, whether it be at a company or at a national lab, going into academics, and continuing that K-12 outreach. Even this past weekend, I was involved in it, so that has stayed, for a long time!

M. CRAWFORD: I definitely want to talk more about your K-12 education outreach work. I have a couple of follow-up questions about your time at the LCI, and some of the things you were just saying. You characterized the LCI as uniquely interdisciplinary and international and receiving funding from multiple sources. From your time there, what do you think it was about the LCI that meant that it had those qualities? Why was it so interdisciplinary at this time when it sounds like that was fairly novel?

R. CRAWFORD: That’s a very good question, and I think the important thing is to remember on that is that at the time—I probably entered there at 18 and I left when I wasn’t quite 25 when I got my PhD—so we're looking at it from a perspective from somebody from that age. So I was not part of the administration or having some of that knowledge. We're talking about very much of external knowledge. But it’s also based on very, very fond memories. I think having the leadership that LCI has always had—for me, it was always Dr. Doane, who was the director, and who really valued and understood the importance of all of that, and then obviously showed us—I’m saying “us” because Greg and I were together at that time—the importance of all of those different components. As far as I know, I think the LCI was the only, or maybe there was only two, institutes in the entire world working on something of this magnitude, which required all these different components. It’s not just chemistry, it’s not just physics; there’s a lot of mathematics, and it’s also in biological systems. So there isn’t just one side of this.

M. CRAWFORD: When you say the LCI was working on this thing that required this kind of interdisciplinary approach, what are you referring to there? Just liquid crystals themselves, or something in particular?

R. CRAWFORD: I think that’s a hard question to answer because again, I’m now in my fifties, and I’m looking back to what I was thinking when I was like 18 or 20. But all the people were working on such different parts, and all had the one single theme of liquid crystals. Yes, there were people working on low-temperature physics. Then there were a lot of chemical physicists involved. There were really high-end cleanrooms, one of them that was just built when I was there, so I saw these really high-level cleanroom facilities being built. Then working on displays, whether they were the heads-up displays or the polymer dispersed liquid crystals or privacy windows. A few weeks ago, when our semester was ending, I brought in a PDLC, one of those polymer dispersed liquid crystal displays, to my class, to explain how many of the things that we have been working on in Physics 2, whether it’s from optics, to alignment layers, to polarizations, and electric fields, electric diodes, all of that came into this display. One of my students was like, “Oh, yeah, I think we use this in our ambulance , for privacy windows.” I’m like, “Wow, that is so cool.” Every lab, people were doing something very different, yet with a common theme. I’m sure there is way more to that, but again, I was looking at it with the eyes of a barely 20 year old.

M. CRAWFORD: I wonder if for the purposes of the transcript and the recording, could you explain to us what PDLCs are, as well as heads-up displays and privacy windows?

R. CRAWFORD: I will do my very best. [laughs] Polymer dispersed liquid crystal displays are when you have liquid crystal droplets in a polymer. Normally, if there’s no electric field applied—so they are between glass plates that are conducting glass plates, so that you can apply an electric field across them. Normally, without the presence of an electric field, [the alignment of the droplets is completely random,] they're in every single direction, and thereby scatter light in the very same way that clouds scatter the light. So they'll have that milky white appearance, very opaque. Upon the application of an electric field, they will align—these droplets will align with the electric field, all going in one direction, and thereby allowing the light to pass through and becoming clear. So you could change this from being an opaque window to a transparent window, and that’s why they're used sometimes in high-end privacy windows maybe like in office buildings, or hotels, or architecturally. I’ve seen them used in bathrooms, in people’s personal homes, where you can make this going from opaque to clear. You can also include dichroic dyes. These are dyes that then would make it go from maybe a red display for your lovely red sportscar sunroof, to a perfectly clear display.

The heads-up displays are a completely different kind of display. They're probably more your traditional liquid crystal display or LCD. But if you're driving in your car, literally whether it’s your speed or your GPS direction, basing it only on personal experience here, they will be projected out in front of you, like just past the windshield. So you do not have to look down to look at your GPS system or to look at your speed. It is right there in the bottom of your view, just past your windshield.

M. CRAWFORD: Your explanation of these technologies and also PDLCs gives us the sense that the study of liquid crystals has both basic science components—the fundamental properties of molecules and their behaviors and so forth, physical properties and so forth—but also technical applications.

R. CRAWFORD: Oh, absolutely. Obviously in my current role and then also knowing that I’m a scientist, I’m asked to give a lot of talks, to a lot of different student conferences and things like that, or introductions for an undergraduate research conference. I often times ask, I start out the question, saying, “I worked with liquid crystals” or something like that. “Have any of you ever been near liquid crystals?” And nobody raises their hand.

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: I’m like, “Okay, so raise your hand and leave them up if you've ever heard of—” and then I list them all—"cell phone, your laptop, a flatscreen TV, a smartwatch, and calculator”—and you just go and on and on. Then I’m like, “You're welcome!” [laughs]

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: People don’t recognize—I don’t know how many LCDs they're in contact with on a daily basis, but it is a lot.

M. CRAWFORD: For you, as a student at the Liquid Crystal Institute, from your undergraduate career through your PhD, or even in just your career as a scientist, how important is this kind of balance of basic research versus application? Did you have any particular interest in one approach or the other? How do you approach that?

R. CRAWFORD: For me, that was very important. It was actually seeing the applications—what probably made me do that switch into the sciences. Because physics no longer was, oh, a block slides down an inclined plane, or you drop something off the top of a building and see how long it takes, to calculate the height of the building. Those are the things people think of when they're talking physics. Now, I saw, whether it was the displays, or the heads-up displays, or even how it was being used for food safety—that you could tell if a frozen product had been brought above a certain temperature because the display would change—I saw all of these different applications. Even mood rings! When people had that. The cups that change color when you put your hot coffee in there. All of those things, that gave physics a whole new perspective to me, and made me very interested in it. Of course when you're doing your PhD research, that’s very basic research, but the long view of that was still an application. So for me, the applications were always the draw, although when you're doing your PhD research, it’s very basic research.

M. CRAWFORD: I would like to talk about your PhD research as well. I just have a couple other questions from this early period from your undergraduate career. Why did you come to Kent State in the first place? How did you end up at Kent State University as an undergraduate?

R. CRAWFORD: That is a good question. I don’t necessarily have a good answer for that except for that, as I had mentioned, I moved to the United States as a junior in high school. I was told I needed to take this test that’s coming Saturday, and bring a #2 pencil. Apparently that was the SAT! [laughs] I had just moved to the United States. I also didn’t quite understand the whole college system, and Kent State was about 30 minutes away from where my parents lived. So, I went with that! I’m very fortunate that I did! It just really wasn’t a well-thought-out plan like people now have. I know when our own daughters went through that process, it was very different from me. It was like, “Oh, yeah, well, this one’s close by. We'll go there.”

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] You didn’t consider, for example, going back to the Netherlands for university or something like that?

R. CRAWFORD: No, it’s just such a completely different system. Quite honestly, it never really even occurred to me.

M. CRAWFORD: Relating to your time as a lab assistant, you mentioned that you have many fond memories from that period. I wonder if you could share maybe an important memory or two from that period. Is there something that really stands out to you from that period?

