Oral History Interview with Robin Selinger by Matthew Crawford

July 18, 2023
Location of Interview: Department of History, Kent State University

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I’m a Historian of Science and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kent State University. Today is July 18th, 2023, and I am interviewing Dr. Robin Selinger. We are conducting this interview in the conference room of the Department of History at Kent State University. Dr. Selinger, thanks for agreeing to speak with me.

ROBIN SELINGER: Great!

CRAWFORD: I want to start off with just a couple of identifier questions. First, could you tell us your current title and institutional affiliation?

SELINGER: Great. My name is Robin Lillian Blumberg Selinger. I have four names. I am Professor of Physics in the Physics Department in the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State. I am also affiliated with the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute.

CRAWFORD: Great. How would you identify yourself as a scientist in terms of what discipline you fit into? And what do you see as your main field of research currently?

SELINGER: I work in the field of soft matter theory. That is, the theory and simulation studies of soft materials, which include liquid crystals, liquid crystal elastomers—which is a class of polymer—and lipid membranes.

CRAWFORD: Do you identify yourself as a materials scientist, a physicist, or—?

SELINGER: A physicist, and a computational materials scientist. These days, I especially focus on soft matter, but earlier in my career I worked on, for instance, plastic deformation and fracture in crystalline solids. I’ve worked in both areas of materials science.

CRAWFORD: Soft matter is one area of materials science and then—?

SELINGER: Previously, I would call it theoretical metallurgy, so theory of fracture and—but what those two fields have in common is the theme of topological defects, so those are essentially wrinkles in the structure of stuff.

CRAWFORD: And so would you say that has been the running theme for you between—?

SELINGER: A lot of work on topological defects continuing. Chirality and origin of breaking of symmetry between righthanded and lefthanded in various molecular systems, and cooperative chiral ordering, is another theme that threads through my career.

CRAWFORD: Great. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to discuss about that, but first I want to begin with getting a sense of who you are and where you came from. I wonder if you could tell us what year you were born, where you grew up, and what your childhood was like.

SELINGER: I was born in Arlington, Texas, which is a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth. My mother was born in Europe. She was born in Amsterdam shortly before World War II. Our family is Jewish, so there was a tremendous danger to the family in the Netherlands. Her parents were both PhDs. One was an MD/PhD. My grandfather had already done an internship in the United States and he knew it would be safe here, so he brought his wife and at that point two children to the U.S. to safety, while the rest of the family remained behind in Europe and struggled to survive the war.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: So, I’m first generation on my mom’s side. The other side had been in the U.S. since around 1900, a little before 1900. My paternal grandparents were born in the U.S. but their parents were born in Eastern Europe, so my father was the second generation born in the U.S. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a chemist, a PhD chemist. He worked in industry his whole career. My grandmother was an MD/PhD ophthalmologist, and having trained in the Netherlands, she was not allowed to practice medicine upon immediately arrival in the U.S. But she had small children, and two more to come. So she didn’t practice initially, but later she got her practice and was an active ophthalmologist in the U.S. So that side of the family, pretty educated.

On the other side, the first immigrant that came over on my father’s side, I guess one of the people that was first, my great grandfather, he came to the U.S and attended medical school. So, he was an MD, an educated person, active in his community. In fact, I’m the family historian; I have all his—all his diaries were translated into English, and we have history on that side of the family going back to his life in Europe before he came to the U.S. I discovered in my family history research that although my grandfather himself did not—he was the son of the doctor, grew up in Denver, did not attend college. But his second cousin won a Nobel Prize. My family name is Blumberg, right? That’s the name I was born with. In the seventies, when I was in high school, there was a Nobel Prize winner named Baruch Blumberg, who discovered the whatever microorganism or virus it is that causes hepatitis B, I think. And developed the vaccine, which saved millions of lives. And I’m like, “Daddy, daddy, look! There’s a Nobel Prize winner with the same last name as us.” He’s like, “Oh, honey, there are so many people named Blumberg. We couldn’t possibly be related.” So I didn’t learn until recently that he was my grandfather’s second cousin. That the act of immigration separated the family. He never met his great uncles and aunts. He didn’t know who their grandchildren were. It was one of those people. And I’m so excited—I’m going to the U.K. at the end of this month, and I’m going to meet that guy’s son!

CRAWFORD: Wow, that’s amazing!

SELINGER: The Nobel Prize winner’s son. Who grew up in the U.S. because I think his dad was at NIH or someplace. He teaches at a university in the U.K. He’s in Oxford, I’ll be in Cambridge, so I’m going to take a train and go visit him.

CRAWFORD: Nice!

SELINGER: Anyway, so I come from a family that was doing science. My mother’s younger brother, who was the baby that came over from Amsterdam, grew up to be a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m sad to say he just passed away recently—

CRAWFORD: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

SELINGER: —after a very distinguished career, and we’re going to have a celebration of life for him, coming up soon. That was Donald Voet, V-O-E-T. In Dutch it would be pronounced “phoot.” His wife was also an academic scientist, Judy Voet, who luckily is still with us. She was a professor at Swarthmore College in chemistry. They wrote a very popular biochemistry textbook, so they were real celebrities in the chemistry community. I went to an American Chemical Society with them once, with my aunt, and she was like a celebrity. People followed her around. So I come from this family where lots of people are doctors and scientists. So, when I was a child—I like to tell the story about my mother. She had three children. I have an older brother and a younger sister. For each of us, she slept overnight on the sidewalk outside the door of the Science and History Museum in Fort Worth, to get us enrolled in their preschool.

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow.

SELINGER: They had a preschool program. It wasn’t a five-day-a-week program. Maybe it was two days a week. But it was first come, first serve, and we lived 20-plus miles away. She didn’t want to have to get up in the morning and drive and worry that she wouldn’t be—so she slept on the sidewalk in a sleeping bag—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: —like people do for—like they used to do for like Grateful Dead tickets or something, right? And I went to that nursery school, in the Museum. It was later called the Museum of Science and History. I think at that early stage it was called the Children’s Museum. So I was steeped in science from the earliest age. Then my older brother started public school, and my parents did not find it met his needs very well. He’s a brilliant guy, but was borderline dyslexic in those early days, and there wasn’t any such thing as special ed for kids like that. So they put him in a private school, and the private school was 20-plus miles away. It was a boys school. They didn’t have a place for me there. So they asked, “Where is the nearest school like this that would accept a female student?” And so I went to Fort Worth Country Day School, which is a very nice prep school in Fort Worth. And I grew up in plaid and knee socks.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Uniforms. It was not a religious school; it was a secular day school. I had the most fantastic faculty there. And it was coed. The teachers had small enough classes that they were able to differentiate specialized curriculum for me and let me advance where I wanted to. So in the elementary grades—I don’t know if they still used them when you were in school—because remember I finished high school in 1980, so we’re going back a ways—in the elementary school, we had—I think they called them math labs, but there was nothing—there was no laboratory involved. It was basically a box filled with cards, each of which had a lesson, and you worked through them at your own pace. So I could just move through the curriculum as fast as I felt like. I’m pretty sure we had language labs, too. Anyway, that part of the curriculum was differentiated, even if the rest of it was pretty much the same. They also separated us into two classes and had a more advanced math class and a less advanced class. Anyway, I was able to get good, good, good instruction. Then somewhere around eighth grade, my tore me off from the main curriculum and just put me in the high school. I was only one year advanced, so I was able to take more advanced math. Then in high school, they let me do self-study for one semester of math over the summer so I could accelerate and get into calculus by eleventh grade. So they really did a wonderful job educating me.

What’s also particularly fun—it was a really long way to school, and my poor mother didn’t want to drive 20-something miles—round trip would be 50—and then another 20 miles round—it would be a hundred miles a day of driving. She didn’t want to ever do that. So what we did, the first year I think when I was in first grade, there was a staff member at the school who drove me in the morning, and Mom drove out and picked me up. Because the staff member didn’t come home until five, and my school was out at three. But after that, at some point the physics teacher became—had a second job on the side, as it were, transporting kids from our remote suburb to the school in Fort Worth. He and his wife had a team operation, with a big station wagon and a little Datsun station wagon. He drove around on one side of town and picked up kids, she drove around on the other side, then they met in the middle, transferred all the kids to the big station wagon, and he took us to school. I was the smallest kid with the shortest legs; I sat in the middle of the front seat, immediately next to the physics teachers, for years on end. So maybe it was just osmosis. But when I finally landed in his class, he was my very best adult friend. I spent so much time with him. And, we listened—I couldn’t read in the car or I would get carsick, so we talked, we listened to the radio, we had a jolly time. At some point he stopped teaching, and there were buses and various things. And at some point when I was old enough, I was tasked to drive, and actually also drive my little sister. There was another stage when he could take me in the morning, but that crew went home when the elementary school let out, and upper-schoolers had to stay later, to do sports or theatre or whatever thing, and so the English teacher became my ride home. Then she and I became very close, and we started taking square dancing lessons together. It’s a Texas thing, right? So I just had these amazing faculty who not only were brilliant instructors, but also extended the hand of friendship to me at such a tender age. They were great.

CRAWFORD: This secular day school that you went to, that was all the way through high school?

SELINGER: I went there for grades one through 12, and I graduated as valedictorian in 1980. But every summer, my parents provided other kinds of enrichment. In the elementary grades, that was typically that same museum where I attended nursery school. They had summer camp activities. Or not really camp; I learned origami, I learned pantomime, acting. Whatever it was that they offered, that’s what I took. Or it could be an art class. Even when I was in pre-K, my mother was taking flower-arranging classes, or building papier-mâché. It was just a source of extracurricular enrichment for my mom and for us kids. So it was great. By the time I was in middle school, my parents found places to send me away for the summer, to different—for parts of the summer, to different places. My elder brother went before me. There was an organization called the Gifted Students Institute, that was actually based in our town—I don’t know how that happened, in the middle of the country, Arlington, Texas—and they ran programs all over the U.S. My brother went to one and enjoyed it. And then I suppose to get admitted to this thing you had to prove you were gifted? Did they just look at my report card? I don’t remember taking a standardized test, but whatever it is. The first one I attended was at Indiana University in Bloomington, which is on my mind today because our dear Lamar Hylton is leaving, abandoning us at Kent State to go be a leader at that wonderful place. I had a great program, maybe it was three weeks, on that campus. I used to go stare at the Gutenberg Bible in the Lilly Library on that campus. Made a big impression on me. But was the first time I lived in a dormitory, and ate cafeteria food, and had to do my own laundry. It’s like getting ready for college, and I was only a seventh grader.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Then I went to another one at University of Michigan the next year. They were all on different themes. Then the third one was close to home. I think it was in Dallas. I think it was at SMU, Southern Methodist University. I went to those three. Then, the next summer I went to Phillips Academy in Andover, that—it’s the preppiest place on Earth, even preppier than Harvard Yard.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Although it looks a lot like it. I was there for a six-week program. That’s the longest I had ever been away from home. Those other programs were maybe three weeks.

CRAWFORD: Were they science-focused programs, or college prep, or—?

SELINGER: Different ones. I’m trying to remember. The program at Phillips Academy in Andover was a summer school. You could register for any class you wanted. I took a civics class, like a U.S. government class, because I needed it to fulfill a graduation requirement. But then the other class was creative writing. That was so much fun. So that had no STEM content. But they did put us on—you had an optional activity—all afternoon Wednesday and all day Saturday, they drove me around, up and down the East Coast, looking at colleges. So my parents were spared that whole college tour, because Phillips Academy did it for them. I think we went as far as—we certainly went to Rhode Island, and we saw Brown. I think we saw the Rhode Island Institute of Arts, or design, or whatever. We saw many, many fine schools up and down the East Coast. Did we go as far as Princeton? Probably. I don’t know, we were just—long, long bus rides. But yeah, I was like, “Ivy League, here we come.” I was just like—that was my chance to see it all. And I loved taking the bus into Boston. Then the next summer—I’m trying to think—the other programs that I attended all had different themes. I think the one in Michigan was about career pathways, and I convinced myself I was going to become an MD, like so many other people in my family. Oh, and by the way, my mother is not only the daughter of an ophthalmologist, but she married an ophthalmologist. My dad was an MD, ophthalmologist.

CRAWFORD: Right, I was going to ask because I—

SELINGER: That’s kind of weird that—we got ophthalmology on both sides of the family.

CRAWFORD: You gave all this great sort of extended family history, but I don’t know that you told us much about your parents. Would you be willing to say what their names are?

SELINGER: Absolutely. My mother, her name at birth was Loesje—L-O-E-S-J-E. It’s a Dutch name. But when she took U.S. citizenship her name was legally changed to Louise. Louise Elizabeth Blumberg is her married name. Voet, V-O-E-T, is her name at birth. I try not to say “maiden name”; that’s kind of an icky term. But anyway, that was her birth name. My father was—he passed away, also, sadly, in the pandemic. In 2021, he died of COVID.

CRAWFORD: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

SELINGER: Elliott Jay Blumberg. It’s E-L-L-I-O-T-T. Jay—J-A-Y. Blumberg—B-L-U-M-B-E-R-G. He was born in Denver. During the Depression, the family was really struggling in Denver, and my grandmother attended school to become a dental hygienist. And actually I have her oral history. I have the whole story about her life.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: This family is pretty well documented. The story is that her older brother got a scholarship to attend dental school and become a dentist. Nobody would give that kind of financial aid to a girl. I mean, she was—I think she was born in—I forget—1900 or 1902. She was able to scrabble together the resources to attend school because he was there, because she could use his materials. So maybe just had to pay tuition? But after he graduated, it was more than she could handle. So she said there was an opportunity. If she attended school for one more year, she could have been a dentist like her brother. But no one in the family could come up with the money. And no one would loan it to her; no one would give it to her. So when I was a little girl, and she said, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I said, “I want to be a nurse like Mommy.” Because my mom’s an RN. And she said, “Why don’t you be an MD like Daddy? Because the doctors and the nurses all work really hard, but the doctors make so much more money!” And I was like, “Okay, grandma! I’ll be a doctor like Daddy!” So I started out with this point of view, that I was going to be an MD. I’m absolutely not suited to it. But that was my plan. And I asked my dad when I was 12—I remember he was shaving, and I went into his bathroom in the morning, and said, “Dad, if I get into”—I think I asked him, “I want to be a doctor, and I want to go to the Harvard Medical School, so I might as well go there as an undergraduate too,” Actually I asked him, “If I go to Harvard as an undergraduate, will that help or hurt me in getting into medical school?” He’s like, “Let’s write to the dean!” I don’t think we ever did. But he’s like, “Yeah, if you get in, you can go.” And I never asked again. I was like, “That’s where I’m going.”

CRAWFORD: Wow. What is it like to come from a family that is so steeped in medicine, science? I mean, generations of people. Did you feel pressure, or was it just kind of like, “This is how we do things”?

SELINGER: There were other people in the family who were attorneys. But if you look at the women in the family—my mom was an RN, and at some stage when I was still growing up, she had a—first of all, I should say my younger sister was the bonus child that wasn’t particularly anticipated, and abortion was not legal in 1970, or I might not have a sister. We love our—I love my sister very much, but she—I was eight when she was born, and my mom’s like, “Here we go again. Another baby.” But as soon as that child was in first grade, my mom went back to graduate school and got a master’s. So, that was a great role model.My mom is not limiting her attention to—well, in German, they say “kinder, küche, and kirche”, right? So, yes, she was very much a housewife, but she was a person who read voraciously and had a lot to say and do. She was deeply engaged in the community as a volunteer, with many organizations. I’m trying to think; her younger sister also was pretty much—she had two kids, but she also was working and had a degree, I think maybe in—I’m trying to remember—social work? I don’t know, anyway, the women in my family were not women who just sat at home knitting. They were deeply engaged in the community, working for free as volunteers, or working for money, or working part time. I don’t think any of them worked full time. For instance, the story I heard about my grandmother—I didn’t know her because she died when I was only an infant, but the story I heard is that she set up her medical office—their living room was the waiting room. This was a family with four kids and they had a full-time housekeeper, so the housekeeper could keep an eye on the kids and Mom would see patients. And they had set up a medical exam room. In an ophthalmologist’s office, you have to have the special chair, and the instruments, and the screen and all those things. She had that at their house. That way, she was able to be essentially at home with her kids and working. But anyway, let’s just say expectations were high. Nobody expected—so also, I asked my dad at some point if you think women—because he was very conservative in his view—women should be—their primary responsibility is their home and their family. And it’s like, “If you thought I was going to end up as a housewife, why did you spend all that money sending me to that expensive private school for grades one through 12, and then four years of an Ivy League tuition?” And he’s like, “I wanted to give you a benefit of the doubt.” Maybe he thought I was just going to be a scientist and not have a family.