R. CRAWFORD: It was also a very colloquial and fun environment. Even though obviously everybody was [laughs] incredibly driven and brilliant and all of those things, there seemed to be just a great working collaboration between the lead scientists as well as all the students. We had an LCI softball league every summer. There were other social events that were being held. A lot of the students were friends. We still are in contact with some of the people that we met during that time. I’m sure that if you asked Dr. Peter Pallfy[-Muhoray] about this, he may not remember at all, but I remember he would be working late a lot of the nights, and then he’d give us like a very fun probability and statistics problem. He’d just put it on the board, and a big smirk, and then walked away, and then we’d just try to solve that and work on it. He may not remember that at all, but it was one of those things that just made it into like a very collegial environment. Everybody worked really long, hard hours, but it didn’t feel laborsome.

M. CRAWFORD: You also mentioned that you had some great mentors during this period. I wonder if you could talk about some of the individuals that were your mentors, as a student.

R. CRAWFORD: Absolutely. Clearly the number one would probably be Dr. Doane, not just in taking me under his wing, but also so many of the things he taught me. He and Shirley would invite us to their house for dinner on quite a few occasions. We talked about so many aspects. Dr. John West was phenomenal. I always knew that I could talk to him. At the time—it certainly has changed; probably not enough—but there were no women, right, in physics. So I did not have any female mentors in physics, because there were no female physics faculty. I did have—and I am really embarrassed that I can’t remember her name at the moment—but she was a faculty member, a somewhat newer faculty member in the Chemistry Department. She also worked—although her office was not necessarily— in the Liquid Crystal Institute, I don’t believe. Because it has grown so significantly. Now when you're looking at the building, it’s huge. At the time, it was a two-floor—meaning one floor and a basement—building. Very different than what you are now envisioning on campus. [laughs] Many of the questions that I could ask her about, quite honestly, having a career but also wanting a family at some point, when I was getting further into graduate work, and those things are starting to take shape. Greg and I had married by that time. So many people who were always willing to help me. I always felt like everybody was willing to help, versus I never had the feeling at the Liquid Crystal Institute that people felt I did not belong. It was just the opposite. They were all incredibly supportive and wanted to help me in any way that they could, and the same way they would help any of the other students.

M. CRAWFORD: Even though you didn’t really have female mentors and it sounds like there weren’t a lot of women around in physics, you didn’t feel sort of alienated or anything like that.

R. CRAWFORD: No. I never had that experience within the Liquid Crystal Institute. Of course, there were other incidences, but never within the Liquid Crystal Institute. Because also we had chemists and biologists and mathematicians, and there were more women in those areas. They were around, and they were willing to help.

M. CRAWFORD: What about being an undergraduate woman in physics? Were there other women in your courses as students?

R. CRAWFORD: When you're in the introductory courses, you have the students that may need physics because they're going to go into medical school, or maybe they're going into high school education or any of those areas. Once you get into the upper-level courses, no. But they were also very small. So it wasn’t like I was—I don’t want people to get the wrong impression. If they haven't been in an upper-level physics course, they may be envisioning like a 40-, 50-, 100-person class and I’m the only woman. No, we're talking like ten people classes here.

M. CRAWFORD: But it didn’t seem like there were many other women physics majors.

R. CRAWFORD: No, there were not.

M. CRAWFORD: It sounds like your experience at the LCI was supportive and maybe we might say inclusive. Did you feel the same in the Physics Department and as a physics student generally, at Kent State?

R. CRAWFORD: You know, I’m going to skip that! [laughs]

M. CRAWFORD: You also mentioned—

R. CRAWFORD: I don’t want that to come across as though I had like the worst possible experience within the Physics Department. I don’t mean it like that. But you're always going to have specific examples. Actually, I’ll answer some of that. Because I just don’t ever want to like bad-talk people. But I’ll talk about one specific example that happened. I believe it was in graduate school. I know that probably people are going to be like, “How do you not remember if it was undergraduate or graduate?” But remember, I did that in one continuous sweep, so there never was a very clear distinction of when undergrad ended and graduate school started. But I remembered being in one particular course, and it was a smaller course, as it usually is for graduate courses or upper-level physics courses. It was a very complex course, in my opinion [laughs] but the faculty member kept asking me, “Renate, do you understand that too?” “Renate, are you okay with that?” I wasn’t the least bit offended until some of my fellow students came up to me, and they're like, “Doesn't it bother you that they always ask if you understand it too?” I was like, “Oh. Yeah. Maybe it should.” Then later, when I became like closer to that particular faculty member and I really got to know them, and not looking at it like, “Oh, this may be meant as like I shouldn't understand this or possibly couldn't understand this because I’m the only female,” that it was actually just the opposite. That they knew how much I wanted to succeed and not just pass the class, but do really well. And one or two totally and unequivocally helped me reach that goal, and said, “Hey, if you understand it, I know I—” It made me see things very, very differently. That was a good life lesson—that sometimes, when you don’t know somebody, and they're making certain statements, you can interpret them maybe not the way that they were meant at all. Once I got to know them, and I actually talked about that, [they mentioned that], “Oh my god, that is not at all how it was intended.” Sometimes it’s even, whether it could be a language barrier, or a cultural barrier, or whatever it is, when somebody does something in the best of their intentions, and it may not be interpreted as such, just because you don’t know them. I think that was sort of a life lesson for me, in that you don’t know what somebody means until you really know them. It’s something that—I know I keep harping on it, but I think it’s important—is also just when you're working with people, and I think maybe that’s why—and at the time I didn’t necessarily recognize it as such—when faculty members have the class over for dinner, it isn’t about the dinner. Although as a graduate student, on a very limited budget, that home-cooked meal was very much appreciated. But that’s where a lot of the mentoring takes place, and that’s when you really get to know people, and they get to know you, and your aspirations, and are better able to help you. It’s the same way in more of a professional setting, so I’ve tried to carry that forward in all of our roles, to really try to get to know people on a more personal level, because it makes the professional collaboration so much different, when you really understand the person. Maybe you get a curt email from them once, and you're like, “Oh, something must have happened; they must be having a bad day,” rather than, “Oh, this is a horrible person.” Because you know the person, and you know that is not them, or not how they intended it, but there was something that day that happened. That particular example that I mentioned about what happened in class ended up being such a good life lesson.

M. CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could say a little bit more—you just mentioned that the real mentoring takes place in these spaces or opportunities like having dinner with a faculty member or perhaps in other contexts.

R. CRAWFORD: Going to play racquetball. That was very popular at the time, in the 1980s. Many of the students and the faculty would go play racquetball at lunch. Because whether it is over a dinner table or in a confined racquetball court or any of those other situations, when you're not sitting in a formal meeting and it feels very like forced, when it’s more just a conversation that you have, and it could be about just about anything, and that leads to, “Oh, I’d love to have an internship at GM,” or whatever it may be, just because it comes out, rather than going to somebody’s office and asking for that. When you just get to know the people and they get to know you.

One of the things that I do here as University Ambassador, I also have Presidential Fellows, undergraduate scholarship students. But also one of the things I do is go running with the students. Because I find [laughs] that while you're running and you're just talking about things, they're more likely to ask these questions, like, “Hey, I want to be a physician, but how would I do that if I also want to have kids?” Or, “What specialty?” I’m clearly not a physician, but my sister is, so I vicariously have gone through it. The reason why I’m bringing up the physicians, is because I predominantly teach physics to the premed majors. It seems like all of my students, that is their career goal, so that’s why a lot of questions come in from that.

M. CRAWFORD: Would it be fair to say, just based on what you're saying, that you envision mentoring as a fairly holistic enterprise? What I mean by that is it’s not just about professional career. That’s part of it, but it’s also about managing work/life balance and those sorts of larger questions. Would that be a fair characterization?

R. CRAWFORD: Yeah, I really do. Because I think we're not one identity. All of us have many identities and how we refer to ourselves and our lives. You can’t just talk about one thing without it affecting the other parts of you.

M. CRAWFORD: You could either take this question in terms of your career, or the state of affairs nowadays, especially in your experience working in university administration and so forth. Do you feel that academic science does a good job at recognizing the multiple identities that people hold as scientists and as the other roles they play in society?

R. CRAWFORD: I think there is more and more emphasis on that, especially when you refer to like mental health, which obviously comes into play when you're talking work/life balance, or study and life balance, whatever state of their career people may be in. Even financial health. All of that now is taken into the student experience, especially when students are at a residential college. They actually have entire systems set up so there’s somebody looking into the well-being of a student. It’s their academics, their emotional, their physical, and even their financial health; in the sense that sometimes it can be, because of financial difficulties and not being able to pay their bills, that the students then end up with their academic health and their mental health and subsequently their physical health deteriorating. So I think there is absolutely more and more emphasis being placed on that, and the students absolutely recognize it. One of my platform areas here at the university is physical fitness. That was never my area of study. I have no actual knowledge of any of that. But I had already mentioned going for runs with the students, and there are many other things that we do, because my just own personal take on that is that the physical fitness isn’t just for physical health; it’s also for mental health and academic health, and that all of those come into play together.

M. CRAWFORD: Along these lines, I want to go back to, again, a comment that you made earlier when you first started talking about mentoring and talking to your mentors. You said that you wanted to talk to them about having a career and wanting to have a family and balancing those things. When you were a student in the 1990s, a graduate student, was your sense at the time that you had to choose one or the other, or was there a sensibility that you could have a career and a family?

R. CRAWFORD: I think I had the idea that I could have a career and a family. I just didn’t know how to go about it. [laughs] Because I didn’t see anybody doing it, that I could necessarily directly relate to. It was different at the time, but many of the people that I worked with, their spouse stayed home with the children. And I was going to be that spouse! I don’t mean that in a negative way whatsoever. It was just the realities that I saw. So when I had a chemistry faculty member that was a bit earlier in her career and had the younger children—so we're not talking children that are out of college, out of the house, but that were younger kids, and how she was dealing, how she was making it all work. I don’t want it to come across as that was the main thing I was talking about. It was just when those kind of questions came up, clearly I would go to more of a female mentor in a more similar situation.

My parents didn’t grow up in the U.S. I really didn’t have any experience with, “If you want to go into academics, what does that entail?” I did not know there was such thing as postdocs, and what all career options were available, and how to go about pursuing those. That’s where especially Dr. John West and Dr. Doane really came in and they had phenomenal contacts, and people that they worked with, and that—like Dr. ?umer, who was also one of my co-advisors, but he was still in Slovenia, although he did do his one-year sabbatical while I was finishing up my PhD, so that’s why I got to work directly with him as well. So we got to also see a lot of international institutes. But what career options are open to you, and if you want to go into academics, you need to do a postdoc. How do you go about finding a postdoc, and what are all of these postdoctoral fellowships that you can apply for? People helped me navigate that process. I didn’t even know there was such a thing, let alone knowing how to go about the process.

M. CRAWFORD: It can be a little mystified, at times.

R. CRAWFORD: Absolutely. So you need people to mentor you and help you, who want you to succeed in that. They're excited for you. It’s very different if you may have somebody that feels like, “Uch, this is my job. I need to do this.” But somebody who is excited about it and wants to see you succeed and bring up opportunities to you.

M. CRAWFORD: Great. I wanted to shift track a little bit and talk about your PhD research. I wonder if you could tell us about what was the focus of the research that you did for your PhD work.

R. CRAWFORD: I did a lot on confined nematic liquid crystals. These were liquid crystals in very, very [laughs] small tubes. I did a lot of nuclear magnetic resonance, NMR, which is also—I’m bringing up that that is also used in hospital settings, but it’s called an MRI. People are like, “I don’t know what NMR is.” I’m like, “You're probably familiar with it in a different term known as MRI.” You just don’t want to use the word “nuclear” in any hospital setting.

M. CRAWFORD: Right. [laughs] When you use NMR to study liquid crystals, what is it that you're doing, for someone who might not know exactly what NMR is used for, or how it works?

R. CRAWFORD: You use the magnetic fields to align the liquid crystals and also watching them come back down to their equilibrium state. Looking at what kind of surface treatments would make these molecules act differently, and putting them in different sizes. It was a lot of mathematical modeling that was involved in that as well. It almost seemed like it became more math at some points, and definitely veered away quite a bit from the applications. Quite honestly, after doing the PhD, I never went back to that. [laughs] So that is about 30-some years old by now. Yes! Oh, this is scary; I got my PhD in 1993. It’s going to be 30 years this summer!

M. CRAWFORD: How come you didn’t come back to that?

R. CRAWFORD: As I had mentioned earlier, I was very much interested in more of the application side, even if it was a little bit further away from the applications. One of the things that I worked on my first postdoc was for the Naval Research Laboratory, or NRL, in Washington D.C.—that was on an active Navy base, but I was sponsored, thanks to all the help I got in getting the fellowship, so the funding actually came from the National Research Council, and then you could decide on where you would take that funding and work. I worked for the Naval Research Labs, working on viewing angles for displays, and also working on displays for submarines. So really I went more into the applied physics, the applications component, versus doing the more basic research that I did for my PhD.

M. CRAWFORD: Could you have done a more application-oriented project for your dissertation?

R. CRAWFORD: You know, I really don’t know! This is the area I was going into. This was the area I believe Dr. Doane was working on at the time. It was very interesting. I learned a lot. And never even considered doing something else. I knew I wanted to work for him! [laughs] I asked him to please take me on as his student.

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] It sounds like the opportunity to work with or continue working with Dr. Doane was a significant motivator for—

R. CRAWFORD: Oh, absolutely. I went from John West’s lab, which was at the time, especially, very applications-oriented, and was certainly in chemistry, because he’s a chemist. Then to pursue my PhD, because my PhD is purely in physics. It’s not in chemical physics; it’s directly in physics. Because LCI or the Department did have the opportunity to get a PhD in chemical physics, but mine is just physics. I asked Dr. Doane to take me on and work in his lab.

M. CRAWFORD: Did the Chemical Physics PhD program exist at the time that you got your PhD?

R. CRAWFORD: Greg has his PhD in chemical physics. And he got that like two years before me.

M. CRAWFORD: I wanted to talk a little bit more about your time at the LCI, especially as a graduate student. You were there at the time that the Liquid Crystal Institute had the funding for the ALCOM Center.

R. CRAWFORD: Yes, absolutely.

M. CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could discuss what that Center was, or what your involvement may have been with ALCOM.[4]

R. CRAWFORD: I’m sure there will be others that you're interviewing that could do a way better job in explaining the Center and all that meant, but I did remember how it was an incredibly big deal, because it was a very large amount of funding, for very interdisciplinary research, meaning there were a lot of people from different departments involved. It was not a, “Hey, this is a single lab, single project grant,” but it was a Center of Excellence. But my direct—although some of my funding certainly could have come from that, absolutely—but my direct involvement, in addition to possible funding, was working on—they had a K-12 outreach. They had a newsletter. I was in charge of creating that outreach newsletter. We were working with K-12, both students as well as educators. We were using different parts of liquid crystal displays to teach basic science to students, trying to use displays, almost like in the way they were used for me, to show, “Hey, physics, and then science in general, is incredibly exciting.” You can use that to really grow the pipeline and to get students excited about science. Because I’m sure it hasn’t changed too much, but if you're asking like second- and third-graders, “Who loves science?” they all do! Almost all of them do. You ask that same question in ninth grade, and it’s a very small subset that will say, or at least admit, that they enjoy the sciences. So, working both with the students directly, as well as having summer programs for K-12 educators. Then having those newsletters, the ALCOM outreach newsletters, that were—I don’t know how often we put that out, whether it was quarterly or how many a year came out—with like different science projects that the teachers could do with their students. There were kits that came with it, too, if I recall correctly. Some of the funding definitely came from ALCOM.