CRAWFORD: Right, right. Okay. [laughs]

SELINGER: I don’t know. I just feel like—my younger sister is really intelligent, but maybe a little less academically motivated than me. And so at some point, as my brother did also, they both dropped out of private school and went to public school. All that time in the car, the uniforms, the rules—private school is—it’s an extra challenging thing. But I just loved it. There was no way I was going to leave it. I didn’t know anything else. It was just my whole life. But my brother and my sister both quit private school and ended up in the local public schools. And neither of them graduated at the top of their class. They were good, but they just didn’t put the extra-extra in. I think in my brother’s case, again, he had this undiagnosed learning disability. He is so successful as an attorney. And my sister, I don’t know, maybe it was just the place and the time. My favorite story about the public school—like all girls, she got scheduled to take typing class, and my mother had to go in and tell the administrator, or whoever, “My daughter needs to take computer science, not typing.” They’re like, “But all our girls take typing! It’s such a great skill for girls to have.” It’s like—“Put her in computer science.” She ended up majoring in management information systems, and she has had a great career in that field. She’s at home with kids right now, but I think she’ll be out in the workforce when she’s ready. She had one child with some special needs who needed extra attention. What’s hard about that environment is that if—if most kids came home with a B+, their parents would be, “Right on! Great job!” I came home with a B+; my parents would be like, “What happened! Why did you fail! What went wrong!”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: It’s like, “Mom, I put—” You know—“I had a big physics test that week!” So anyway, I worked my fingers to the bone. I was really at it. Academics was my most important thing.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned talking to your dad at age 12 and saying, “I think I”—

SELINGER: I aimed for the Ivy League.

CRAWFORD: “I think I want to be a doctor. If I go to the Ivy League—” What about science in general? Was that an interest of yours? I know you said you were in accelerated math.

SELINGER: The high school did something really interesting. They decided to try an experiment with the curriculum. The usual sequence in that era was biology in 10th grade, chemistry in 11th grade, and physics, if you took it at all, would be in 12th grade. Or else, you might take AP biology or AP chemistry instead. But at our school, I got physics first. The Physics First movement was something I read about later. So I had physics in 10th grade. And it wasn’t called AP physics. I did take the AP physics exam, and I think I scored a three out of five, which is not a disaster, but I wasn’t in an AP physics class. But it was an interesting—and of course the physics teacher was my dearest friend. Okay. And then the summer after the year I took physics, which was tenth grade, that’s the year I went to Phillips Academy. The next year was chemistry. And I had an extraordinary chemistry teacher by the name of Donald Welch. Bad luck—Mr. Welch had lung cancer. He was a smoker, heavy smoker. And tragically he passed away the summer after I finished tenth grade. While he was still my teacher, he wrote—he discovered a program I could attend, a summer research internship for high school students at Boston University, funded by the National Science Foundation. It was partially subsidized by them. And he wrote a letter—first of all, he read about it in a teacher journal, he recommended me to apply for it, he wrote the letter of recommendation to get me into it. Okay. Nine days after his funeral, I got on a plane and went to Boston.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: And so I went with this burning desire in my heart to fulfill the dream that he had for me. And again, I worked my heart out that summer. I was assigned to a wonderful faculty member named H. Eugene Stanley in the Physics Department at Boston University. This was a six-week internship. He handed me off to a graduate student, and gave me a computational physics project to do. I had to use the FORTRAN programming language. I had learned programming in BASIC. I had never seen FORTRAN before. It’s still my favorite programming language. It’s a little out of date these days. I worked really hard on this project. I had to share the IBM mainframe with the entire campus, so it was really hard to get stuff done during the day, so I tended to work at night. The graduate students and postdocs were all very supportive. They taught me everything I needed to do. And I worked those late hours. And again, I burned the midnight oil. I fell in love with one of the postdocs. It was a very bad idea.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Well, you were in—tenth grade?

SELINGER: I was a rising—actually that was the summer between 11th grade and 12th grade, so I was a little older; I was 17. Still should not be dating the postdocs.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: And then as the end of the six weeks approached, the project was not finished. The professor said, “Okay, I know this program is ending, but could you just stay?” I was like, “Okay, that’s thinking outside the box a little bit.” There’s a beginning date and an end date. There’s no internet. Long distance phone calls are even expensive. How am I going to—I don’t have a mainframe IBM computer accessible to me in Arlington, Texas. I have a TRS-80 from Radio Shack. Like, that’s it. How is this even going to happen? He’s like, “Let me talk to your parents. Let me talk to your principal.” So, Professor Stanley made those phone calls. He found alternative housing for me, because I had to move out of the dorm where we were all housed during this program. And I stayed. So I was in Boston for the rest of the summer. Then I had to go back and start school, but he worked things out with the school. I went to school for six weeks, I came back to Boston for six weeks. I went to school for three weeks, and then three weeks back in Boston. And three weeks of school, and then back in Boston. So all told, 12 weeks out of my senior year was spent doing physics research. Now I still had to do my high school lessons. And again, there was no internet. Long distance phone calls were expensive. So everything—they sent me with stuff, they mailed me stuff, I mailed stuff back, I brought all my textbooks. So I managed to do my school work. The teachers were really understanding. But I had run out of math. I had done calculus in 11th grade. I wasn’t in a math class in 12th grade. They didn’t have anything for me. But I was learning plenty at BU. I wasn’t sitting in any classes, but I heard seminars, I was hanging out with graduate students.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: I was hanging out with Physics faculty. Oh, and then while I was in school and at BU, I had to do my college applications, that fall. I had a letter of recommendation from a university professor saying I had a bright future in physics. I got in everywhere I applied. I was top of my class from my little teeny school, and I had good SATs, AP scores, except for that one physics test that was kind of early. I think I did—it must have been AP chem, AP calc, and English, and history, and whatever. So I had all the AP scores. I had the SATs. I was a National Merit Scholar. And Harvard let me in. Which was great.

CRAWFORD: But you said you got into other schools, too.

SELINGER: I got into every school I applied to. Certainly—Yale, Princeton—

CRAWFORD: Did you consider anywhere else? It sounds like you had been thinking about Harvard for a while by that point.

SELINGER: I had been. Okay, here’s the other story. My uncle, Donald Voet, did his PhD there. That was my only connection to the place. I discovered later in my family history research that on my father’s side, my great grandmother came to the U.S as a toddler with her grandparents in like the 1890s, and they lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her aunts and uncles had established residency in Scranton, and her three uncles had set up a dry goods store. Two of her first cousins from that—the first born generation in the U.S.—had gone to Harvard, and one did a bachelor’s degree and a law degree, and one did a bachelor’s degree and a medical degree. And so this is part of the history of the Jewish immigrants transition from newcomers to the educated middle class, able to earn a living in the professions. Now you also know the history, because it has been in the news recently, about how affirmative action got started? Well, sorry, no, about how the model minority got excluded from—because there were too many Jews at Harvard, right? That was a problem. And then they changed the admissions rules to try to reduce those numbers. But anyway, my family did have a history there; I just didn’t know it.

The summer after I finished high school, my mother took me on a trip to Europe and to Israel to meet many of her first cousins. These were the generation that survived the War in hiding. Some of them were born after the War; some of them were born before the War and were actually in hiding separated from their parents and then were reunited with their parents, some of whom they didn’t recognize, because they were babies when they went into hiding. But anyway, there’s a family diaspora, so there are some still in the Netherlands, where my mom was born, and some had moved to Israel. So I met all these cousins. And one of the cousins that’s in the U.K., I’ll be seeing him next month! Actually I’m going to try to get over to the Netherlands and visit some of the other cousins while I’m in Europe this August. So, when that summer trip was over, I went back to Boston University to work some more—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: —and then moved directly from there into my freshman dorm room in Harvard Yard.

CRAWFORD: Did you get a publication out of this project? [laughs]

SELINGER: I did! I got my first publication the summer after I finished high school.

CRAWFORD: Wow!

SELINGER: And my advisor took me to my first conference. It was a Gordon Research Conference on water and aqueous solutions, somewhere in, I don’t know, probably it was in New England, probably New Hampshire. I got a chance to see what a conference is like. But I couldn’t understand hardly anything from the talks. So it was really kind of a little bit of—so I would sit in the dark room. And of course they didn’t have a projector like we use now. They had an overhead projector with the little transparencies. And maybe I might understand something a little bit from the introduction, and then I was just at sea. Like, pair correlation functions, x-ray scattering, blah blah blah. Like, what, I’m 18? What do I know about any of that stuff yet? So I drew my left hand in my sketch book. I used my notebook as a sketch book and drew my left hand. In the dark, that’s all I could see. So that’s what I drew.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] And yet, you decided to become an academic!

SELINGER: I liked hanging out with—so the thing about a Gordon Conference—and it’s on my mind, because I just attended one a few weeks ago—is that they have talks in the morning, and then the afternoon is free to go swimming, hiking, whatever. Or just, if it’s raining, you sit inside and talk about physics. Then there’s an early dinner, and then an evening session. So I got plenty of social time with all these interesting people. I got to hang around with these wonderful scientists from around the world. It was a very international community to be steeped in. And people were just so warm and welcoming, and kind. I can only imagine they would let someone who hadn’t even started college yet come to the conference. That’s kind of insane.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: But—my advisor vouched for me; I was able to go.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the Gordon Conferences. I’ve read about them. There are certainly many people connected to the LCI[1] that either went to them or—

SELINGER: Yes, a bunch of us were there. Actually Elda Hegmann, our colleague from—spouse of Torsten—she was vice chair, co vice chair of the Liquid Crystal Gordon Conference that just took place a few weeks ago, and she will be chair of the next one in two years, co-chair of the next one that begins in two years’ time.

CRAWFORD: I think Bill Doane went to a few of them.

SELINGER: Well so, there are continuing series. The Liquid Crystal Conference is normally every two years. But there are Gordon Conferences on many topics across life sciences and physical sciences, and even some in engineering. The tradition was to hold them always in a residential setting. So it could be a small college with dormitories and a cafeteria, or it could be like a boarding school with dormitories and a cafeteria. So it’s like summer camp for scientists.

CRAWFORD: Who funds it?

SELINGER: The Gordon Research Conferences has a foundation, maybe the Gordon Research Foundation? I don’t know. I have no idea who Mr. Gordon was—Mr. and/or Ms. Gordon—who founded the Gordon Research Conferences. And now they have Gordon Conferences in California and in Europe and in various other places.

CRAWFORD: So it has really grown into—something.

SELINGER: It’s huge. It’s absolutely huge. I have to say, it’s unique among the types of conferences I’ve attended. I would say after missing the conference that would have been two years ago that was cancelled for obvious reasons, and the pandemic, everybody was just so grateful to be together. The talks were well chosen, and people behaved well. They have a new innovation which is now there’s a one-day conference just for students and postdocs that is the Sunday before the main conference gets underway. Maybe it starts Saturday at dinner time. They call that the Gordon Research Seminar. It is chaired by students and postdocs. So they have one day just for them to work on—they give the talks, and they get mentoring sessions about building your career, which is really awesome. The Gordon Conference is only one week out of the year, and in the case of liquid crystals it’s one week every two years, but it’s really wonderful.

CRAWFORD: How important do you think that kind of socialization that something like the Gordon Conference offers is to science?

SELINGER: I think it enables students who may be—I mean, we have a big liquid crystal community here, so students here maybe don’t feel isolated. But if you’re the only kid working with the only faculty member at a school where that’s not a big strength, then you get to meet your peers from across the country and around the world at a conference like that. There’s also the International Liquid Crystal Conference, which is also every two years, and it’s in the off years. It was last summer in Lisbon. It was pretty well attended but not a huge number of students came. It’s expensive to send students to an international conference. It wasn’t a super spreader, but there were some cases of COVID after the conference.

CRAWFORD: I guess somebody might say, we live in this age of email, social media, rapid publication of papers, preprints.

SELINGER: Oh, we have online seminars. I’m actually in a leadership role with the American Physical Society. Last year I was Speaker of the APS Council of Representatives. This year I’m in the role of Past Speaker. It’s kind of a bonus year. The APS has historically been a technology leader. They were the first people who said, “Hey, instead of FedExing your abstract for the conference, we’re going to let you submit it online.” Think of all the money that was saved with all those FedExes that didn’t have to be sent. But they have not really been technology-forward with the virtual conferences. Our electronic conferences have really been spectator events rather than participatory. Other than giving your own 12-minute contributed talk or 36-minute invited talk, there just wasn’t a lot of opportunity for social interaction in the online conference. So it really has not met my expectations for what an online conference could be. But we’re not done. We’re still working on it.

CRAWFORD: I totally understand that, certainly, having attended some virtual conferences myself. There’s some level of interaction that’s missing. What is it about that interaction that is so vital, do you think?

SELINGER: What happened at this conference, I won’t give you all the gory details, but one colleague said, “I have experiment, you have theory, let’s collaborate.” And that’s the kind of thing that we live for. Another experimenter said, “I have unpublished results. Let me share those with you. You can compare those with your theory and use them to build your theory.” Another person said, “Oh, I have computer simulations that—” I asked him, “Can you share your computer simulations with me? I want to analyze them in this new way.” He’s like, “Of course.” I mean, I could have—if I had known—I mean, I know all those three people. I could have called them up. But it’s just so easy to have that conversation when you’re near each other. What’s missing from the online conference is two things. One is asking questions in the sessions. APS—I love the American Physical Society. I am devoted to the American Physical Society. So if I criticize them—I am actually like the chief complainer in the American Physical Society.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: We laugh about that. Because I am constantly asking them to fix things. And we have a procedure. I tell the CEO or his deputy what needs to be fixed, and then they tell the people who need to fix it to go fix it. I don’t have that authority as—even as Speaker of the Council, I can only request. I have no management authority over anybody. I’m just the chief complainer! So I complain. One of the things I’ve complained about is that they broadcast the stream, the live seminar, with a 30-second delay. You can’t have a conversation with someone with a 30-second delay. “I’d like to ask the speaker a question”—you can’t do that, so you have to type it, and then you hope that the chair chooses your question to read, which they may not. And you can’t have any back and forth with a 30-second delay. It’s just not feasible. I mean, we could have used the virtual social lounge where you move your icon around the screen, and you can only see and hear the people whose icon is adjacent to your icon. You have a little conversation bubble. Spatial.chat is one of those. Gather.town is one of those. We had that at the Spring ‘21 meeting. Some of the individual units within the—like the Soft Matter unit or the Polymer unit or whatever, would set up their own little virtual social lounge to have a kind of coffee break or happy hour gathering. But it wasn’t used for anything as part of the main conference. I’m hoping that we’ll have more of that hallway chat environment, at some point.

CRAWFORD: I want to go back to your story.

SELINGER: I was starting college? Should I go back to there?

CRAWFORD: You were talking about this computational physics project that you got involved in at BU, and how that kind of carried through your senior year.

SELINGER: I continued that into college. The great thing is that Harvard and Boston University are not very far apart.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yes, of course!

SELINGER: The easy way to get back and forth is by taking a bus down Mass Ave., past MIT, across the River, and then walk down to BU. But that took too long. Gene Stanley—oh, the other possibility is to take the red line and connect to the green line at Park Street; that took too long, too. He wanted every possible minute of my time. So he worked out this deal where I would take a taxi from Harvard to BU, which is a very short ride, I would hand him a receipt, and he would hand me cash.

CRAWFORD: Okay, so the question is, then [laughs], why was this professor investing so much—why did you become so important to what he was doing?

SELINGER: I guess because I was capable and willing to work hard. I’m sure I was consuming more mentoring than I was producing results at the beginning, but probably by the end of the six weeks, it got to the point where, instead of my—I mean, the first six weeks of this program, my parents paid for me to have the enormous privilege to participate. After that, my parents paid nothing. He paid the airfare, he paid the housing, he gave me money for meals. He invested his grant funds in mentoring me, because he saw me as someone who could contribute to get a project finished. With help from a graduate student. There was no way I was ready to be independent at the beginning. But, I got that way, before too long.

CRAWFORD: At a certain point, was it the case that you just knew the project so well, you had become so skilled at the FORTRAN programming, like—?

SELINGER: It was little by little. It wasn’t immediate. It was little by little. But he brought me along. He had a big group. He had a lot of graduate students and postdocs. So when I had a programming problem—oh, gosh the Professor was not the person I would go to. He wasn’t a programmer. I would go to one of the graduate students or postdocs. So I was being brought—it’s like being a kid in a large family. He sent me to work for colleagues overseas. The summer after freshman year, I traveled with the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, an acapella choir, and we toured Europe. It was an extended tour, so it took most of the summer. It was the most amazing thing, to do nothing but music, all the way through. Because I had been singing in the choir as a freshman, which I got into by audition, because I knew they were going to Europe and I wanted to join. [laughs] And so we toured around Europe. Of course I had been in Europe the previous summer with my mom, so I was excited to go back. Then the rest of the summer, I worked at Boston University. Then the summer after sophomore year, he sent me to Paris, to do light scattering experiments with a colleague at the Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris—the ESPCI. I was not skilled as an experimenter, number one. Number two, it was hot in the lab, and none of my experiments were temperature-controlled, so the data was not really publishable. Number three, a key piece of equipment failed partway through my stay, the machine that measured the scattered or refl…whatever the—it calculated the time autocorrelation function for the laser light that had passed through my sample that I had lovingly prepared. And, the power supply broke. I turned it on, and nothing happened. I asked my advisor; he looks at it and he’s like, “Oh, the power supply is broken. We’ll have to send it to be fixed.” I said, “Oh, good, when can it be back?” He’s like, “Oh, it will take about a month.” It’s like, “I’m only here for three more weeks. What am I supposed to do?” He’s like, “Well, what do you want to do?” I said, “Do you have a computer? I could do some more simulations.” So I did that. To think—if that power supply had not blown, maybe I would have become an experimenter.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like you’re really diving into physics, but you had said earlier that you were thinking MD, so—

SELINGER: Well, but I could still be a premed and a physics major.

CRAWFORD: I see. So you’re still thinking—

SELINGER: But push came to shove, at the end of my first semester at Harvard. I took the second semester of general chemistry. Based on having taken the AP class as a high school kid, I got to start in the second semester. If you’re premed, the next course is organic chemistry. I didn’t take it. That was my way of saying, “I guess I’m not going to be a premed.”

CRAWFORD: Why didn’t you take it?

SELINGER: Because at that point I decided, “I’m just going to major in physics or chemistry, and decide between those two.” I guess somehow by the middle of my first year of college—well, I still had three more years. If I wanted to take O Chem, I could take it. But at that point, I was like, “I would rather take physics now.” I only had room in my schedule for one science course. “I would rather take introductory physics, and then decide between chemistry and physics.” I decided on physics. After that I didn’t take another chemistry course. I took all math and physics courses. Then I took a lot of music and music theory. I signed up for voice lessons. In the end, I took a full year of music theory and composition with the music majors. Which would be—imagine a music major taking introductory physics with the physics majors. That was quite a challenging experience, but a very educational one.

CRAWFORD: Why did you decide to do physics?

SELINGER: I guess because the people I met that I did research with convinced me I had a future in that field and that I would enjoy it. I would say in retrospect I’m really more of a materials science person. I’m not interested in black holes, cosmology. Nuclear physics is not my thing. Please don’t ask me any questions about—

CRAWFORD: I won’t. [laughs]

SELINGER: —about what’s happening in the world of high-energy physics these days, which is pretty exciting, but I just don’t do string theory. I like the physics of stuff. Good old stuff. So, I didn’t have to choose. The other issue was I got to take lots of math, and I never took a computer programming class. I learned all my computer science skills, as it were, on the job. I was mentored by people more advanced than I was. But I had my hands on the IBM mainframe! At 17! The other issue was, I had to share that computer with the entire campus. But I would put my jobs in the queue and they would run at night. And if they ran for an hour, I was using 1/24th of the whole university’s—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: —compute resource. I had my hands on—and we didn’t even have video terminals at the beginning. We typed on a keyboard and it would appear on paper, on tractor—you know the paper with the little holes on the edges? I would type a command to the computer, and the computer would answer me by typing. On paper.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like time on the computer was a limited resource.

SELINGER: It wasn’t the time at the keyboard, it was the actual compute time. If I ran, put a job in the queue—you also have to recognize, in the years or maybe even in the months before I got there, people ran computer jobs by bringing a stack of computer cards to the batch window, with a rubber band, and you hand them off, and then you come back later and you get your paper printouts of what the computer did when it executed your code. And the answer could be “Error on line two.” It might fail right away, and you would find out the next morning.

CRAWFORD: You hand the cards off to—?

SELINGER: To a human, who feeds them into the machine when it’s their turn.

CRAWFORD: I see. So there was a person whose job it was to just take—?

SELINGER: Right. But by the time I got there, the machines that punched the cards were still in the hallway; I never had to touch them. I could type, but the editing, since there was no video screen initially, I would print the code, and then tell my editor, “On line 12, change I to J.” Then I could print it out again—I could just print line 12, or I could print the whole thing again. That’s how we edited. When it was ready, then I could say, “Submit the job.” If it was a short job that was going to run for 15 seconds, I could get it right away, but if it needed to run for half an hour, it had to go overnight. But the data still came to me on paper. There wasn’t enough internal memory in the computer to store the results of the calculation.

CRAWFORD: So, it actually had to print it out.

SELINGER: So I would get all the—and then I would have to analyze the data, from paper.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: So we were drawing graphs by hand. Then at some point, we got a pen plotter. I was present for the sort of scientist computing—so like for my first papers, our hand-drawn figures were handed off to a professional—I think they called him a draftsman. It’s a gendered name. The draftsman would turn our hand-written figures into publishable figures.

CRAWFORD: Wow, wow.

SELINGER: Then later, we were able to generate them with a pen plotter that moves a pen with a robot arm. And later, we were able to generate them other ways. Also, when I first gave presentations, everything had to be on transparencies. We could take one of those images and Xerox them onto a black and white transparency. When we wanted color, eventually we got a printer like an inkjet printer that could print on a special transparency that could display color. We were so happy! Before that, all we could do was write with markers—

CRAWFORD: Colored pen, colored markers.

SELINGER: Yeah, Sharpies. Sharpies. Oh my goodness, Sharpies. Then we had to carry alcohol to erase the Sharpie if we made a mistake.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Then we were able to actually—I think I rented a—I think it was the Materials Research Society, we rented a television and had a videotape to show, of a moving simulation. That was the first time. And oh my goodness, having that videotape was a huge deal. Now I make a video in 30 seconds and display it on my screen, show it at the conference, no problem. So, I’ve been present from the beginning to where we are now! It has been a great ride! Watching the computer technology get faster and faster and faster. So, we had the IBM mainframe. Eventually we had the Connection Machine—a long defunct company—that was doing parallel. I was exposed to parallel processing already as a grad student. Then now GPU computing, multicore message passing, all that stuff. My career as a computational physicist is basically surfing the wave of this incredibly growing powerful tool. Being a computational physicist from—I started in ‘79—to now, it’s 2023—it has been an amazing period to be a computational physicist. Pure pleasure. And my students are more advanced than I am.

CRAWFORD: I should have asked this when you mentioned this in the first questions, but what exactly is a computational physicist? I think most people are familiar with what physicists are, and I think many people have heard of theoretical physicists.

SELINGER: Well, let me just ask you this question. What if we had a pair of dice like you would play Monopoly with. So they have one, two, three, four, five, six. I could ask you, “What are the chances every time you roll the dice that you would get double sixes?” Well, there are several ways to solve this problem. One is that you can just roll the dice as many times as you have patience to do so, and keep statistics. Okay. Or, you can do a mathematical calculation that I have one in six chance for this one, and one in six chance for that one, so it should be 1/36th of the time. But on the other hand, that might be true for perfect dice, but maybe these dice are weighted. How could you find out? You have to throw them many times. Okay. Well then, again you can use the rules of statistics to try to—you know, I’ve rolled them a thousand times. This is the distribution I got. This is what I would have gotten if they were fair dice. It’s not going to be exactly the same. How do I know if these dice are weighted or not? Well, there’s another thing you can do. Maybe we have a problem that’s not as easy to deal with as dice. Maybe we have a more complicated problem. We can let the computers draw random numbers—we’ll call them pseudorandom numbers—and do what’s called a Monte Carlo simulation. Monte Carlo is—in the principality of Monaco—wait, which one is the principality? I think Monaco is the principality. Whatever it is, when I was in the choir, we sang a concert in that place; Princess Caroline came to our concert. I sang for a crowned head of Europe! One!

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Wow.

SELINGER: But anyway, Monte Carlo simulations means using pseudorandom numbers to essentially run a computer simulation of random processes. So when we have a problem in statistical physics where there is a distribution of outcomes, so the sort of—the fruit fly of the statistical physics world is a model of magnetism called the Ising Model. So imagine you have a bunch of atoms, each of which can have its magnetic spin in one of two states, up or down. There’s an energetic preference for neighboring states to agree with each other, to align with each other. If you start a large system, imagine a square lattice, like a checkerboard, and all the spins, you could imagine putting an arrow that points down or points up, and then have a stochastic process where each spin has an opportunity to flip or not flip, and then you watch the system evolve over time. At high temperature, the system will remain disordered. Below a phase transition temperature, it will order. This is a model of a phase transition. We use something called the Metropolis algorithm to model how the system evolves statistically over time. That was a technique developed at Los Alamos, initially to model something—you know, runaway nuclear reactions, whatever thing. But in this case, it’s a very simple statistical physics model, and we can use it to study phase transitions. The thing about the Ising model is we can solve it analytically for one spin. We can solve it analytically for a single chain of spins. Once you get to a square lattice of spins, it was solved analytically by a guy named Lars Onsager, but it’s not something we can assign even in a graduate class. It’s a complicated solution. We can do the 1D problem as homework in a grad class. The 3D system, no one has ever solved. The only way to study it is through modeling.

CRAWFORD: Interesting.

SELINGER: That’s just an example of a system where we can kind of virtually flip coins using pseudorandom numbers.

CRAWFORD: And that’s the kind of work that a computational physicist does?

SELINGER: That’s the first lesson, one of the first lessons in my computational materials science class that I teach at Kent State. So if we have a binary alloy that’s a mixture of two types of atoms, and maybe at high temperature they mix, and at low temperature, they tend to demix into little clusters of like atoms, that’s a phase separation process. How do we model phase separation? We have a whole bunch of models for phase separation. This summer, I have a summer student using a Cahn-Hilliard model, which is another model of phase separation, that, instead of having ones and minus-ones, has a number that’s—continuous variable that’s what’s the concentration of one species or the concentration of another species. But it also spontaneously phase separates. So this is a method of studying pattern formation. But there are other types of models that are not stochastic and don’t need random numbers. One of those is molecular dynamics. Imagine I have a bunch of atoms located in a three-dimensional box. There’s an energy function that tells you the energy of interaction between two atoms as a function of their separation distance. We call that the potential energy. And then each atom has a mass, and a velocity, which gives it a momentum, and it has this energy of interaction. Derivatives of that energy give you forces. And then we can essentially, for each atom, find all the other atoms that are close enough to apply forces to it, or mutual—equal and opposite forces, add them all up vector-wise, and then integrate the equations of motion forward in time for position and momentum. And so, you don’t just have an image; you have a movie. So all particles are moving around. At this point you can try to ask the question, what phase is stable at a certain—so we have a thermostat and a barostat to control the temperature and the pressure. Or we may keep the volume fixed. And we can study phase transitions, pattern formation, transport, diffusion, chemical reactions. So that’s not stochastic; it’s deterministic. From a given initial position and initial set of velocities, there’s only one trajectory. On the other hand, you might do a stochastic process to generate the initial condition. But from then on, it’s deterministic. There’s error of numerical integration. And so if you run the simulation three times, even with the same initial condition, if you change the time step, you might get different outcomes.

Anyway, I learned all those different techniques. I did not learn anything that involves quantum mechanics or solid state physics. All my computational work was on the classical side, so statistical physics, fractals, pattern formation, diffusion in disordered media. I came to liquid crystals actually fairly late, after I had finished grad school. While I was an undergraduate, I was studying liquid water. I was doing some statistical physics. I mentioned that one summer I worked in Paris. The next summer, my advisor, Gene Stanley, sent me to Germany, to work on computer simulations of water. I didn’t perform the simulations; I analyzed them. You would think now, you would just put the data into Dropbox, and we could do it. But there, I had to physically go to Germany, and they had data on big tapes that had to be loaded on a machine so I could read the data and analyze it. I suppose they could have mailed tapes, but then they would have had to copy them, and mailing them. Anyway, it made more sense for me to go there than the other way.

My future husband also came and did an internship in Germany that summer, and we were both welcomed as home guests of the professor I was working with, who was Alfons Geiger, and his dear family. And something really amazing happened that summer that I was living in Germany. First of all my cousins in the Netherlands who were Holocaust survivors came to visit me in Germany, and they were visibly uncomfortable even setting foot in Germany. That sense of anxiety was still there. I didn’t share it. I was perfectly happy to be in Germany. I somehow didn’t get it. Yet. I get it now, but I didn’t get it then. The other issue was while I was living with this lovely family, grandparents came to visit. The grandfather spoke flawless English, like really, really excellent English. I was blown away by that. I asked him, “Where did you—?” I thought maybe he had been a student in the U.S. or whatever. I said, “How did you learn your wonderful English?” He said, “I was a prisoner of war in the United States during World War II.” I didn’t know they took prisoners from Europe to the U.S. And he was housed in Texas where I grew up. I mean, in my home state. Right? And my mother was safe, but her first cousins, her grandparents were killed in the war, in a concentration camp. Her great—let’s see—her grandparents, and her great grandmother, and then most of her great aunts and great uncles; not all but many of them. And many of her second cousins all died in the War. And here I was, living as an honored guest, in the home of this guy’s daughter. It was 1983. It was 40 years after.

CRAWFORD: Wow. Wow.

SELINGER: That made a huge impression on me. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Yes, I bet. I bet. For sure.

SELINGER: A lot of people that I met in Germany were curious about Jews. They just didn’t know very many. They were respectful. But yeah, it’s 40 years after the War, at that point. I visited those cousins, some of those cousins, in the Netherlands, more recently. It was the anniversary of the Battle of Arnhem, and they live in Arnhem. We went to the Museum, and we went to the historic burial ground and various things. My cousin’s wife, whose older siblings were betrayed—they were in hiding, and they were betrayed and killed, in the War, so she was one of the ones that had the most anti-Germany feeling—she said in that visit, in 2019, “Those poor German soldiers. They were pawns in all of this, too.” She felt, for them. She also, from being in a place where she would never drive a Volkswagen car or want anything to do with anything that was Germany, she told me about her new favorite grocery store, which was a German health company, and it’s like her favorite grocery store—best food, best prices, best service. It’s like, okay, she got over it, too. Okay, it was from 1983 to 2019; it took longer. But even that branch of the family that was so deeply personally damaged in the War. One of my cousins in Israel, who sadly also just passed away recently, was a psychologist who specialized in the needs of Holocaust survivors and their children. Because the trauma—being raised by a Holocaust survivor is not easy, either. I was not, though. I was raised by—my mother was in the United States. Her biggest trauma was maybe that they couldn’t get butter so they had to eat margarine, and the margarine—the farmers wouldn’t let them color the margarine yellow, because they thought that was unfair competition to butter. So one of my mother’s childhood jobs was to mix the yellow dye with the margarine—

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow. [laughs]

SELINGER: —that was sold separately, or packaged separately. So, yeah, my family did not suffer during the War. They were safe in the United States. Anyway, so, one summer with the choir, one summer working in Paris, one summer working in Germany. And then I graduated.