M. CRAWFORD: So, part of the ALCOM funding supported these education outreach activities. I’m curious about these newsletters. You're saying that the audience for them is primarily K-12 educators?

R. CRAWFORD: Yes. Then I later took that, when I was at my second postdoc—the first postdoc was for the Navy; the second postdoc was in chemical engineering at Stanford University. They then also had one of those centers, called CPIMA[5] and I continued those efforts and writing the newsletters for them, and going to K-12 schools, as well as working with educators directly.

M. CRAWFORD: Were you essentially coming up with these experiments for K-12 educators?

R. CRAWFORD: Yes. They were very, very basic. I remember, there was the cover of The Physics Teacher—oh my goodness, who knows when that was. That was quite some time ago, that that came out. But we had a really cool opportunity—we got to be on the cover of The Physics Teacher[6] with a picture showing some of our efforts.

M. CRAWFORD: Really! And there was a feature article as well?

R. CRAWFORD: Yep. It was funny because one of the people that we worked with was—some of the topics were like twist nematics and polarization of lights, and just some fundamental applications—it was with Hudson High School, and that particular faculty member, I still occasionally talk to. Then we had the “Make It, Take It” workshops, where educators would make a very basic liquid crystal cell. Those are your twisted nematic, your more traditional displays, like the one likely on your cell phone. The students—or actually the educators—would make that, and then they would make these and then take it with them to be able to teach some of like polarization of light and electric fields to their students.

M. CRAWFORD: Wow. You mentioned that sometimes kits would be sent out with these newsletters, like essentially giving teachers the materials to do these?

R. CRAWFORD: Yes, to the best of my recollection. These kits were probably just like polarizers, or something like that. We're not talking anything—some of the workshops were like “From Mood Rings to Laptops: Liquid Crystals Made Easy,” or “Liquid Crystals from Wrist Watches to Thermometers: A Twisted and Colorful State of Matter.”

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] How did you get involved with education outreach?

R. CRAWFORD: It was definitely something that was very active at LCI. I don’t recall there being a particular eureka moment for me. Clearly, being a woman in physics, and not seeing any other females in my upper-level undergrad physics courses made me want to show people how exciting, and especially underrepresented students, how exciting physics can be. I think a lot of times—and it has changed a little, probably more than a little, in what we see on TV, and streaming, of science made a little bit more accessible and exciting. But still, you know, when most kids think of the sciences, they're thinking Einstein. [laughs] They're thinking Einstein, and they're thinking lack of social skills. I’m sorry to say that, but that’s clearly not my idea of a scientist, but—

M. CRAWFORD: Part of your goal or interest in education outreach was sort of challenging that traditional image of the scientist.

R. CRAWFORD: Yes. It was called ALCOM Education Outreach: A Publication of the National Science Foundation and NSF ALCOM Center.” I had to look that up!

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] You said one of the goals at the time—it sounds like maybe one of the goals of the program—was to grow the pipeline of students interested in science. Was there a real sense at the time—and we're talking I think early 1990s—was there a general sense that there weren’t enough students going into the sciences at that time?

R. CRAWFORD: That there were not enough underrepresented students, meaning students of color and females. Absolutely. Students in general, but when you're looking at females and minority students, it was really small.

M. CRAWFORD: What was your sense of the challenges that students faced? I know we talked a little bit about the traditional image of the scientist as a kind of Einstein figure, so there are issues of representation. Are there other challenges that students faced at that time, that the program tried to address?

R. CRAWFORD: I think for students to understand the fun and excitement of science. Especially now there’s so many programs on that, where, when people are thinking—especially the younger students—thinking “science,” it’s a lot of times what I joked about before. It’s like a block sliding down an inclined plane, and a lot of equations, and a lot of math, and, “Why do I need to know this?” Whereas when I talk to students a lot of times, I’m like, “There are probably more engineers and physicists involved in getting athletes ready for the Olympics than coaches.” They're looking at me like, “What?” I’m like, “Just what goes in to the creation of the swimsuits, or the bottoms of the running shoes, or”—bringing it back to the swimming, how they design the swimming pool to make sure that there’s the least amount of drag and so many different—I can’t even think of all the examples I have in my head, when we actually are watching the Olympics, and I start to think about that. I always want, whether they're my students from my physics courses or the younger students that you work with, for them to recognize that. Like I ask them, “What do the bottoms of different sports shoes look like, and why are they different?” For them to think about, like, “Oh, science is actually like super cool.” I always say, “We live with the rules of science every day; you may as well understand them.” So I think that’s part of it. So, for them not recognizing what career opportunities are out there. Not seeing anybody who necessarily looks like them who is in that role. But also not necessarily being encouraged.

I don’t know what it is at the moment, but I know that at the time—I, at one point, I don’t really even quite remember why; maybe we were moving or whatever it was—I was like, “Oh, maybe I can teach high school physics.” I was super excited about that, trying to work at an earlier level to grow this pipeline. I had a PhD in physics, but I wasn’t qualified to teach high school. I couldn't teach high school, and actually some of the systems set in place were that I almost had to start over. I understood completely that I would have to take education courses, and curriculum development and things like child psychology, all of that. Totally understood that. But I would have to retake some of my math courses and my physics courses [inaudible], the specific elementary math or physics that they had in their well-thought-out curriculum. I’m like, “Wait! I think the science part and the math part, I’ve got covered.” It’s some schools and districts, and I know it’s at the state level, in many cases. The reason why I point that out is, for example, Greg, [my husband,] didn’t know anybody growing up who was a physicist, but he had a phenomenal high school teacher who was actually his physics teacher. He was a retired engineer, had worked in industry, and he brought that excitement into the classroom. So for Greg, who neither one of his parents were scientists nor went to college, physics would have never been something he would have considered until that teacher entered his life. That’s why I brought up the educational component. Having somebody to show the students how this can be a challenge, but it’s a fun puzzle to solve, and there are all these really unique and great and exciting and innovative career opportunities that you can pursue.

M. CRAWFORD: Obviously the goals and challenges that you've been talking about were specific to the program that you were involved with. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, was this a kind of general shift that was happening in science in the 1990s? Trying to change the image of the sciences in general and seem more interesting and applicable and not so distant and just kind of the typical image of a kind of disconnected scientist working in the stereotypical ivory tower? Was this part of a cultural shift in the image of science in general, in your sense?

R. CRAWFORD: It was starting, and absolutely. Like the National Science Foundation had some opportunities there to get involved in K-12 education outreach. The one thing, though, that I was told—and at the time, I didn’t appreciate it until way later when somebody from one of these national programs—and I was just a starting faculty member then, so we're talking past the point that you were just asking about, and then I’ll get back to that. I was really getting heavily involved in education outreach and she—purposely mention that it was a female—she said that I should not spend so much time and effort on that because in order to get tenure, that wasn’t going to be valued. So even though there were a lot more programs and the importance was there, sometimes you got some conflicting messages. On the science front, it was starting to—and maybe not starting; I was starting to see it, so it may have been out there way before me, but I didn’t really enter that until I was like an undergrad—starting to see that there was definitely a lot of talk, a lot of scientific publication already on what is referred to as the pipeline, and then the leaking of the pipeline. Once people do get their undergraduate or maybe graduate degree, that they don’t stay in the sciences. But definitely a lot of programs and internships, and everything was there, to try to increase that number. Yet in some of the areas, like biology, medicine, law, since the 1990s the shifts have been huge, in some cases to the point where there are more females than males in those areas. Medicine and law are two examples of that. Physics, computer science, civil engineering, probably computer engineering, there may be some others out there, and pardon me if I forget some particular fields—they have not made much progress. They've made some, but not much.

M. CRAWFORD: Why do you think that is?

R. CRAWFORD: Oh man, I could write an awesome article if I had the answer to that.

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: There’s a lot of speculation. I just—don’t know. I don’t know. One of the areas that people have really shifted to, in terms of—and it has totally changed education pedagogy—is—because I was [inaudible 1:26:28] lucky to have the opportunity to have a very hands-on education. Meaning I was working every single day from my sophomore year on, in research. I was seeing all of the applications. I was seeing the importance of math and biology and chemistry and physics and computer science and statistics and all of it together, on a daily basis. But not every student has that opportunity. Now, when you’re looking at the education in the sciences, it is a lot more hands-on. It is very activity-driven. The importance of undergraduate research is just stressed, and most schools really want their students to have that experience. I stumbled on it, quite honestly, because I needed the job. [laughs] And that particular job, that decision, changed my life. But now, they're going about it on a very direct measure, and making sure that students get this type of opportunity. Because then, seeing the excitement of it will really make a difference. I don’t know if it’s directly anecdotal evidence—there’s definitely studies on that, but I don’t have any of the references now—is that underrepresented students, female and minority students—and I don’t mean to generalize here, and people get upset if I’m generalizing—but [laughs] it may be speaking from my own experience—tend to be more drawn to a certain extent to the helping professions, professions where they can see making a direct and immediate impact. So if you're looking at medicine, that has shifted. The number of minority students involved is huge. The number of females is larger than the number of males. If you're looking even in biomedical engineering. So there’s now new and emerging fields where they're really having that direct correlation between—pardon the expression—“the helping professions” and the basic science. Those are huge. We have at the university here, at Miami we have a Center for Assistive Technology. I’m pretty sure that has more female and minority students than any other major in the sciences or engineering.

M. CRAWFORD: Wow. Yeah. That’s really remarkable.

R. CRAWFORD: So that is some of the ways that we're trying to really make a difference. But we've been working on this problem for a very long time! Also just as a reference, I did come up with Winnie’s name. I’m like, “Winnie was such an important person in my life! And I can’t think of her last name!” Horrible. Winnie Tamura-Lis.

M. CRAWFORD: Could you spell that?

R. CRAWFORD: T-A-M-U-R-A, hyphen, L-I-S.

M. CRAWFORD: Great, thank you. I just have a couple other questions about ALCOM, and then I’d like to move on to your post-PhD career. In 1991, you received the ALCOM Industrial Partnership Award. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about that at all.

R. CRAWFORD: Hmm! I did, huh? That is awesome! [laughs]

M. CRAWFORD: It’s on your CV, but—

R. CRAWFORD: [laughs] So what ALCOM did—we also had—so 1991, that was right at the—nope, I was a graduate student at that time. So, we also had presenting of our research that was done under these industrial collaborations. As I had mentioned, a lot of my research funding, especially early on, came from GM, but there were obviously a lot of other companies and industrial connections involved. That research then was presented at a conference-style setting. It was very early on, which was a gift that I didn’t realize at the time was a gift, because it felt very scary, having to present your research both an oral presentation as well as poster presentations, to different constituents, or maybe it was company execs, and then company researchers. So, it was for one of those.

M. CRAWFORD: Given that you did research as a graduate student that was funded by industry, and it sounds like it was quite common at the LCI and I would guess probably in materials science in general, but there are other fields in which industrial funding of science raises some questions about where the money is coming from and what effect it might have on the kind of knowledge that is being produced, the sorts of problems that are being explored, and whether things are getting ignored in favor of marketable products and things like that. I wonder if you had any sense of that kind of tension. Was there any sense that there were some concerns about accepting funding from industry at all, in the fields that you've worked in, or is it just more kind of part of doing the work of a scientist?

R. CRAWFORD: I was not aware of it or experienced it, but I was also in a very small subset of physics, working on displays. It’s not very controversial. [laughs] I’m not saying it’s not there. I just did not experience that.

M. CRAWFORD: You personally didn’t experience it, for sure. Did you ever consider going into industry?

R. CRAWFORD: I did. And especially once I had made that switch from business to physics, that was absolutely my intent. [And because of my] experience with the ALCOM Education Center and working in that, and just seeing the excitement in the students, whether those students were indeed K-12 students or those students may be actual educators in the other parts of their day or their lives, and seeing it click, and wanting to learn more—it changed my perspective, making me want to go into academics, and therefore doing a postdoc, so that I could pursue an academic career. Because that really was like a prerequisite. I could still have changed and gone into industry, absolutely. But to go into academics, it was pretty well understood that you needed that postdoc experience. So that’s what changed it. It was really neat and exciting, and if you're working at a university lab, you still get to do your research and work with undergraduate students, in the lab, and graduate students in the lab. You could provide for them what others had provided for you, and at the same time having students—and when I first started, it was several hundred per class—but I always wanted people to think physics was cool and not something to be feared.

M. CRAWFORD: Again, this should be probably my final question about ALCOM. Other people I’ve interviewed, other interviewees—and these are faculty members associated with the LCI—talked about students, and particularly the PhD alumni of the LCI during the ALCOM period, as being one of the most important outcomes of the ALCOM Center. I just wanted to get your reaction to that. Do you agree with that assessment, as one of those students?

R. CRAWFORD: Wow, that is very—that is awesome to hear. I would be highly biased to say yes, because I am one of them, right? So that’s a very biased expression. But I think as an educator, you always—your research and some of the research, a lot of the research, that was done in ALCOM has changed all of our lives, from viewing angles and displays, and all of that. But it’s also—and I think that was the big difference, and we've talked about it in different ways—whether it’s through the mentoring or just seeing the collaborative effort—it was a very personalized education. It was a very personal experience. People got to really know each other and have made collaborations that are lasting well beyond leaving LCI. When I first started in academics, my first department chair was one of Dr. Doane’s first PhD students! I was one of his last. Well, he told me I was going to be one of my last, and then there were quite a few more after me! [laughs]

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] That’s amazing.

R. CRAWFORD: So whether it’s looking at what people are doing, in industry, or in academics—you have Joe Whitehead and Greg that both went into academic leadership positions—and I’m sure there’s many others that I am forgetting but obviously Joe Whitehead and Greg and I all shared an office.

M. CRAWFORD: It is interesting how many of the alumni did go into not just academics but also university administration or other types of leadership positions.

R. CRAWFORD: Or leadership in companies. I think some of the skills that we learned were in the leadership. Maybe one day you're talking to an executive from a company, or a scientist from another company, and then you have K-12 students going through, and then the next day it may be the governor or somebody, stopping by, so you're really learning how to make connections and speak to a lot of different people, without it ever being taught as such. It was just part of the experience. You never thought about gaining those skills until later in life you used them, and you're like, “Oh!”