CRAWFORD: When I asked you about your turn towards physics, you said that the people that you knew, the grad students and postdocs that were part of this community, they thought that you would enjoy it. Did you enjoy it at the time?

SELINGER: I was. I thought it was really—the first time I brought a result to my advisor, that had the linear behavior on log-log paper of whatever thing I was measuring, it was a really hot summer, and the air conditioning was not very good. He was a very informal guy. He would sit in his office with his shirt off. I was just mortally embarrassed by the whole thing. Plus he told me to call him by his first name, and I was used to calling adults by their last name. I was really struggling to deal with this social setting. But anyway, the first time I brought him a good result, he jumped up and down for joy.

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow. Yeah. So that’s—[laughs].

SELINGER: He was just so excited that I produced a publishable result. I was such a baby. I just supervised a high school student for the last two semesters, fall and spring of this last academic year, 2022-23, named Nadia Peterson. She is a graduating senior. She just graduated from Warren G. Harding High School in Warren, Ohio. This is a kid from a family that has been very challenged. I think she attended nine different schools, K through 12.

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow.

SELINGER: I never heard about a dad. I believe she was raised just by her mom. But they moved hither and yon. At some point, the family house burned down, and they lost most of their belongings. This child had a very challenging upbringing. Sometimes she was even homeschooled. Those nine schools included a couple years of homeschooling. She got into Harvard and Yale. To my chagrin, she chose Yale.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: She’s going to be so happy there.

CRAWFORD: I noticed from your CV that you started this science experience course, or—?

SELINGER: Yeah, this was something that the pre-college programs office put me up to. If you look at this—and maybe you have them in your classes too—many of the students that are still in high school but take Kent State courses through College Credit Plus, many of them just want to fulfill their core requirements so they can get through school faster. But you will find from time to time the 14-year-old taking differential equations, or the 16-year-old taking organic chemistry or whatever thing. I watched my own kid—one of my children was really motivated and wanted to take Kent State courses. Before it was called College Credit Plus, it was the Post-Secondary Enrollment Options Program, P-S-E-O-P, PSEOP. So he took—I’m trying to think. He took computer programming and discrete math. Then his whole senior year he took no courses at his high school. He took all his courses at Kent State. So he essentially had a pre-college college year. Oh, and it was such a wonderful year. He got AP physics. Well, instead of AP physics, he got university physics. They let him into the honors calculus class! He took two semesters of organic chemistry. He took economics. He just had the time of his life.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned that the University asked you to have this science experience course, but was it motivated at all by the kind of mentorship that you got?

SELINGER: Absolutely. It’s pay-it-forward for me. The first one who did this, there was a professor in the LCI, Qi-Huo Wei—that’s Q-I, H-U-O, with a hyphen in between, Wei, W-E-I—who was a faculty member here in Chemical Physics. Actually I was in Chemical Physics when I first joined. My tenure transferred from Chemical Physics to Physics when we reorganized a bit over at the AMLCI.[2] But Qi-Huo agreed to supervise a high school student. I think we did it without him being registered for anything initially. I don’t remember exactly when we started. The woman who was at that time the director of pre-college programs said, “Can we create this course, and will you be the faculty member of record?” I agreed to do that. The stages now, I work very closely with staff in the pre-college programs office. We get a list of students who are already enrolled at Kent State, in College Credit Plus, and who want to do a research internship.

CRAWFORD: Oh, interesting.

SELINGER: I work with Ann Gosky, who is head of the undergraduate research office, and we place those kids in summer internships. In some cases, they’ve already placed themselves. I get a message from a student saying, “I’ve already talked to Professor So-and-so.” Especially if they’re faculty brats themselves, like my kids were. So, this summer we have 24—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: —students, and for the first time this summer, Summer 2023, some of our high school kids enrolled in this—our class only requires 45 hours of internship time over whatever semester they’re enrolled. Forty-five hours is not a full-time gig over—I mean, the shortest semester is five weeks. That’s nine hours a week. If it’s a 15-week semester, that’s a minimum of three hours a week. Heck, I was super full-time, plus, when I was doing that. But some of the students are now enrolled in the SURE program. Some are Undergraduate Research Experience. They’re getting paid! They have to agree to work a minimum of 20 hours a week, and I think they get paid about $10 an hour. Which is amazing. I have a student working with Yanhai Du—I think he’s our youngest student this year—he scored maybe second in the state science fair, for a project that he did without the resources of a university lab. Now, he’s in Yanhai Du’s lab working on fuel cells, and Professor Du has the most positive things to say about this amazing student. I am so thrilled to be able to bring these talented kids in the community. Yes, we can offer them access to advanced coursework. Not every high school has AP. I heard that Stow-Munroe Falls might not be offering AP physics next year. If a student wants to take AP physics, they have to take it through us, or they have to go into the pre-engineering program that they will spend half their day at Kent Roosevelt High School. But yeah, the university is here to offer those advanced classes. But the hands-on research. And it can be fall, spring, or summer. The advantage of summer is that scheduling is a lot easier when the kids are not dealing with the busy school day. Twenty-four is probably the most we’ve ever had. I have to go back and look at my records.

CRAWFORD: That’s a large number,

SELINGER: But we’re back to pre-pandemic strength.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] That’s great.

SELINGER: Now, we’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’ve seen the kids who came through that program, almost all of them end up majoring in STEM fields. I haven’t done a good statistical analysis lately but the last one I did, historically about a third of them stay at Kent State. I had one of them in a class with me last fall; top of the class, by far. We attract really excellent students that way. And she’s headed to grad school.

CRAWFORD: That’s great.

SELINGER: So it’s just a way to—what happened to me, like that early internship, led to more research, and more research, and more research.

CRAWFORD: You kept working with Professor Stanley—

SELINGER: I did, straight—

CRAWFORD: —throughout your whole career. Even though he’s at BU and you’re at Harvard.

SELINGER: That’s true. For those four years, it was commuting back and forth across the River, and down the River a little ways. Then when I was graduating—first of all, he wrote—by the time I graduated, I had, I don’t know, a handful of publications, so the one from high school and then several more from those college years. My grades at Harvard were not summa cum laude territory. I was definitely a cum laude kid, so A-, B+.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: I was not the top of my class. In my high school, I was a big fish in a little pond. At Harvard, I was a little fish in a big pond. And I knew it, and it frustrated me, that I couldn’t be the top. I wasn’t the smartest person in any room I was in. I felt a little bit like chopped liver. I still feel like chopped liver when I go to Harvard, as a visitor, these days. But yeah, I was a little duck. The people I went to school with are some of the—like Brian Greene, Lisa Randall—they were great—they’re brilliant physicists! I learned a lot by being a student there. I do not at all regret having been a little fish in a big pond. But at BU, I got that personal attention I probably wouldn’t have gotten at Harvard.

CRAWFORD: Did you have any mentors at Harvard, or was Professor Stanley just kind of—?

SELINGER: During my undergraduate years, I only worked with him, and then with the colleagues he sent me to abroad. And there were visitors I could work with who were at BU. His tradition was to ask the youngest person in the room to sit next to the honored guest. I got exposed to a lot of really great—I met future Nobel Prize winners. I met all kinds of amazing people, hanging out at BU. But at Harvard, the summer after I graduated, I spent the summer working at the Center for Astrophysics, doing essentially applied math for an astrophysicist. I was thinking about doing a PhD with him, but he got an offer to move to another institution, and I didn’t want to follow him. I was already engaged to be married. I didn’t want to move to another institution. So I found another advisor who was also an assistant professor, and I really—I guess, because I already knew computational physics, they kept giving me jobs that were really just like building applied math tools, and I didn’t feel like I was learning any physics. So at some point—I’m trying to remember—I had an interruption in my graduate studies from a health problem. It had happened to me when I was an undergraduate, too, It was just a non-life-threatening condition that required surgery, and like a week’s hospitalization, kind of thing. I needed to take a little break from doing research. When I came back, I went back to Gene Stanley. I just had a better experience there as a student.

CRAWFORD: I’m curious to ask, because you’re in college in the early eighties, and I don’t know exactly what the gender composition of the sciences was at the time—

SELINGER: Oh, we were few. We were few.

CRAWFORD: —but what was it like being a woman majoring in physics as an undergraduate?

SELINGER: I have a very strong recollection that when I was a sophomore, all the physics majors were invited to a luncheon at the Faculty Club with the Physics faculty. I looked around the room, and I looked at—the faculty at that point was 100% male at Harvard. There was not a single woman among them. And most of my classmates were male. Not 100%, but many of them. I thought to myself, “I would rather have lunch with the women who are serving lunch.” Because all the women in the room were waitresses. Most of the adult women in the room were waitresses. There were female students. But at Boston University, I knew a female faculty member, Rama Bansil. And of course I knew my aunt who was a professor of chemistry at Swarthmore. So I knew it wasn’t impossible for women to be faculty; I just didn’t see any. At that stage at Harvard, it was still all guys. We had a Women in Science group.

CRAWFORD: At Harvard?

SELINGER: Yeah, there was a Women in Science group, and I was co-president of it, at some point. Women in Science at Harvard-Radcliffe, WISHR. The Radcliffe College had a once-a-year Women in Science dinner, where they would bring in a speaker. Oh, there was Margaret Geller, who was an astrophysicist who was at the Center for Astrophysics. There were some women faculty in Chemistry, certainly in Biology. So, there were role models, just not in the front of the classrooms where I was learning. I’m trying to think, did I ever have a female instructor in any math or science class? Not that I can think of. Not one, at Harvard. All my math faculty were male. All my physics faculty were male. All my chemistry faculty were male.

CRAWFORD: How aware of that were you at the time?

SELINGER: I knew that the next generation was coming up. The other issue was, I was absolutely determined that I was not going to forego the life goals of family formation. I was going to get married and I was going to have kids. “My grandmother did it; I’m going to do it, too. And I’m going to do it on my own terms.” I’m like, “I’m going to find a way to make it work.” Super Mom. And, it was challenging. I married while I was still in grad school. If I had had a baby in grad school, the cost of child care would have been equal to my entire income. There would have been no way. I did get pregnant, and happily so, in my last year of grad school, and I sort of figured, “Well, we’ll work out the money thing.” But I miscarried.

CRAWFORD: Ohhh.

SELINGER: I was distraught. But I did succeed finally in having a baby when I was a postdoc. The first one. But the environment at Harvard was—let’s see—there was a really public sexual harassment case of a faculty member in I believe it was government, what they call political science, government department, who had been convicted of harassing a junior faculty colleague. He was forced to take time off or whatever thing. When he came back, he was teaching a core course. And the grad students were picketing, because they’re like, “We shouldn’t put him in front of an undergraduate class. That’s not okay.” There was a case of a poet who did something that upset an undergraduate who was from MIT, who was cross-registered in a course at Harvard. And Harvard was not really doing much in the way of punishing harassers. But oh my goodness, the MIT ombuds office was there to support their student. So at some point, we invited the head of the MIT ombuds office to speak to the Women in Science group at Harvard. By that time, I was a grad student. And boy, did I learn a lot from her.

Did you see the movie or the video called Picture a Scientist? It was broadcast on NOVA, so you can stream it for free from the NOVA website. It basically tells the story of what was kind of going on. And as I said, I had a—how shall we say—inappropriate romantic connection to a senior member of the research group. That was totally not okay. I wasn’t a victim of harassment, but it—but there was a lot of stuff going on in that era, and a lot of women were victims of harassment, and they had basically no recourse. At the very beginning part of this video, of Picture a Scientist, is the story of a woman who was on a field expedition, and was tormented and really miserable, and didn’t do anything about it until she was herself a faculty member. I did have one episode, if you want to hear the story. I was an undergraduate, I was a sophomore, and my wonderful advisor had taken me to an international conference in Pisa. It was a conference on, I don’t know, water and aqueous solutions. There was a poster session, and I presented my poster at the poster session. Are you familiar with what that’s like at a scientific conference?

CRAWFORD: I’m familiar with it, but—

SELINGER: Right. So you’re in a big hall, there’s a bunch of bulletin boards set up, and you set up your big piece of paper, with your story, and you stand in front of it, and people come by and ask you. So some guy came and said, “Oh, I’m really interested in your work, but I can’t stay here and talk with you. I need to go see all the other posters. Can I meet with you later?” He was a friend of my advisor. I said, “Well, of course.” He said, “Why don’t we have dinner?” I said, “Okay, I’ll meet you in the lobby. What time?” He’s like, “You know, I’m not really sure when I’m going to be ready to go. Why don’t I pick you up from your room?” Okay? And then, he knocked on the door, I put my purse on my shoulder and opened the door, ready to go out, and he walked in. He said, “You know, it’s so noisy in the bar. Why don’t we start the discussion here?” Then he proceeded to tell me about stupid stuff going on in his marriage, and started eventually chasing me around the room. It was really, really ter…and he blocked the door and wouldn’t let me out. It was really, really terrifying. Okay. So I managed to escape without being attacked. I guess I talked my way out, or he realized that this wasn’t—this—we didn’t have dinner together. I told my advisor. He said, “Oh, you know, Italian men, you just have to tell them ‘no.’”

CRAWFORD: Oh my gosh.

SELINGER: He didn’t get it.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. Yeah.

SELINGER: It was in that era. Fast forward some years, I was an assistant professor; that guy came as a speaker at the federal lab where I was a sabbatical visitor, at the Naval Research Lab, which is in D.C. I told the head of our division in the lab, “I’m going to spend that day in my office at Catholic U. I don’t want to be around if this guy is here, because I had this bad experience with him.” And you know what he said? He said, “When I’m out of the room, that guy chases my wife around the coffee table. He is a known predator.”

CRAWFORD: Oh my gosh.

SELINGER: So I didn’t see him, when he visited that time. I had seen him at other conferences, and I just avoided him. But at that point, I wrote him a letter, and I said, “I still remember that episode at that conference in Pisa, even though it was like 10 years back.” And I said, “I’m still angry about it, and I can’t believe you behaved that way.” And he wrote me—an apology! And he said, “I was so out of control. I was abusing alcohol. I was cheating on my wife. And I was behaving terribly. And I want you to know I’ve turned over a new leaf. I never do that anymore. And I’m so sorry for the pain and suffering I caused you.”

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: So I achieved closure. But I was following the instructions, more or less, that I learned from Mary Rowe, the head of the MIT ombuds office, that—actually she’s more about—you tell the person exactly what they’re doing that’s making you unhappy, and ask them to stop. But Mary Rowe’s method is you put a copy of that letter on file with a person of authority in your organization, so that in case eventually you progress to a formal complaint, you have a paper trail. But anyway, I wrote—I didn’t have any place to put such a thing. I mean, I had spoken to the guy at the Naval Research Lab. But anyway, I think I kind of achieved closure, 10 years later or something. But anyway, so while I was an undergraduate, I was busy taking all courses. The great thing about the Harvard undergraduate curriculum is that it’s really only half math and science, so I had plenty of room for music theory, history, poetry. I had a wonderful undergraduate education, from the most amazing faculty. History was part of it. Then, in grad school, it’s all physics all the time, like physics and math. The courses were still interesting, but—like I don’t use quantum mechanics, I don’t use solid state physics. So, a lot of the courses I was taking, I’m just like—I didn’t hate the courses; they were interesting and I learned a lot of stuff. But most of what I learned, I learned in the research setting.

CRAWFORD: Did you consider going anywhere else for grad school?

SELINGER: Yes. I had no illusion that I would get into Harvard. I was like really lucky they let me in. I was only an A-, B+ kid. I did win an NSF[3] graduate fellowship. I went after every fellowship in the book. And there was a book. Harvard gave us a book! Like a homemade list of fellowships. I applied to all of them, and I won some of them. Have you heard of a welfare queen? I was the fellowship queen. I went after all the fellowships. I still tell all my students—I met with a prospective student yesterday, and it’s like, “Oh my goodness, you have a 3.99 grade point average. You have research experience. Let’s go after some fellowships!” Anyway, I looked at—where did I apply? Definitely Harvard and MIT. University of Texas. I don’t remember where else but there were probably about half a dozen.