M. CRAWFORD: You finished your PhD at Kent State in 1993.

R. CRAWFORD: Mmhmm.

M. CRAWFORD: And then you take this two-year postdoc position at the Naval Research Laboratory, funded by the National Research Council.

R. CRAWFORD: Yep.

M. CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you would compare working at the Naval Research Laboratory—obviously, you're now a postdoc as opposed to a graduate student—but as an institution of scientific research, how would you compare the National Research Laboratory to the Liquid Crystal Institute? Was it a similar sort of culture?

R. CRAWFORD: It was quite different. There were quite a few postdocs working in the lab. Well, like several. And we were very close, but in terms of the relationship, then, that you would have with your supervisor, it was very different. It was also an active Naval base. So that experience, in and of itself, is very different. Each one of the labs seemed like a very independent, autonomous lab. It was more of a siloed situation versus what I had been used to, that everybody is very open-door and collaborative. And it may be that it could have been that, if I had thought it out. I don’t know. I don’t want to make it sound negative. It’s just not the experience I had. There were three or four postdocs and the lab manager. We just did our own thing.

M. CRAWFORD: Who was your supervisor at the NRL?

R. CRAWFORD: It was Shashidhar. Dr. R. Shashidhar. He worked together with his wife, and her name was Ratna, Dr. B. Ratna, and they worked very collaboratively.

M. CRAWFORD: You said you had a different relationship with your supervisor there than you did at the LCI?

R. CRAWFORD: Yeah.

M. CRAWFORD: Was it a more strictly—?

R. CRAWFORD: More formal.

M. CRAWFORD: More formal, yeah, that’s what I was looking for. Thank you. [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: We'll call it that.

M. CRAWFORD: You had mentioned earlier that you were working on viewing angles for displays. That was part of your research as a postdoc. I wonder if you could explain a little bit about what that’s about, for people who don’t know.

R. CRAWFORD: Viewing angle and flexible polymer displays. The viewing angle, explaining it at the most basic of levels, if you're buying—and this is the way I explain it—if you're buying—and especially, at the time, when you were buying—which was then considered a very large flat-panel display—it was probably like 40 inches; now, nobody buys that. That’s like your computer screen. But at the time, that was large, and very expensive display. But the viewing angle was such that you almost needed to sit directly in front of that display. So, with the hopes of these displays getting larger and larger, you didn’t want to have this in your room and not being able to sit on any of the couches or chairs in the room, because you could only see it if you're right in front of it. Whereas in other situations, like for example at a bank teller machine, you want it to be as narrow as possible, so that only you can see what you're doing on this screen, and not the people standing on the side, sort of keeping an eye on your business there. So being able to control that viewing angle, meaning do you want it to be very large for such a thing as a flat-panel display or a TV, or do you want it to be very narrow, or for any kind of application in between.

The other thing that—and then ended up getting a patent on while working for the Navy—was flexible displays. At the time, all the displays were on glass, but if you wanted to have a curved display or a flexible display, maybe even one that you could just like roll up, then clearly would be very different, so they needed to be made on polymer sheets, and that was one of the things I was working on as well.

M. CRAWFORD: That was trying to develop the polymer sheets that you might use for those applications?

R. CRAWFORD: Trying to develop displays that would work that were flexible. So rather than just two pieces of glass, it was a conductive coating on these polymer sheets.

M. CRAWFORD: You mentioned that you had a patent that came out of this research.

R. CRAWFORD: Yes, I think there were three.

M. CRAWFORD: Three patents.

R. CRAWFORD: Yeah, that was a very interesting process. I had never been through that process, where they go through every single marking you have made in your notebook.

M. CRAWFORD: Really!

R. CRAWFORD: Greg has so many that for him it was probably like, “Yeah, another one.” For me, it’s like, “Wow!” I never understood why you can’t bring your lab notebooks home, so you can finish some of your notes at home. It was like, “No, those stay in the lab.”

M. CRAWFORD: Could you explain that further?

R. CRAWFORD: Any of the lab notes that you made during your experiments, of your outcomes and your procedures and everything—I’m sure now, everything is computerized. We didn’t exactly have that at the time. So for people listening now, they possibly don’t quite understand it; you can just record it on your phone. Not exactly an option at the time. So, you have your lab notebooks, and all the pages in the lab notebook are numbered, which also I didn’t understand at the time why that was so urgent. I’m like, “They're all glued in. Why do they need to be numbered?” So you can’t take any out! So all of your data, all of your notes, you write in there. So when it goes up for patent review, and you're meeting with a patent attorney, and especially when it goes through the review, they look at every single one of your notes, and all of your data, to see if this was indeed original, and so on.

M. CRAWFORD: They're looking at those materials to determine originality?

R. CRAWFORD: Originality, and all of your data and how many times you've tested things, and your working prototype and all of that. I was indeed one of the people getting the patent, but it’s usually Dr. Shashidhar and—I was in a lot of those meetings, but definitely not all of them.

M. CRAWFORD: Did the Naval Research Laboratory have its own patent office, so to speak? Did it have its own patent attorney or did it work with an outside—?

R. CRAWFORD: I really don’t know. Now, hindsight, full-fledged adult, with a daughter who has graduated law school, those are all things I would certainly pay attention to. At the time, you just know that you're meeting with a patent attorney. It’s also very different if you're working for the government, and then you also have third-party entities coming in. All of that, at the time, I didn’t necessarily pay that close attention to, quite honestly.

M. CRAWFORD: Given that, I don’t know if you’d be able to answer this question, but do you know why there was the decision to pursue patenting these technologies?

R. CRAWFORD: I know that Shashidhar—that was what they were looking for. They were looking—it wasn’t an accidentally stumbling on something, as some scientific discoveries are accidentally stumble on something, and you're like, “Wow, this is amazing, we need to patent this.” No, this was, “We want to create a flexible display. And once it seems like there was a working prototype, now we need to patent this, because this is going to have significant implications.”

M. CRAWFORD: I see. Was the thinking then that the federal government would license that patent to companies or the individual researcher, do you know?

R. CRAWFORD: I do not know. Because they were never mine. Once you work for the government, they're not your personal property. So, who they licensed them to, I do not know.

M. CRAWFORD: It’s interesting, because we're talking about federally funded research at a federal research laboratory. The idea of privatizing that knowledge by patenting it in some ways, it’s a little unclear how it fits with, say, the mission of producing knowledge for public use, I guess.

R. CRAWFORD: Yeah, I understand what you're saying there, and I don’t want to—I really don’t have the expertise to answer any of these particular things. I know that there was a lot also that—like different people are involved in these patents. There’s a lot of funding that comes in—like my particular funding, yes, it came from the—but did not come from NRL directly.

M. CRAWFORD: There’s a certain complexity to the situation.

R. CRAWFORD: Right, so I’m not being evasive. I just really—and now, with a 50-some-year-old brain, all of these things would be incredibly interesting to me. At the time, you don’t necessarily understand all of those implications. Maybe they hold on to the patents? I don’t know. Because you also don’t want to have to pay to use knowledge that you yourself have created, but somebody else patents it. So there was the alignment layers patent, and then conducting substrates for flexible displays. So there were U.S. and international patents.

M. CRAWFORD: Did you publicize your work in other ways at this time? Were you publishing articles as well?

R. CRAWFORD: Yes. There were also articles in other refereed journals.

M. CRAWFORD: Great. I know you had another postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, but I also wanted to talk about your time as a faculty member. You work as a visiting lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. You eventually become an assistant professor in 1998 and promoted to associate in 2002. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your experience as a physics professor at U Mass Dartmouth.