CRAWFORD: Would any of those other programs have been—just because you’re talking about having to take all these courses that were—

SELINGER: I applied to Boston University, too, because I knew they would let me in. And I think Northeastern, because that—I think everything I applied to was in Boston, except for University of Texas, because that’s like the home state school. My husband was a year ahead of me—Jonathan Selinger. You’ve already met, right?

CRAWFORD: Yep.

SELINGER: Jonathan was a year ahead of me. He also got in everywhere he applied. Harvard initially sent him a rejection letter. Which was funny, because he was graduating summa cum laude. Like, how could they do that? So his plan was to go to Princeton. And I was like, “Oh, no. I’ll never get into Princeton. Maybe I can get into Rutgers. I wonder how far apart they are.” Because I figured, “I’m not an A student, why would Princeton let me in?” Then Harvard sent Jonathan another letter saying, “Oh, sorry, we sent you the wrong letter. Of course you’re accepted.” I was like, “Please don’t go to Princeton. Can’t you please stay in Boston? Because I know at least I can go to Boston University.” So he stayed. Okay, giving up Princeton for Harvard is not like the hugest sacrifice—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: —but that was the sacrifice he made. We made many sacrifices for each other, to stay together, through our career. But he was the first one that had to make that call. How many people do you know that got married in 1985 and are still married? I think we are super lucky.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, especially with academia being—the challenge of the two-body problem.

SELINGER: We both made many sacrifices along the way. If you want a list, I can give you a list. Do you want the list?

CRAWFORD: Sure! If you want to.

SELINGER: Okay, so let me see. After he got into Harvard and stayed, then I got into Harvard and stayed, so we were both still there. When we needed to find our first postdoc, the only place where we had two offers was at UCLA, so whatever other offers he had, he turned down, and we both went to UCLA. From there, we went to the Washington D.C. area, and he went to the Naval Research Lab and I went to University of Maryland. Somewhere along the line—I don’t remember at which of those two transitions—he had an offer from University of Pennsylvania, from Tom Lubensky, one of the best-known theorists in our field. Would have been a perfect postdoc for him. He turned it down because I didn’t get a job in Philadelphia. I got a postdoc offer at Harvard through the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute. It would have been to work with a distinguished faculty member there from the Division of Applied Sciences, which would have been a perfect match for me. But I didn’t go, because Jonathan didn’t get a job in Boston. So we both had to turn down those opportunities. But things worked out pretty well, anyway. I’m trying to think what else. At some stage, Exxon—I think when we first finished our PhDs, Exxon offered Jonathan a really great postdoc at their R&D facility in New Jersey. Exxon offered me a career R&D position in Houston.

CRAWFORD: Oh, geez! [laughs]

SELINGER: The people in New Jersey told me that they could give me the—it was in a verbal conversation, not in a written offer—but in a verbal conversation, they said, “We could give you a job in our computer graphics department, and you could work half time on research.” Okay, do you remember the story—? It wasn’t Ruth Bader Ginsburg; it was one of our other female Supreme Court justices, who was told, “We have room for you in the typing pool.” I mean, it’s like, what part of Harvard PhD makes you think I would be happy in your computer graphics department? So Exxon tried to break up my marriage, basically. I told Jonathan, “We can meet on the weekends in St. Louis. There’s direct flights.” He’s like, “Forget it. We’re going to leave.” He’s like, “If we’re going to be married, we’re going to live in the same city.” He was not willing to consider a two-location—a remote marriage, at all. He was not interested. I was willing; he was not willing.

We did have advice from one of our senior colleagues at UCLA, a brilliant physicist named Shechao Feng, who told us, “Listen, just suck it up. Live apart. It will only be a couple years. You’ve got to do what’s best for your career. And you’ll be able to live together after that!” Uhhhh—Jonathan, number one, wouldn’t go for it. And number two, Shechao died in an episode that looked pretty seriously like a suicide, not that long after that. Right. So, the lesson I—also I have to tell you, that first graduate student that supervised me, that first summer at Boston University, also died of suicide. I was exposed to the high-pressure mental health breakdowns that happen in the physics community. And we were just as vulnerable to mental health issues as anybody else. Also my first PhD student was schizophrenic, and had to be hospitalized. So, if you put your own well-being last on the priority list, you will not survive. You have to find that balance.

So for me—we haven’t talked about it yet, but in professional life, I also undertook a part-time music career. So between physics, family, and music, that’s what I have instead of kinder, küche, and kirche. Although I do cook, and I do love my children. But I had to deal with like the home responsibilities, the full-time job responsibilities, and the music responsibilities. I gave up sleep and watching television. I have more time now. No children at home. And I’m on sabbatical; I’m not teaching in the fall. I don’t have to be putting a new course together. Anyway, with all those things going on, what is the next thing in the story you want to hear about?

CRAWFORD: You mentioned that you did the acapella group at Harvard, and I think you mentioned you were in the choir, if I’m remembering correctly?

SELINGER: Yeah, so the choir was—actually, sometimes we sang with instruments. But when we were traveling in Europe, we didn’t have a band with us; we were just an acapella choir, 50 or 60 voices. Then I took voice lessons, and I took music theory. By the time I was in grad school, I wasn’t a part of any choir, but I joined a group that sang acapella in the streets of Harvard Square.

CRAWFORD: Where did the music come from? Were you engaged with music before you went to college?

SELINGER: Yeah, in high school I took—at school, I learned clarinet and saxophone. I think in elementary and middle school, maybe we played those little recorder devices. And let’s see, what else? My brother took piano lessons when I was a little child, and I would just listen to him, to play, and I would copy. So I was just learning piano by ear. At some point, my father taught me to read music. We had a piano in the house. So he taught me to read music, but not very well. I could play a few things on piano but I was self-taught and not very good. Then in high school, I finally got some piano lessons. After I joined the choir, I became interested in writing harmonies and counterpoint, and so I took a semester of music theory for non-majors. It was the same kind of thing—based on what I had learned in high school, just in regular music class, I knew some music theory, so I took the second semester of music theory for non-majors. And I’m like, “I want to take the real thing.” Like, physics for poets is not physics. Music for non-majors is not music. So I wanted—well, it’s a beginning, but I thought, “Now I’m ready. I’m going to take two semesters of theory and composition, with the music majors.” And I wrote a piece for string quartet. I harmonized Bach chorales. I wrote counterpoint. I just had the most fun.

CRAWFORD: Do you see music as something distinctive from what you are doing in science, or is there cross-fertilization?

SELINGER: The cross-fertilization is in the public performance setting. When you stand up to give a talk, you have to stand and deliver. No matter how many butterflies there are, if you have practiced and you’re ready to go, you stand and deliver. So push came to shove on the music part. Singing in the choir was easy, because I was blending in with the whole stage full of people. If you’re not sure, you can kind of lay off a little bit and join in when you’re sure, and no one will know. I heard a musician say on the radio yesterday, “When in doubt, lay out.” Don’t sing if you’re not exactly sure what you’re supposed to be singing. Anyway, I managed to get a solo role in a performance of a restoration drama called Circe. There was a PhD student in Music associated with my undergraduate house at Harvard who decided to stage a performance of this thing. The lyrics of the songs existed but the melodies did not, so he found period melodies that those lyrics would fit to, and we were singing about Circe, the daughter of the Sun. Whatever, it’s this famous old story. And I had to sing a solo. I was so nervous. I would shake, I would sweat. And if you can’t breathe, you can’t sing.

My dad is an MD—was an MD; he prescribed a beta blocker. He was taking them himself, because he had heart disease. He had a bypass from Dr. Denton Cooley in Houston. He was an early—so he had to take these beta blockers all the time. So he prescribed a very small dose for me. I think I took a quarter of what would have been his regular dose that he took multiple times a day. When I had had that pill, I was fearless. It was like Dumbo and the feather. It gave me permission to be fearless. One performance, I didn’t have time after lab to get back to the dorm to take the pill; I sang the first half in a state of anxiety. At intermission, I changed from my long skirt into a pair of jeans, top half of costume still intact, took a taxi back to Mather House, took the pill, came back, sang the second half, no problem. It’s like, “Hmm. With the pill, I can do it.” Then I realized, “If I have the pill, I can do it, which means I don’t have to fear that I can’t do it.” So I learned eventually to stop being afraid. After that particular show, I never took beta blockers again. I don’t think I really got comfortable with public speaking until I was an assistant professor, teaching multiple times a week. Well, you went through this!

CRAWFORD: Yeah. [laughs] You don’t have a choice, right?

SELINGER: Let’s put it this way—the first time you’re teaching the class, the little alarm bell is sounding all the time, and you’re like—at some point, if the alarm bell is sounding all the time, you just have to tune it out. Okay. Then, when I started performing as a musician, I was a music teacher in an elementary school religious school setting, and that was in high school. I was the music teacher for little kids in the Sunday school at the synagogue in Fort Worth, Temple Beth El. As long as I was with kids, little kids, I was fine, but if I was with big people I was terrified. Then later I became a cantorial soloist and had to learn how to sing in front of big people and not freak out. I learned something really important: if you’re a doctor and you remove the wrong kidney, your patient is going to die. If you’re a musician and you sing the wrong note, nobody dies! It’s okay.

CRAWFORD: It’s true. It’s true. [laughs]

SELINGER: So—it builds character. The crossover—we started this conversation with the crossover between physics and music. My students who have experience in any aspect of performing arts, or even debate club or model UN, they are ready to stand and deliver with scientific talks. Musicians, dancers, actors [snap]—they just learn to quiet the little voice in the back of your head that says, “You suck. You’re not ready.” It’s like, “I have what I have, and I’m going to give what I gotta give, and that’s all I got. There’s no reason to be nervous.” Just—I mean, if it goes badly, so what? Just like do what you can. If you make a mistake, don’t burst into tears, don’t freak out, just keep going. And chances are, no one in the room will know. Okay.

I had one really big challenge once, musically. Usually I’m well prepared, I’ve rehearsed, I come in, whether I’m teaching a music class or performing for a congregation. I was in a situation at Temple Beth Shalom in Hudson, where I’m the cantorial soloist, and I had been the music teacher for many years. I was sitting in a situation—the rabbi was there, the children were there, and their parents were there. I think it was Passover? We were doing a model seder, and the rabbi said, “Turn to page 37, and Robin will now lead us in this song.” I turned to page 37, and I’ve never seen the song in my life. It’s not on my list, not on my program. I didn’t rehearse it. He made a mistake. People make mistakes! Nothing wrong! All I had to say is, “Rabbi, didn’t you really want me to sing the song on page 36?” But I didn’t. Because he really wanted to sing the song on page 37. I looked at it, and it’s like, “It’s not that complicated. I can sight-read that.” So I did a live sight-read lead. And the good news is nobody in the room had a clue. It was only private to me that I was taking on this challenge, and that I decided, “Let’s do it!” If it ends in failure—again, nobody dies. If I make a mistake, then everybody will have a good laugh. But yeah, it was the most fun.

CRAWFORD: What was it like when you finished that performance?

SELINGER: No one knew any—let’s just say it was the most memorable model seder I had ever—because, you know, like we take on these little challenges in our lives.

CRAWFORD: Sometimes people don’t know.

SELINGER: If someone falls in the lake and you have to jump in and fish them out, that’s like lives depend on your performance. It’s like, “It’s a song. I’m just going to give it a try.” My teachers taught me well. I know how to sight-read. It’s a really good skill to have. Another skill they taught me in music theory class—to hear a song and write it down. I save so much money on sheet music.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: These days you can just order it and pull up the PDF, but back in the day, you had to wait a week for it to come in the mail, maybe two weeks. And I need it like right now. Also, I built a website for my religious school kids. I called it TotShabbat.com. I still own the URL. I don’t have an active website there right now. But Tot Shabbat is the Sabbath service for children. Tot Shabbat. I put sheet music there. I put recorded music there. It was just so much fun to be able to provide that as a resource. But now it’s available everywhere. But yeah, so music theory skills have been really valuable to me. And, standing up and giving a talk, and standing up and singing—singing is harder. So by contrast, standing up and giving a talk is easier. I still get stressed. I had to give a plenary at the International Liquid Crystal Conference in Lisbon. It’s the first time for me to give a plenary at an international conference. I was a little stressed. Then that morning the coffee machine was broken in the dining room where I was having breakfast. They had this other coffee. I didn’t realize it was super strong, and I drank a whole bunch of it.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Oh, no.

SELINGER: And then I was like—not in good shape. But yeah, I made it through my talk. It was fine. Anyway, let’s see. I did a—I guess they call it a colloquium—at NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently. It was supposed to be a talk accessible to the general public, not just for people in my immediate field. That’s high stress.

CRAWFORD: Those are challenging, yeah,

SELINGER: This is one that they record, they broadcast it. I was a little stressed out about that. And, I was getting sick. Anyway I made it through that. Then my computer was not cooperating with their projector. So it was a little bit stressful. But again, nobody dies, so it’s okay. That’s why I’m probably better as a physicist than as a doctor. I can’t stick people with needles. It’s just not in my nature.

CRAWFORD: We were talking about grad school. You’re going to Harvard and taking these courses. What are you working on at that time? What’s your research focus? Did you do a combined MA/PhD program?

SELINGER: Right, it’s all one. Let’s see. I was working on fractal aggregation models, diffusion-limited aggregation, which is a—if you imagine—if you’re at the park and you have a round table, and you put a dot of honey in the middle, and then you release an ant from the edge of the table, and it does a random walk, and if it happens to touch the honey, it sticks. Now that ant is also sticky. And if you add another ant, if it hits the honey or the first ant, it sticks. And as you grow them, you get this beautiful fractal structure, and we can measure—we can first of all produce one by computer simulation. We can measure its fractal dimension, whether it’s on a square lattice or a triangular lattice, or in three dimensions, whatever thing.

Then, there’s another model. What is it called? Dielectric breakdown model. Imagine we have a square lattice of resistors, and we apply a voltage to it, and as we raise the voltage—maybe the voltage is between a point in the middle and the outer surface of the system—and then whichever resistor exceeds its current threshold fails and disappears from the network. So the other ones that are near it get extra current and so they’re more likely to break. So you end up, again, with a fractal pattern. They have the same fractal dimension.

Third experiment. Two pieces of glass; there’s a hole in the bottom of one of them. Or I suppose it could be on the top, but usually we put it on the bottom, so it doesn’t get in the way. We fill the space between the two pieces of round glass with a viscous fluid, could be oil. The edges are open, and they’re held open—like the two pieces of glass are separated by some spacers so they don’t collapse. So we fill it with oil. Then we inject air, or water. And the water comes out. And it doesn’t just make an emerging disk; it breaks into a fractal pattern. Same fractal dimension, as the other two experiments. What is the origin? Why are these three experiments producing the same type of fractal? That was one big topic I studied.

And what happens if we introduce spatial heterogeneity into the model? How does that change? For instance, if we were injecting—to get more oil out of porous rock, sometimes there’s an injection well, where you inject air or foam or something, to try to push the oil towards the production well, except the injected material makes these fingers that basically make a fractal instead of a wall. So, Schlumberger, the oil recovery technology company, was really interested in understanding everything about this phenomena which is also called viscous fingering. My advisor sent me to work at Schlumberger one summer. I did an industrial internship studying two-phase fluid flow, which is part of the reason why I ended up getting a job offer from Exxon, because I had research experience, both studying it in the laboratory—although we never published those lab experiments—but I did computer modeling.

CRAWFORD: This was during your graduate—?

SELINGER: This was during my years of graduate study. That Schlumberger lab was in France, actually. I went to Saint-Etienne.

CRAWFORD: Who was your advisor in grad school?

SELINGER: It was still Gene Stanley.

CRAWFORD: Oh, it was still Stanley? Okay!