R. CRAWFORD: Absolutely. As I said, my first department chair, Paul Ukleja, was a former student of Dr. Doane. When Greg got his position at Brown—and they always call it the two-body problem. [laughs], where you have two scientists looking for jobs at the same time. I blanketed the state of Rhode Island with my resume and ended up with a position in Massachusetts [laughs]. That is definitely through connections. They did not have any tenure positions at the time, so I was just a full-time—they call it visiting lecturer, because that just means that you're there on a yearly contract, and that yearly contract is renewable, but you don’t have any long-term contract with the institution.

I remember when I first started teaching—and I had never taught anything formal, because I went straight into being a research assistant and a research associate as a graduate student and never was a TA, the teaching assistant. I was the research assistant, because I had had so many years of research going into it. [When I started as a faculty member at UMass Dartmouth,] they told me I would have 12 units. I asked what that meant. They said, “Oh, that’s just 12 classroom hours. That’s four classes.” I accepted the position, and I was like, “Wow, I cannot believe that they call this a full-time job. Twelve hours of teaching, that’s full time? Man! This is exciting!” Well, 12 hours in class probably—especially if you're teaching new classes—meant that I was spending probably three times that, or four times that, preparing for each one of these new courses, so we were talking at least 60 hours a week of working. And I had a whole new appreciation for faculty [laughs]. I so keenly remember leaving that interview and thinking, “Wow, they call this a full-time gig? It’s a pretty cool deal, 12 hours in classes.”

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: At the time, our oldest was a year and a half. Every night, I read to her from a physics textbook as I was still preparing my lectures when it was time for her to go to bed, and I’m pretty sure that’s why she went into law and stayed away from physics.

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: Like, “I heard enough. As a toddler.” At the time, I knew the importance of reading to her and spending time with her. I also knew the importance of teaching evaluations, and understanding what I was going to be talking about the next day. Then when a tenure-track position did open up, and obviously those are always a national search, but I was able to get that position. Obviously at that point I had a very well-established teaching career at the institution already, so that certainly helped obtain that position. I was already very much involved in committee work and service to the university and the community, so I had already established myself prior to getting the tenure-track position. I had a running start, so I’m very fortunate that way. That’s when I could really get established in also getting a lab. I was doing optics on liquid crystals and displays, so I had a lab. I had undergraduates. I had master’s students. We did not have a PhD at UMass, an independent PhD. We’d get together with UMass Worcester—or UMass Amherst; I’m not quite sure—but I didn’t have any of the PhD students. I had master’s students working in my lab as well as undergraduates. And then teaching my three to four courses a semester. But, I loved it. I was the first hire in 20-some years.

M. CRAWFORD: Wow.

R. CRAWFORD: Yes. [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: Yes. And that was because when the institution was established—and I used to know the history of UMass Dartmouth so well, how it went from like a technical school, and then an engineering component. I don’t remember it, so my apologies on that. But when it was established as a university and as a physics department, everybody was hired at that time to establish a department, and it wasn’t until then 20-some years later that people started retiring, and that they needed to hire new people. So, it wasn’t for any ill will; it was just a younger department in that sense. Then Miami has been around since 1809. UMass Dartmouth got started like 20-some years before I got there.

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] When you got hired as a faculty member or even during your time at UMass Dartmouth, because you were there for over a decade—

R. CRAWFORD: Mmhmm.

M. CRAWFORD: —were there other female faculty members?

R. CRAWFORD: Not when I was hired. I was the first hire in 20 years, the first female hire ever, in the Department. That always brings—challenges—but it also brings opportunities. You have to look at it as such. When I had been there for a few years and I recognized that—and at the time, I really—I wanted to teach the introductory courses. So, don’t get me wrong; I asked for those, and I got them. I also realized, like, “Wait, if I’m teaching like three of these courses, with 100-and-some students in each one, that’s a lot more students than teaching three graduate courses, with a handful of students. That can’t exactly be the same workload.” There were other things. When people have been there for a very long time, things are set in place. I had the opportunity to either complain about it, or keep to myself, or to Greg, or try to make a difference. I had a lot of phenomenal colleagues that were doing great things, and they totally encouraged me to run for, ask for, get voted into, the chair position. That’s how I became chair of the Department. There were some things I would love to do, and make an impact, and make a difference, and going into administration then was the way to go. Because some of the people that were really actively involved in like physics outreach and physics education, they were totally in support of that.

M. CRAWFORD: I was going to ask you about your transition into university administration. I think you've answered that.

R. CRAWFORD: Yeah, that was it. That was a very conscious decision. If you want to make an impact, then that is the way to do it. That is not at all to speak ill of—most of my colleagues were amazing. But when people have been there for a very significant amount of time, then sometimes it just takes somebody coming in, new, with a different perspective. I think that is what we have all really understood and learned—the importance of just having a very diverse set of people working on any problem, so that you get diverse perspectives, in any sense of that word, whether it’s diverse in terms of their educational background, their personal background, and any other aspect of diversity. It’s critical, because people bring different perspectives, and thereby different solutions. It’s not an echo chamber.

M. CRAWFORD: When you went into being chair, you've talked about wanting to make some changes. What were some of your goals and objectives as chair, and maybe some of your significant achievements in that position?

R. CRAWFORD: I would never call them “my” achievements; it’s always working directly with people. I think one of the things that I learned is it’s really just so important to get the right people in a group, and let people really take ownership. Sometimes maybe even making them think it was their idea, even if you—you know, I’m saying this very quietly [laughs]—making people think it was their idea, so that they're all for it. One of the things—and I certainly am not the one to get credit for that—but one of the things that happened also during that time is that—it's really embarrassing that I can’t think of the name of the persons[7] who got all of that grant funding, and it was so huge, because still a lot of universities are doing this now and calling it novel, and I’m like, “Well, that was in the 1990s at UMass Dartmouth,” where they’re really working on an integrated curriculum for engineers. It was called IMPULSE, for short. We always only called it IMPULSE, but it stood for “Integrated Math, Physics, Laboratory, Undergraduate”—or—IMPULSE, let me see—I-M-P—“Integrated Math, Physics, Undergraduate Laboratory Science, and Engineering.” I hope I got it all in there! Yep, I think I got all the letters in there. I should have had a pen and paper handy! You see why we just called it IMPULSE. IMPULSE is also a really great physics term, because it’s a change in momentum over time. So it actually has a physics equation, the word “impulse,” and that is really what happened. Originally, there was English in it as well. So the engineers came into a very interactive activity, inquiry, learning-based, physics classroom, where they had four students per team, two computers on each table, and then 12 tables. I’m totally visualizing this whole classroom now. It was very activity-based. These same students took all the same courses with their cohort, and we had several cohorts. We had a cohort that would take physics together, they’d take engineering together, they’d take calculus together, they’d take chemistry together, and originally they even took English together. They took all of their courses together, so the faculty members would also get together and sometimes do this like just-in-time teaching. If I knew they needed a particular concept in engineering, I wanted to make sure that we covered it in physics, and we even had some common homework problem sets or projects. Super cool projects, like rockets and things, where you had your physics and your engineering. The same for the calculus. I would tell the calculus professor what we were going to working on, and they made sure that they had the calculus knowledge. And their papers may be more like lab report writing. So, it was really novel. There was quite a bit of education pedagogy that went into that, papers that were written on that, and it came with a very large NSF grant.