SELINGER: Yeah. Not officially. Officially my advisor was a Harvard faculty member who was in a caretaker role. The actual advising was Gene Stanley. I had worked with two other faculty—let’s see, it was Phil Marcus and David Vanderbilt, who were both assistant professors. But Gene, I’d say, had already been my mentor for so long that working in those other two groups—they’re both excellent scientists, Phil Marcus and David Vanderbilt, but I was so much happier in the Stanley group. I was just happy to go back to them. And to him. But it wasn’t just him; it was a whole group. There were like ten graduate students, postdocs. We were sort of a family.

CRAWFORD: Why not go to BU for graduate study, anyway?

SELINGER: Because I wanted the Harvard diploma. I didn’t know that I was going to make that choice when I applied. He encouraged me to apply to Harvard and MIT. He had already supervised another Harvard student’s PhD. So, he wasn’t, as it were, sending me to the West Coast or far away. I was still close. I’m trying to remember—there was an MIT undergraduate who was working with him when I was working with him, also, who did go to BU as a grad student, and his career has been fine. I could have made that choice. Would have been simpler, in some ways. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: This work that you’re doing—you went from this experiment of ants and honey, which kind of made me, think, like, why would we need to understand [laughs] that—to this work with injecting materials that—

SELINGER: That’s a real problem in petroleum engineering. I should also mention the diffusion-limited aggregation model is also called the Witten-Sanger model. I later became friends with Tom Witten, originator of that model. I know him, and he’s someone I can ask questions.

CRAWFORD: I don’t mean to sound dismissive about the ants thing; I’m just saying, how much of the interest in this research is driven by these kind of practical problems, versus sort of like the challenge of, say, solving these questions or developing these models?

SELINGER: It is a good question. Some aspects of theoretical physics can start to be a “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” kind of problem. But, I will say that the tools and methods that are developed in solving those—I don’t know, you could ask the question, “What are the critical exponents that describe the phase transition in such and such a model, in this many dimensions, or that many dimension?”—Nobel Prizes have been given for this kind of work, right? They do have application. And so, the key element is always making a connection between the model and the experiment. That has been one of the great things about being at Kent State, that the Liquid Crystal Institute brings together the theorists and the experimenters. And, oh my goodness, the opportunities that presents to me as a theorist are huge.

Anyway, maybe I should move the chronology along, because I’m 61 years old and this will take three days if we don’t speed up. So, I finished my PhD in 1989. I had been married since 1985, and, thinking about starting a family. Then we went to our first postdoc at UCLA. I was distraught because after a certain amount of attempts and one miscarriage, I wasn’t having that baby that I really wanted to have. The good news is that UCLA had a world-class infertility treatment program, which I enrolled in and was fully covered by my health insurance from UCLA, and I had my first child at UCLA, thanks to their great work. And I could walk from the Chemistry Department over to the medical center. Because infertility treatment is a very time-intensive area of medicine. You have to be ready to go for daily blood tests. It was so great that it was really close by.

My postdoc advisor, William Gelbart—we call him Bill Gelbart—is a prince among men, a brilliant scientist, and a wonderful manager, mentor, who I ended up postdoc’ing with him for three years. I was only planning to stay for two, but I won—a fellowship! Yay, fellowships! The President’s Fellowship. Not from the president of the United States; it’s the president of the University of California President’s Fellowship. That provided two years of support, so that covered year two and year three. Ah! Another story! My dear husband only had a two-year postdoc. His advisors didn’t have money for a third year. He didn’t win a fellowship. We had to find a way. We found a way. First of all, Jonathan assisted his co-advisors in writing a grant proposal to a private foundation. I think it was the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society, which was funded, and covered two-thirds of his salary. But he needed another third, and we had to find a way. One of my lab mates from Gelbart’s group just got a faculty position at Caltech, which is nearby in Pasadena. That is Zhen-Gang Wang. Zhen-Gang had a plentiful startup funding package. He’s like, “You can be my postdoc a third time.” So Jonathan was two-thirds time at UCLA, one third time at Caltech. It’s not bad to have Caltech on your resume! This is not a sacrifice. It involved some commuting. And we did have a newborn baby at that point. Anyway, it worked out fine. We just found a way to make it work.

CRAWFORD: You’ve talked about the reasons why you ended up at UCLA, because you both had offers in L.A., and you talked about the case with Exxon. I know you both—

SELINGER: That was an issue right at that time. The other issue was I had an offer from the RAND Corporation, which is in Santa Monica, very nearby UCLA. They were offering a very generous salary. It wasn’t a postdoc; it was a career position. But I knew my husband wasn’t likely to stay in Los Angeles for our whole careers, so I was hesitant to get out of the physics community into a very specialized science consulting job. What if his next position was in the cornfields somewhere? How would we—? It seemed like a bad—it would give me less flexibility. Actually I was just about to sign on the dotted line when the phone call came from Gelbart with the offer. I was this close to signing with the RAND Corp.

CRAWFORD: Maybe this is a moot point, maybe not even worth asking the question, but all things being equal, would you have preferred to, say, pursue a job in industry versus academia?

SELINGER: In retrospect, the easiest career pathway for a family with kids is a national lab. Industry does not offer stability. For example, that summer I was at Schlumberger in Saint-Etienne, the guy who taught me to use the darkroom, to develop my experimental images, got laid off because the price of oil was down.

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow. [laughs]

SELINGER: I had a very negative opinion of life in industry based on that one short—what they call in France a “stage.” I did a “stage” with Schlumberger, an internship. It’s like, yeah, the price of oil goes down and you could lose your job. With two of us, stability became super important to me. National labs are stable jobs. I have one friend that got laid off from Argonne National Lab, which is a DOE[4] lab near Chicago, so it’s not zero, but national lab jobs—I mean, postdocs are short-term. Like I was at NIST; I was a short-term postdoc. I had no job stability there. But once you become a member of the staff, it’s very rare to get laid off. Then in academia, as you know, once you achieve tenure, you’re fine, but not everybody gets tenure. But I liked teaching. Also there’s something really important about academia, for a scientist. As a theorist, I don’t need a big lab. I need a computer. I can get that anywhere. I get time now from the Ohio Supercomputer Center. I have freedom to study whatever I want. No one can tell me, “We need you to work on this project. Drop that project; we need you to work on this other project.” I valued intellectual freedom to pursue any research I wanted to. As a postdoc, after the first or second postdoc, I was like, “I’m ready to be independent. I’m tired of being told what to work on. I want to make up my own—I want to be the driver of my own research program.” So I was so happy to become a faculty member. My postdoc advisors were great. No complaints. But it just took me a while, to get through.

CRAWFORD: The national labs, you’re saying, offer stability, but maybe not the same kind of freedom as you have in academia?

SELINGER: Yeah, you’re in a group, and the group leader is the one who tells you what you’re allowed to work on. I only know vicariously through Jonathan’s experience at NRL; their accounting system, there were individual projects, and 100% of your time had to be allocated—10% to this, 20% to that, whatever—and that all had to be negotiated. Then you were supposed to spend that much of your time on each of those activities. I just wanted to be my own person and supervise my own students, and choose my own topics.

CRAWFORD: Thinking about the life cycle of a scientist who wants to go into academia—and I know, again, you have other considerations with family and your husband and everything—but could you have gone right into an academic job out of grad school?

SELINGER: Absolutely not. I needed the postdoc time to build research experience, and to get cross-disciplinary example. I learned new things in each postdoc.

CRAWFORD: When you say you needed that, is that for you personally, or professionally the expectation is—?

SELINGER: To be ready to direct a dissertation, it’s not enough to do a dissertation, in our field. The postdoctoral time is the time where you essentially really get to know a larger body of literature, a larger set of methods, and just to gain more experience in the field. When I was a postdoc at UCLA, there was a student that wanted to do a computer simulation of a liquid crystal, but didn’t have experience doing computer simulations, so my postdoc advisor asked me to mentor him. That’s actually how I got started doing liquid crystal stuff. That was the first time.

CRAWFORD: Really!

SELINGER: Yeah. I had not done any work on liquid crystals as a graduate student. But Bill Gelbart was a specialist in that field, and he had a grant from DARPA to work on fracture and plasticity—well, specifically fracture—and so that’s what I was working on with him, which was really more fundamental materials science, nothing related to liquid crystals. But, he had this other student doing a liquid crystal project, so I helped him get started. I did more postdoc time than is typical. There was a time when most people just did two years of postdoc and then went straight into a faculty position. The pool was such that most people were doing two postdocs of two years each, so four years was typical. I was on the 3-2-1 plan. I did three years at UCLA, and I had a baby in the middle of that, so the third year was absolutely helpful, that I could—and also I have to say the UCLA—I was in the Chemistry Department—they gave me a private office, in the basement, with no windows, where I could bring the baby whenever I wanted to bring him to campus. So, when I was in the just back on the job situation as a new working mom, I brought him to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and he stayed with a neighbor on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That way, he was with me four days a week, because on the weekends, right, and two days with the—well, so wait, he was with me—he was three days with the babysitter, four days with me—and I felt like I could—and I was still breastfeeding. I was an absolutely La Leche League crazy—no—not a drop of formula for my baby! But finally when we went for job interviews in Maryland, and gosh, the baby was maybe eight months old at that point, I didn’t have time to build up a store of milk for him, and we couldn’t fly a bunch of frozen milk from Los Angeles to Maryland; it was too far. Grandparents came to babysit while we did all our job interviewing around D.C. And the baby had to have formula. And he didn’t die! So I realized maybe I was just a little over the top as a La Leche League maniac. But yeah, that baby had some health issues, and I think that hopefully nursing contributed to his ability to get through that difficult time for him. He finally had his tonsils out and he stopped getting ear infections after that. But yeah, we did everything we could for his little immune system.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like the support you got as a mother and a postdoc at UCLA was pretty good. Would you say that was unusual for the time?

SELINGER: It was. There was a female vice chair, and she saw my expanding abdomen, and said, “Oh, you’re expecting a baby. We’ll put you in a private office.” I was like, “Wow.” They actually had to move an adjunct faculty member to do that. Then, on the days the baby was with the sitter, I needed breaks to pump milk. I was a busy bovine animal feeding my child. No other place did that for me. I was at University of Maryland and got through the second pregnancy. Then I had the second baby between—so I finished at Maryland six months pregnant. I took three months at NIST as a—I had won a two-year fellowship. Another fellowship! The NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at NIST. My wonderful advisor there realized that if I took a maternity leave during my fellowship, those months would be lost. There was no tacking them on at the end, and there’s no healthcare coverage, there’s no salary, nothing. So he put me on as a temporary contractor for three months, then I was three months unemployed after I had the baby. Luckily Jonathan was a staff member at NRL by then, so we could well afford to live on one salary for three months, and I had healthcare through his employment. Then I started my postdoc at NIST when that child was three months old.

By the time I was back at work, I guess it would have been January ‘95, Catholic University advertised a faculty position out of season, in the spring. Usually those ads come in the fall. I’m not Catholic, but I needed a job in the D.C. area. I had no illusion that NIST would certainly keep me. I had no idea what the answer was going to be on that. So I applied at Catholic U. They already knew my name, because I was on the list—the American Physical Society kept a list of female colloquium speaker candidates. Catholic U, having no budget for colloquium speakers, always looked who was on that list in the D.C. area, so they had had me come in and give a seminar. So, when I applied for the faculty position, I was a known quantity. I mailed—there was no email then for attachments—I mailed my application on a Wednesday, and I got a phone call on a Friday. It was that fast, and like, “Can you come for an interview?” And I went for the interview and they hired me. So, I already had one foot out the door from NIST when I sort of started there. But there’s a story about Catholic U. I asked them, “What can you do for me in terms of startup funding?” Does the History Department do startup funding?

CRAWFORD: Sort of. Not—

SELINGER: Not big bucks?

CRAWFORD: Yeah, not close to what you guys—

SELINGER: You don’t need experimental.

CRAWFORD: —yeah.

SELINGER: Well, but if you need to do field work, if you need to travel to Italy to access original manuscripts in a library, you need some startup funding.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, yeah.

SELINGER: Anyway so I asked the chair, “So let’s talk about startup funding.” He’s like, “Oh, we don’t have any budget for that.” I’m like—“Am I on Candid Camera?” Like what’s going on here? Why, would there be no startup funding? He’s like, “Well, we just don’t have a budget for that.” I said, “How am I going to start up if I can’t buy a workstation, pay a graduate student, go to conferences?” I even needed budget to make a long-distance phone call. We needed budget. I went home that night thinking, “How is this going to work?” And, you know me; I’m always finding a way to reason out of any—of these challenges. So what I was thinking was this: “I have this two-year fellowship. Two years of salary is a huge amount of money. But I can’t ask NIST to write me a check to cover employment at Catholic U. How can I convert one to the other?” And here’s what I came up with. I said, “How about this? If you want me to start in September, how about if I teach that course you want me to teach in September, as an adjunct, and stay in my postdoc through December?” I’ll start the tenure-track position that January, start in the spring instead of the fall, and I’ll still cover your course, and I’ll just stay on my NIST salary. The salary that you’re not paying me—because you know, adjuncts get paid like what benefits would be for a faculty member, right?—give me that as my startup. They said, “Sold.”

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: So I did. I essentially converted fellowship money to startup money. But at what expense? It meant I had a full-time job at NIST. I had a part-time job at Catholic U. I had a baby that was still nursing and one that was not quite out of diapers yet. I did not sleep much that semester. And I had to teach a new course at the graduate level I had never taught before! So I had a new prep course. And, I was organizing my first symposium at a major conference. And then Newt Gingrich shut the government down, and then we had a giant blizzard, and my nanny had an auto accident. That semester was a tough semester. I’m trying to think, is that the semester the baby got chicken pox? I think it may have been the semester the baby got chicken pox. So we had the semester from hell, but at the end of it, I was an assistant professor, with a grad student, and some startup funding.

CRAWFORD: That’s great.

SELINGER: And I read this wonderful book called A PhD Is Not Enough! I always recommend that book. I was at risk of being the only housewife on Forest Lane with a PhD in Physics from Harvard. I read that book, and a year later, I was an assistant professor with a grad student and some startup funding. I really love that book. It’s by Peter Feibelman. The second edition came out in 2011, so I read the first edition. But yeah, it changed my life. So, by the time the first year was up, I managed to get a grant, small startup grant; again, the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund. Then a year after that, or two, I managed to get an NSF Career Award. Now I could afford to have students, get research done, publish papers. I had a wonderful department chair, Charles Montrose, who was trained here in Cleveland at John Carroll University, loved John Carroll, recreated at Catholic U the positive environment that John Carroll was. And he was a human shield that protected me from too much—you know, everybody wants a woman on every faculty committee. You’ve probably seen that here, too.

CRAWFORD: Yep, yep.

SELINGER: So he was a great chair, and I had ten happy years at Catholic U. I was promoted to associate professor with tenure, and I got some more NSF grants, and some more publications, and I was ready to come up for full, basically where you are in your career right now, right? Then Kent State decided they wanted to hire Jonathan. They had one of those state-funded chair positions, Eminent Scholar position, and if they didn’t fill it, it was going to be taken away. They decided they wanted to hire Jonathan. So, they interviewed me. And here lies the tale. I was offered a non-tenure track research fellow position with funding from the University for the first two years, and the responsibility to me to raise money for the rest of my career. And I’m like, “Are you kidding? And leave a tenured soon to be promoted to full professor? I don’t think so.” Then they said, “Okay, well, we can offer you a faculty position but without tenure.” And it’s like, “No. I’m not going to leave my tenured associate professorship ready to become a full professor.” Then the University’s next offer was, “Well, we can make you a full professor,” but they hired me at an associate professor’s salary.

CRAWFORD: What?

SELINGER: The starting salary was on the low side. I asked for a little bit more. I mean, I negotiated not too hard. Jonathan’s salary was so generous. Money wasn’t the limiting reagent in this process. We were tearing ourselves out by the roots from a place where we had really settled. We had bought a house. We had two kids in school. And Jonathan really, really wanted to move. Because Kent State is the belly button of the liquid crystal world. This is the birth, right? This is the place. And so we moved, and I came into a full professorship. I brought Kent State—I’ve trained graduate students, I’ve published some good papers, I’ve brought in some funding. It has been a good—it was a good move for us.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned that you had done some work with another postdoc at UCLA on liquid crystals.