Still, even at Miami, we use it. They call it SCALE-UP, but it’s a very similar approach. It doesn't include any of the other courses, like IMPULSE did, but it is just a more activity- and interactive-based teaching of physics. Because now I was the chair, and we had people actively working in the Department on this, we were able to really work with Engineering, even get completely new physics labs. Because departments tend to really want to hold on to their domain. Now, if we're going to let our domain also be used [by our departments]….but, I told everybody, “We want to upgrade our physics labs. This is the way to update the physics labs and have somebody else pay for it.” It worked out. It was an amazing experience to be part of that, and it actually influenced my teaching style up to this day.

M. CRAWFORD: Really! Because of the integrated approach?

R. CRAWFORD: Not just the integration between the courses. I think it is critically important, but that is really hard to bring that to another institution. But the activity-based and inquiry-based learning. Not just lecturing to a big, huge classroom, but rather, learning by inquiry, and peer instruction, and all of those different methods of instruction.

M. CRAWFORD: I know that from University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, which you left in 2008, you continued to work in university administration. So, moved to the University of Notre Dame, where you were involved with academic recruitment. And your current position at Miami University as University Ambassador. Correct me if I’m wrong; I know you're still engaged with teaching even today, but it sounds like your duties have moved even further beyond traditional academic faculty and teaching.

R. CRAWFORD: Absolutely, yes. When you first asked about this interview, I’m like, “Well, I’m not your traditional academic or scientist by any means,” in that I’ve had a bit of a roundabout sort of way. Always, when somebody asks how I identify myself, “physicist” will always be on the identities that I claim. I absolutely love it. In any of my roles, even when I came in here clearly as University Ambassador, teaching was not [part of the job description.] I always call that my extracurricular. It’s something that is certainly not expected nor part of my job, but something that I absolutely love, so I do it as my extracurricular because I want to do it. It does provide me with a very unique perspective, because I am in the classroom, with the students. I am a full-fledged faculty member. It gives me the perspective not just from the President’s Office, but also from the students, who will want to tell me everything. Sometimes more than I want to know! And from the faculty, because they're my colleagues. So, it has been really neat. At Notre Dame, I taught several courses, and in addition to teaching—because Greg was the dean, so it was really hard for me to have a more traditional faculty role, but a teaching role was absolutely doable. So therefore I also took on an additional role in admissions and in scholarships.

M. CRAWFORD: I know we're getting close to our time here. I just wanted to ask a couple of bigger questions. Thinking about your career as a student in science, and then as an educator and faculty member in science, and even in your involvement in university administration, what are the ways in which you think the discipline of physics could improve, looking ahead?

R. CRAWFORD: Wow, that is a big question, isn’t it! I don’t know how the discipline of physics could improve, because I really don’t even know where the boundaries are. And that is—coming back to why we started this—the whole LCI component of this—I have never necessarily seen the boundaries where physics maybe ends and chemistry begins, or math begins, or biology, or art, for that matter. Remember, Mary, she was a phenomenal scientist at the LCI, but also a phenomenal artist! [laughs] So, I have never necessarily seen the boundaries. So then saying, “How could the discipline improve?” is a little bit of a well a lot of a hard question.

M. CRAWFORD: In part, you're saying you don’t really think in disciplinary terms, because you've been such an interdisciplinary scholar and scientist.

R. CRAWFORD: Absolutely, yes. And I wouldn't call myself a scholar [laughs] and a scientist, per se. But yes, seeing how all of these come together. And then again, once I started teaching at UMass Dartmouth and actually working then with the chemists and the mathematicians and the engineers in a very different way than I had at LCI, but now in trying to bring a cohesive curriculum to the students so that they could see, from their very first day on campus, or in the classroom, how all of these courses were interrelated. I think we can’t be in siloes in order to solve what they call these grand global challenges. There’s too many aspects to it, and way more than we've even talked about. You've got to bring in history. You've got to bring in economics. You've got to bring in religion, and the social sciences. There is no end, to what you need to bring in, to solve some of these problems. Or [bring forward] these solutions, I should say.

M. CRAWFORD: I think you've already started to talk about this a little bit, but what advice do you give, or would you have, for a student, say, an undergraduate or a grad student, seeking a career in science today?

R. CRAWFORD: All right, that one is way easier, because I give that advice like almost on a daily basis. One of the things that I always tell the students is to make sure that they take advantage of undergraduate research opportunities. I give them very specific examples. Like [how my major changed and eventual career shaped because at the time] I just needed a job. There’s a lot of resources on everyone’s campus, where they help you find a direct link to a faculty member who’s looking. Even if they don’t have that, go write emails, knock on doors. Do some research beforehand, as in looking into the faculty member that you’re writing to, to see if this is an area you might be interested in, and write them. If you get five no’s, go to the sixth person, but take advantage of that undergraduate research, because it’s such a value-add. The other thing I tell students is form good relationships with your faculty members. Get to know them. Go to their office hours. Because they want to be part of your journey. It’s during those office hours or meals or the runs that you're going on, or wherever it may be, where you can get so much advice and wisdom and mentorship from them, so make those personal connections.

One of the things that I did not necessarily appreciate at the time; I don’t even have to use the word “necessarily”—that liberal art is core. Now I wish I could do it again, quite honestly, because some of the courses that I took, I took them because I had to, or they fit a time block, to fill a particular requirement, and now I realize how all of those aspects come in. That they were not like insubstantial add-ons; they were actually a big component. If you want to go into a leadership role, and that leadership could just be managing a small team, or literally being university or company leadership, you need all of those different pieces. You may not be the historian or the economist, or the financial advisor, but you need to understand their perspective in order to have that working relationship. So, yeah, I wish I could do that part over. But quite honestly, when I tell my students that, I’m sure they're saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” in the same way that I did, and probably 20 years from now they'll be like, “Renate, you were so right!” I’m like, “Yeah! I know! I didn’t get it at the time, either!”

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs]

R. CRAWFORD: But it is something that people are starting the recognize the importance of. Miami definitely has its liberal arts core that is taken very, very seriously. A lot of universities really understand the value of that. Then the last thing—it’s the personal relations, it is the undergraduate research, it’s the liberal art care—but also, if you have the opportunity to study abroad, take advantage of that, too, as a major value-add to your education, to understand how the rest of the world works. Those are my pieces of—I always call it ”unsolicited motherly advice.”

M. CRAWFORD: [laughs] Great. In this case, it was solicited, so—

R. CRAWFORD: Exactly!

M. CRAWFORD: —very much appreciated. Dr. Crawford, I just want to thank you so much for your time, and for this interview. It was really great.

R. CRAWFORD: It’s my pleasure, as I mentioned when you reached out. LCI and the Liquid Crystal Institute was just such a big part of my life. Even though it was only the six, seven years, it’s lessons that I learned, relationships that I built, and still relying on that on a daily basis. So I’m very happy to do this.

M. CRAWFORD: Really appreciate you sharing your story and your experiences.

R. CRAWFORD: Like I said, even like our wedding was like an LCI event! Dr. Doane’s executive assistant, Elaine Landry, made my wedding dress!

M. CRAWFORD: Oh, wow.

R. CRAWFORD: You don’t get to have a more personal experience than that.

[END]

1 National Science Foundation
2 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
3 Department of Energy
4 Center for Advanced Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials
5 The Center on Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies (CPIMA) is an NSF sponsored partnership among Stanford University, IBM Almaden Research Center, the University of California Davis and the University of California Berkeley.
6 Liquid Crystals, the Phase of the Future, Sept. 1992.
7 Dr. John Dowd (PHY), Dr. Robert Kowalczyk (MTH), Dr. Raymond Laoulache (ENG), Dr. Nick Pendergrass (ENG) ×