SELINGER: Right.

CRAWFORD: Were you doing liquid crystals research at Catholic?

SELINGER: At Catholic U, my NSF funding was related to my work in theoretical metallurgy. But I had funding from the Navy. So Jonathan’s group essentially hired me as a summer visitor, and then they gave me grant funding to do liquid crystal research at Catholic U. So it was already going on. So when they hired me here, I stopped doing things related to metals and made soft matter my primary focus. But I shifted my research interest. My next NSF grant, I wrote together with Jonathan, instead of independent of him.

CRAWFORD: I see. Was that difficult to shift that interest?

SELINGER: Not at all. What really caught my imagination at Kent State was the really innovative experimental work going on here, with this really interesting class of polymers called liquid crystal elastomers. These are polymers which have liquid crystal mesogens, either in the main chain—you can think of that like a chain of sausages, right?—like in the main chain, dangling off the main chain, and they can dangle off end-on, or side-on, or whatever. But the key issue of these materials is that they are like artificial muscles. When you stimulate them, they move. They shrink, they bend, they twist, depending on how you align the molecular orientation, what we call the liquid crystal director, in the sample. And that can be designed. You can, for instance, decorate two surfaces with anchoring layers that specify a particular orientation, or a pattern of orientations. The two sides can be different, and the liquid crystal has to sort itself out in between. So we put the liquid crystal, the monomers, the crosslinking agent, as a liquid, in between two pieces of patterned glass, shine UV light onto it to cure it, take—if you take both pieces of glass away, now you have a thin piece of plastic, thin piece of rubber, that’s an elastomer, where when you change its temperature or shine—if you put a light-sensitive dye on it—either way, you can make it move. I decided I had to model that. I was so excited by that. You can’t do it at the molecular scale; it’s too big. It’s like millimeters. That’s too many molecules. So I said, “Well, I have to learn a new modeling technique.” I basically did a DIY mechanical engineering project. I wrote my own computer simulation using the technique called finite element method, specifically finite element elastodynamics, dynamics of an elastic solid. I derived my own algorithm and built my own code which is really unusual. Most people buy finite element codes or use open source finite element codes. I’m the kind of lunatic that wrote one.

CRAWFORD: Why do you say you’re a lunatic to do it?

SELINGER: Number one, it’s hard. Number two, there are so many great tools out there. But I’m a DIY person. I don’t like to use standard codes written by other people. I like to do everything from scratch. That’s a personal preference. And my students who write codes from scratch have so much success in life. If you’ve just learned how to use the standard code—it’s like the difference between building a car and driving a car; they’re just two different sets of skills. As an example, last summer—Summer 2022—I spent as a visitor at Tel Aviv University. Since I wasn’t going to be around Kent State, I asked my graduate student, “Why don’t we find something else for you to do, instead of sitting around here waiting for me to email?” There’s a big time difference to Israel, too. It’s a problem. One of our alumni, my husband’s former student, is at Los Alamos, and she said, “Oh, there’s a wonderful summer program. Students can sign up at Los Alamos. They learn high-performance computing, computational physics, and it pays really well.” So my student applied and was accepted. While he was at Los Alamos, he was the top of his cohort. By the end of his summer, just like the professor asked me to stay, they asked him to stay! He’s working 20 hours a week for Los Alamos now. My students just have these—DIY. Students that can do DIY, they are so powerful. And I teach a class—I teach computational materials science where students build codes from scratch. Now, these days they can ask ChatGPT to do it, which is kind of depressing.

CRAWFORD: To write the code?

SELINGER: ChatGPT writes beautiful code.

CRAWFORD: Really!

SELINGER: Mmhmm.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: It can do PYTHON. It can do FORTRAN. It can do any programming language you want. CC++. I had a student—I’m pretty sure, I don’t know for sure, I didn’t accuse—but I have a student who I think turned in some ChatGPT code. Looks suspiciously like ChatGPT code. But anyway.

CRAWFORD: But then they’re not getting that—

SELINGER: That’s that student’s loss. But anyway, students—yeah, so our finite element code could do things that nobody else could do. We can model shape transformations. So all of a sudden, every experimenter in the world who had an experiment that showed some like beautiful—so here’s a great story. A wonderful experimenter from the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands—country of my mother’s birth—had a really amazing experiment. They had a little piece of polymer, I don’t know, maybe smaller than a piece of chewing gum, and they attached it on the table in kind of a curved shape, and shine light on it from one side, and it dances. It has this continuous wave motion. The top and bottom were different; if they flip it over, the waves go the other way. That was weird. That was the first question. The second question is, they took that same little piece of plastic, polymer, and instead of attaching it to the table, they attached it to a very lightweight rectangular plastic frame that’s not responsive, just a frame. And then when they shine light on it, it crawls across the table. If they flip the sample over and shine the light the same way, in one case it crawls away from the light; they flip it over, it crawls toward the light. They’re like, “Could you possibly explain this behavior?” I said, “Let’s give that a try.” So my student, Michael Varga, had inherited the finite element code that previous generations of students had built, and he added to it ray tracing, so we could tell what part of the sample was in the light and what part was in the dark. Okay. In fact, he did all kinds of other good things with this code. He was able to demonstrate that when this side is up, the waves move away from the light. When the other side is up, the waves move toward the light. Okay. So he showed this to the group in the Netherlands. They’re like, “Let’s publish this together.” They published it in Nature. I was so happy!

CRAWFORD: Yes! What was that like?

SELINGER: That’s the only thing I’ve ever published in such a prestigious journal. Dear Professor Broer was so generous that he decided that since he supervised the experimental part and I supervised the simulation part, that we should be co-senior authors, or co-corresponding authors. So I wasn’t just an also member of this team; I was one of the leaders of the team. It was so generous of him. Poor Professor Broer sadly had a health issue that took him out of circulation right around the time the paper was published, so all the science journalists who had questions, some of them had to call me, because they couldn’t get hold of him. So I had the fun of communicating with the science journalists. It got written up in a few places.

CRAWFORD: That’s fantastic.

SELINGER: It wasn’t in The New York Times, but they call it like walkin’ on sunshine. Like, fshhh, light-driven robot.

CRAWFORD: This is probably a fairly basic question from your perspective, but finite element code, can you explain more what that is, and how it works in the work that you do?

SELINGER: Any system that you can describe with a set of differential equations to understand what’s the energy, what are the forces. The force is usually a derivative of the energy. Going back to molecular dynamics—we talked about being able to calculate the energy and the forces on every atom—I essentially use the technique—so we take our three-dimensional sample, whatever it is, we divide it up into little volumes, each of which is in the shape of a tetrahedron. Those are the elements. The volumes are the elements. The corners of the elements are nodes. So think of little tetrahedra. They’re not equilateral tetrahedra; they can be all shapes. If you ever played Dungeons and Dragons, you might get dice in the shape of tetrahedra, four-sided dice instead of six. If you try to put those together, you can’t fill space with them, for the same reason you can’t tile your bathroom floor in pentagons. They just don’t fit. They don’t fill space. So you can start with cubes and slice them in tetrahedra. In the end we found some special purpose software that takes whatever shape we want to represent as a family of elements, and it will divide—it will essentially create a mesh for us. We call it mesh generation. There are several free codes that do that, or MATLAB can create a mesh.

Anyway, we start with a mesh, and then we write—if the material deforms, all the nodes move. The whole object is moving. So the nodes are like—you can imagine taking a pen and marking on an object, except there are points inside, not just on the surface. So the whole object is filled with nodes. Then if we imagine the whole system is deformed—for instance, if you just stretch it, it might stretch along one axis and shrink in the other two axes—then the question is, what’s the energy, as a function of the new position of the nodes? So I learned solid mechanics. I learned how to write the energy so you can calculate the stress and strain inside each element as a function of the position of the nodes. Then we had to choose an energy function of that strain, and then write the force on each node, the generalized force, as the derivative of the energy with respect to the displacement of that node. So, I’m using the same technique that I learned in modeling atoms and molecules to model solid mechanics. The challenging part is writing the energy, and there are a number of energy functions in the literature. The first thing I wanted to try—in freshman physics, we learn that the energy stored in a stretched spring, maybe—did you take physics in high school?

CRAWFORD: Yeah.

SELINGER: Hooke’s law—one half k-x squared. So, what’s the sort of tensor generalization of that? It would be like one half times some material constant that tells you how stiff the material is, times the strain squared. Okay, so the strain is a tensor. I did that, and I discovered something disturbing. The thing I had learned was the strain, when I wrote that energy down, that if I just rotated the body, the energy went up. I didn’t stretch it; I just rotated it. The energy should be zero. Oh! And then I learned that that’s because there’s an approximation, the small strain approximation. That what the engineers did, as I understand it, what mechanical engineers typically do is they take that strain function and they say, “Well, we know it’s not invariant under rotation. We’ll just ask what are the invariants of this strain tensor, and we’ll write all our energies in terms of those invariants.” There are invariants of a tensor. I decided that I didn’t want to use that approach. I thought, “That sounds like something an engineer would do, not a physicist. Let me read in depth about solid mechanics.” So I went back to the physics textbook—Landau and Lifshitz, their solid mechanics book. The physics way. I discovered, oh, there’s the Green-Lagrange strain which has nonlinear terms. It’s invariant under rotation. I said, “I’ll write all my energies in terms of that strain.” So I didn’t follow the standard technique that mechanical engineers use. I made my own technique. It worked just fine.

But here was the challenge. I went to talk to the world’s experts. I happened to be visiting the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and I went to talk to one of the world’s experts on solid mechanics. I told him about my method and he said, “It will never work. It’s just not the way it’s done, young lady. Do it our way.” And I’m like, “I don’t want to do that.” Then I served on an NSF panel with another expert from University of Texas; again, senior eminence in this field. I told him my method, and he said, “It will never work.” I came back to him a couple weeks later, and I said, “It conserves the sum of kinetic and potential energy. It conserves linear momentum. It conserves angular momentum.” He said, “Okay, maybe it works.” But I was terrified to publish it, because these people told me I was wrong, and I had a crisis of confidence. So I decided to publish the papers that described the method, but not publish a paper about the method. I didn’t think—F=ma is not that innovative a thing. I just said, “I have a way of writing the energy function. I calculate generalized forces.” Now, real materials are lossy; I had to figure out how to put some friction in the system. I found ways to do that.

CRAWFORD: Was this part of the work or part of the reason why you had to write your own code, your own finite element code?

SELINGER: I could have used any general purpose finite element code to do this, probably, but I chose—first of all, they’re expensive. Second of all, I don’t trust canned software. I wanted to write my own code. Can I mention the students that helped me accomplish this feat?

CRAWFORD: Sure.

SELINGER: In particular, Badel Mbanga was my first PhD student here at Kent State, and he and I built this thing together. I wrote the 2D version by myself; he and I together wrote the 3D version. He is now senior vice president and head of Data Science for PNC Bank in Pittsburgh. I am so proud of him.

CRAWFORD: That’s great.

SELINGER: And he co-advised my last PhD student. He’s an adjunct faculty member here at Kent State. He was an awesome student. Andrew Konya was my student who figured out that we could port this algorithm to—Badel was using message-passing multi-core high-performance computing. Andrew Konya figured out we could use GPU, which—the NVIDIA graphics cards—and got a speedup of almost a factor of 50! My student Vianney Gimenez-Pinto discovered we could apply this code to model all kinds of liquid crystal devices, so she was more on the application side. She’s now an assistant professor at Lincoln University of Missouri. She’s going to be visiting faculty this year at Haverford College. She has a two-body problem of her own. Her dear husband who is also a Kent State alum found a job on the East Coast, so she’s going to be working at Haverford this year. The next student was Michael Varga, who got this thing in Nature. Amazing. Michael. Then the student who just finished recently, Youssef Golestani, worked on a different class of problems, experiments, by Oleg Lavrentovich. How great is it to have wonderful experiments in-house. Also we had close collaboration with Qi-Huo Wei as well. But with Oleg, his student, Greta Babakhanova, now at NIST, who invited me to speak there recently, they did the same problem where they formed the liquid crystal between two pieces of patterned class, the liquid crystal elastomer; they just removed one piece of glass, and now they have a responsive coating. So instead of wiggling or folding or doing origami or something, it just basically has a programmed topography change. So it goes from being flat to having mountains and valleys and troughs and whatever shape. The student who modeled Greta Babakhanova’s experiments is Youssef Golestani, who got his PhD last semester. He has been working in the time since then with our colleague Peter Palffy-Muhoray doing completely other work, actually related to Bahman Taheri’s company, AlphaMicron, as far as I understand, but I’m not involved in that work at all. Youssef is scheduled to start a postdoc with the group in Eindhoven, not with my former collaborator Dick Broer, but with a young faculty member there, Danqing Liu. He’s supposed to start there September 1st. So, all of that is going on.

I have one other quick research story to tell you. Our colleague Hiroshi Yokoyama, he was the former director of the LCI, does some beautiful experiments. I watched his graduate student’s dissertation defense where they told a story of a very interesting liquid crystal cell they devised, where the top piece of glass and the bottom piece of glass were parallel, but the top one, they could make an angle between them. I think they were actually rotating the bottom one. But they could make a twist. And they wanted to learn something about topological defects in liquid crystals, disclinations. So they had written in the anchoring pattern two special points, two defect points, and spontaneously in the nematic liquid crystal in between, you get essentially a little arch that’s like a game of Twister. It touches on one side and it—so it touches both special points. When they rotate the top surface relative to the bottom surface, this arch stretches sideways. And it stretches, and it stretches, and it stretches, so it makes a shape like that, like it’s still touching the two special points, but it’s coming around the back. Then when you twist far enough it snaps off the loop, and the loop expands, and it leaves the special arch still there, to do it again and again. If you keep twisting, you get more and more loops.

I saw Joe Angelo’s presentation, and I said, “Oh my goodness, Joe. That’s a Frank-Read source. He said, “What’s a Frank-Read source?” It’s something I learned about from studying plasticity in crystalline solids. Another type of line defect, the dislocation in crystals, it’s a wrinkle in the crystal structure, can get pinned by interactions with vacancies, impurities, or just by tangling on another dislocation. It can even cross-flip the wrong one and pin itself. So if you have this dislocation and it’s pinned in two spots, when you bend the spoon or bend the paper clip, that segment bows out, and if you keep pushing, it bows out, bows out, bows out, and comes around and snaps off. It’s called a Frank-Read source. It generates families of circular defects coming out. That’s what allows the paper clip to bend. The Frank of the Frank-Read source in metallurgy is the same Frank as the Frank free energy in liquid crystals. It’s the same guy. The two discoveries were in 1950 and 1958. So, at that point, I said, “Oh my god, the same microstructural evolution mechanism that gives metals their ductility can also work in a liquid crystal.” No one has ever seen that before. Not even Charles Frank. Because disclinations in liquid crystals don’t spontaneously pin the way dislocations do in crystalline solids. If two disclinations come together, they might just reconnect and move apart. They don’t form a knot necessarily.

CRAWFORD: In liquid crystals?

SELINGER: In liquid crystals. But we can pin them on the surface. And that’s what Hiroshi and Joe Angelo had done. There’s another graduate student involved. Christopher Culbreath built the cell to begin with. Okay. So we’ve put together a paper. So at this point I turned to my dear husband Jonathan and said, “Help me understand how the Frank-Read source works in liquid crystals.” Okay. And, oh my goodness, tour de force. Jonathan, you put him on a problem like that—like I suggested it to him—I asked him to go a centimeter, and he went 100 kilometers. So he worked out all the analogies between dislocations in crystals and disclinations in liquid crystals. Then his brilliant student Cheng Long did a computer simulation of the Frank-Read source and the nematics. Who, by the way, Cheng Long I think at the beginning of August is moving to Harvard to do a postdoc with Jonathan’s former PhD advisor David Nelson.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: So, what goes around comes around, in a good way. Because David Nelson had heard Cheng give a talk about this subject, and Qiang did beautiful work. They did analytical theory. They did computer simulation. My student, Matthew Deutsch, did another set of simulations where we looked at finite temperature effects and strain rate effects. Anyway we’ve put that all together, we’ve submitted the paper for publication, and we’re hoping it will get accepted.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: But it’s because I worked—the reason why Joe Angelo didn’t recognize, and Hiroshi Yokoyama did not recognize what they did—they never studied metallurgy. Maybe they didn’t know what a Frank-Read source was. They were doing the experiment for a completely different reason—“Let’s evaluate the line tension in liquid crystals, or disclinations in liquid crystals.” So I was the right person in the right place at the right time to see it.

CRAWFORD: What is the value of that kind of connection? If I’m understanding correctly the story that you’re telling, what you had learned from metallurgy, you recognized something about what they were doing with their work with the loop and everything—I think you used the word “analogy”—with crystals.

SELINGER: It’s the same mechanism in a completely different physical system. Here is why it’s useful. In metals, Frank-Read sources form stochastically, randomly, when things happen to collide with each other. In liquid crystals, since these pinning points come from surface anchoring, we can build them wherever we want them. So now we can put Frank-Read sources into a system. There’s another class of materials under intense study in the liquid crystal community including here at Kent State which are called active matter, essentially liquid crystals that can be living creatures, like swimming bacteria. Oleg’s group actually does a lot of swimming bacteria in liquid crystals, but you can also look at biopolymers or microtubules that are driven by kinesin motors and shear over each other.

In those materials, typically stresses build up really, really high, and then defects spontaneously nucleate. And they’re very chaotic, almost like a lava lamp, with everything nucleating and moving around kind of in a random mixing fashion. If we can put Frank-Read sources into an active matter system, either on the walls, on colloid particles floating around inside, on cylinders that are like pillars penetrating through the sample, whatever thing, we can prescribe—we can generate defects in a predictable way and turn chaotic motion into predictable ordered motion. And so, in general, heterogeneous nucleation occurs at lower stresses than homogeneous nucleation. Even when you freeze water in the freezer, a little bump on the side of the ice cube tray will be where the first ice crystal forms. Whereas if you had the material in a situation where it was floating in empty space with no dust, no impurities of any kind, it’s harder to nucleate that first thing, so the system might even undercool and go metastable. Another analogy is that when you shear a piece of metal, like when you bend a paper clip, the deformation may not be uniform through the thickness of the material. You can get slip planes that localize and that can actually help the system fail. But essentially by putting topological defects on the walls of a liquid crystal container, we could engineer formation of slip planes, where all the deformation happens. It’s almost like instead of the whole system shearing, all the deformation is localized on a single plane. We’ve just submitted this paper—the next step for me is to write a proposal, probably to the National Science Foundation or maybe some other place, to explore applications of the Frank-Read source for active matter. Maybe we can change the rheology of liquid crystals by putting a higher density of sources. On the other hand, it might make the material stiffer, or less stiff. It might raise the viscosity or lower the viscosity. I don’t know yet. But we have experimenters who can tell us the answers. One of those experimenters is Qi-Huo. No longer our colleague here at Kent State, he has moved to China. He is at SUSTech. As part of our sabbatical year this year, we will go spend a month at SUSTech.

CRAWFORD: What is SUSTech?

SELINGER: It is the Southern University of Science and Technology, I think? Something like that. It’s in Shenzhen, not far from Hong Kong. But it’s in PRC; it’s in People’s Republic of China. We had to get permission from the provost to go. Travel to China and collaboration with China is—the Ohio State House and Senate have been working on this SB 83, forbidding any relationships between public universities in Ohio and China. First of all, it’s not law yet. We don’t know if it will be. It was not included by the state budget that the governor signed recently. So I hope we will still be able to collaborate with Qi-Huo. He’s one of my favorite collaborators of all time. He has the capacity to do these experiments. There’s also an experimental group in Hungary that can do experiments where something like a Frank-Read source can be driven by an electric field instead of a twist. There are groups that can do active matter experiments. So, we hope to learn, I would say in the next few years of research, where Frank-Read sources may occur naturally, where they can be engineered, and what their impact on material properties will be. But it’s a new way to govern the rheology of liquid crystals. But this means I need now a new technique. I need computational fluid dynamics. I’ve already done DIY finite element elastodynamics. Now I have to do DIY fluid dynamics. And that’s what Matthew Deutsch is working on right now.

CRAWFORD: I see. Is that one of your grad students?

SELINGER: That’s one of my grad students. He’s the one based at Los Alamos.

CRAWFORD: This may be a very gross simplification, but would it be fair to say that one of the goals of materials science, at least from this story that you’ve told about this work that has been done with the Frank-Read source and everything, is one of the goals to take the behaviors of materials that seem chaotic and be able to predict them, or manipulate them?

SELINGER: Yeah, control them. For active matter—first of all, it’s just a curiosity. When you see birds flying in formation or fish swimming in formation, and you’re like, “How does this happen?”—what are the mechanisms by which order forms in the natural world and how do we study them? I would say one of the things about active matter is that it stirs itself. It’s an active self-mixing system. It’s taking energy in the environment which for instance might be energy in the form of a chemical fuel, like food for the bacteria or whatever thing, and translating that into kinetic energy, into motion. The question is, if you want to be able to control the motion, to make the motion periodic and predictable instead of chaotic and unpredictable, that’s one potential goal.

We have another proposal pending right now—it hasn’t been funded so I don’t know—probably we may or may not do the project if it is not funded. But it is a collaboration with a group in Tel Aviv where we visited last summer at Tel Aviv University to model the origin of liquid crystal order in the extracellular matrix. So if you have cells growing in a fiber-rich gel, the fibers are oriented every possible direction; we say isotropic. What’s interesting is that the cells actually contract and stretch the gel, and that causes the fibers to locally align and concentrate and form nematic liquid crystalline domains between these contracting cells. There’s even one of our collaborators in Tel Aviv University—her name is Ayelet Lesman—she even has the theory that one cell will say, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” and the other one will say, “Oh, hi, I see you.” She actually has a cartoon in one of her papers where one is saying, “Hello! Hello!” and the other one is, “Oh, hi.” So that they actually communicate through stretching these fibers. Individual nematic formation is interesting to model, but that has been well studied in the literature. We’re interested in what happens—when there’s a network gelling of many of these bridges, and they coalesce into a whole structure, how does that impact the mechanical properties of the assembly? So this is again looking at how microscopic mechanisms drive macroscopic properties. It’s bringing the tools and methods of soft matter physics into biology. This is also a trend in the overall field of active matter, that something that used to be of interest only to biologists, now physicists are really excited. At the conference I attended, the GRC conference, I met a professor of neurosurgery studying how orientational order of cancer cells in a brain tumor makes the—the larger the domain and the stronger the nematic order, the more deadly the brain cancer. Apparently—they called them—I can’t remember. So, how cells behave is now physics. And the physics of how cells behave is now biology. The two fields are beginning to overlap more and more.

CRAWFORD: Wow. That must be very exciting to see that developing and be in the midst of it.

SELINGER: For instance, the hydra—the little microscopic creature—if you cut up a hydra, little bits of hydra will grow into a whole hydra. Okay. So apparently topological defects, these things we talk about in liquid crystals, also occur in the orientation of the various textures in the hydra, and certain defects turn into certain anatomy. So now this is morphogenesis. It’s life itself. We had a really great talk here recently by Noel Clark, a professor of physics and head of a big liquid crystal research group from University of Colorado at Boulder. He talks about DNA and liquid crystal phases of DNA. Rosalind Franklin’s famous x-ray photograph—what was it, photograph 51? What was the number? I think it was photograph 51—that was DNA in a liquid crystal phase. Noel and his research group have been exploring how liquid crystal behavior of DNA could be involved in the origin of life on Earth. Liquid crystals cross over to biology in lots of ways. And we have people like Thorsten Schmidt here, and others at Kent State doing work with DNA—Hamza Balci and Soumitra Basu, and there’s probably more people—doing work with all kinds of beautiful structures that DNA makes. So, biophysics is a huge emerging trend, area of excellence here at Kent State. Thorsten Schmidt in particular is—I don’t have enough superlatives. He’s fantastic.

CRAWFORD: This is a really great discussion of the research work you’ve been doing. I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about the LCI organizationally. Then I have a couple other questions related to some other things, and then I think we can probably wrap up, because we’ve been going for quite some time.

SELINGER: I’m afraid to look at my watch. I’m not going to look. You decide.

CRAWFORD: It’s not too much longer than what I thought we might go, but [laughs]—

SELINGER: I’m getting tired. I think I need to drink some water.

CRAWFORD: I was just curious to hear your impressions when you came to the LCI. 2005 was, in my impression, as somebody who’s looking at the history, sort of a period of transition, because the big ALCOM grant had ended in 2002, and there was a change in leadership. I’m just wondering, what was your sense of what the LCI was like at the time that you showed up? Did it have a clear sense of direction?

SELINGER: When I first agreed to join the LCI, our move was still some months away. We moved in the middle of the summer of 2005. There was an NSF MRSEC[5]—I think it was a MRSEC—proposal, and I came to Kent and camped out in our empty house that we had purchased but not moved into yet, in the middle of the winter when there was an ice storm and the campus was closed, but we were working on the proposal anyway. Then I participated in the reverse site visit at NSF headquarters in the D.C. area. It was in Virginia. We did not get funded on that try. As usual, because of my intense interest in education and outreach—I mean, I had had my own NSF Career Award. I had had also some NSF funding for curriculum development for training teachers when I was at Catholic U. So they put me in charge of the education and outreach part of the proposal because I was so brand-new to the project. But we didn’t get funded on the first try, at least on that try.

We’ve had another close call. We had an STC—Science and Technology Center grant—that got really, really close, even to the point where I think the program officer told the director of that project, which was Oleg also, that it was on the list to be funded, but then we ended up being cut from the list. Budgets were tight. I think there was a lot of crying that year. We worked so hard. And we had an actual site visit. They sent a whole team here. We flew in all our collaborators. I have no idea how much money the University invested in making that site visit happen, and you get nothing when you come in last. Close, but no grant. Not a penny. But I will say, all the bits and pieces of the proposal, because there was a lot of excellent research, including some of mine, all got funded as individual smaller grants. But we have not gotten a large center grant, not for lack of trying. The pandemic was a tough period. I have not heard if there are other—I guess we put in another MRSEC pre-proposal in the last cycle, but we did not make it to the full proposal stage, and those funding announcements just came out while we were at the GRC conference.

CRAWFORD: When I have asked this question of other people, they often talk about the MRSEC proposal and the STC proposal. I understand that these are—I forget the exact word for this type of grant—they’re not individual grants; they’re like group grants, basically.

SELINGER: Right, and so the MRSEC has subgroups within, which are called IRGs.[6] What does that stand for? I don’t know what they stand for.

CRAWFORD: But why is this class of grant so important?

SELINGER: It brings the individual faculty together for larger-scale collaborations.

CRAWFORD: It’s harder to do those without this kind of funding?

SELINGER: Part of the responsibility for a big center like that also is to have a large coordinated education and outreach activity that would have at least a half-time staff member who would be responsible for orchestrating that, rather than as a side gig for one of the faculty, like I run the high school internship now. I don’t know, I worry about—it’s wonderful to reminisce about the great team that the faculty has been, and I’ve enjoyed many wonderful collaborations with our colleagues. Like I said, this whole research project was inspired by Hiroshi Yokoyama’s experiments, by Oleg’s experiments, by Qi-Huo’s experiments. But the fact is, first of all, Qi-Huo is gone, tragically, and a lot of us are close to retirement age. Jonathan and I are in our early sixties and a lot of the faculty are significantly older than we are. It’s really important that the University decided this year to hire a couple of new people in our field. We did a search but we only got one hire instead of two. We made two offers that were turned down, which is unfortunate.

I think to some degree, SB 83—I’m willing to say this on recording—I think SB 83 scared potential candidates away from Kent State, away from Ohio. Neither one of those people will be teaching in the state of Ohio. Because they see Ohio as—if you’re a woman of childbearing age, why would you move to a state that doesn’t have reproductive rights? Why would you want to work in a state that forbids partnerships with China? It feels like the current political situation in Ohio is making it harder for us to attract talent to the faculty. I have faith—we have an excellent president, provost, dean, and director. We have all the strong leadership we need. But we have to operate in the budget environment and the political environment of the state, and it’s hard. We have to hire some great—now, we do have a new hire coming in physics, not in soft matter though. We got a really, really excellent senior candidate. I was not involved in the search. I can’t take credit for this. It was because the Physics Department is strong. But yeah, we need to hire the next generation of leadership. We lost one of our really great associate professors who moved to a faculty position in Europe. That was a disappointment. And, we lost Qi-Huo Wei, who got an offer he couldn’t refuse in China.

CRAWFORD: What about the recent—I guess we could call it a reorganization of the LCI into the AMLCI, which resulted in the faculty being—

SELINGER: Yeah. Our tenure shifted to Physics. The real substantive result of that was that our teaching loads went up. Before that reorganization, I typically taught one course a year, and you here over in history probably say, “That was a pretty sweet deal! No wonder you’re bringing in all the grant bucks!” Right?

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: But it wasn’t just that my teaching load went up, but I wasn’t teaching exclusively at the graduate level. I was teaching undergraduate courses for physics majors, and also the big service courses, so I was teaching College Physics 1. That’s hard to teach in general but teaching it online during the pandemic with an enrollment of 225—the teaching load for me went up so much, my research productivity went down, and my grant funding went down. I really need to pick it up. I don’t have any major NSF grants. Let me rephrase that; I don’t have any NSF grants right now. I’ve spent my last NSF dollar. I need to write another proposal. It’s not that I got turned down; I didn’t apply. I didn’t have any good ideas. I have good ideas now. But it just felt like I was so overwhelmed with teaching, and the pandemic kind of did me in, too, a little bit.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like from what you were describing about this new research initiative and so forth—because my impression of the LCI sort of before the reorganization—well, let me ask you—did it affect the group identity of the liquid crystal scientists? In other words, do you feel more like you’re part of the Physics Department now, and distant from—?

SELINGER: Let’s talk about the graduate program. When I first joined, my tenure lay in Chemical Physics, which was the PhD program associated with the LCI. In fact, when I first joined in 2005, Oleg Lavrentovich was simultaneously the director of the graduate program and the director of the Institute. At some point those two jobs were separated, and then we had a separate director of the graduate program. That’s the situation we’re in now. Right now, Professor Antal, also known as Tony, Jakli, is head of the graduate program, now called Materials Science, and Torsten Hegmann is a wonderful director of the whole Institute. But they’re two different jobs, so the jobs got separated. There was that. But part of the issue was, I still remember our associate dean of Arts and Sciences said—our graduate students were not working as teaching fellows. All the money that we got as GA support was used to power, to fund research rotations for those students. Our faculty were not teaching very much, and what little teaching we were doing was in tiny graduate courses. And, we were bringing in big bucks in terms of research funding. So, what I remember—I mean, I love our associate dean; I don’t have any complaints with him—but he said, “Gee, if our faculty, say, in biological sciences, had a low teaching load and all their graduate students were funded with GA funds, gosh, they would be producing more grant funding, too. It’s not fair for you guys to be in this like special situation.” And there was anxiety—I still remember Oleg said something at some point—“Oh, yeah, we can let faculty from the other departments affiliate with LCI, but only if they have $50,000 a year of grant funding.” There were people who were just offended by that. They’re like, “Why are you building a moat around the LCI?” Like, “You have this little situation where you have low teaching loads, high research productivity, and it’s a very exclusive club.”

CRAWFORD: Wasn’t that the design of the LCI? It was meant to be a research institute?

SELINGER: When it was first formed, before I got here—because remember, we celebrated the 50th anniversary while I was here. This place has been here—what year was it founded?

CRAWFORD: 1965.

SELINGER: Yeah, I was born in ‘62, so I was not in on the ground floor of the AMLCI.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: But, I think most of the staff were soft money. They were being paid with grant funds, or contract funds, from industry, from the government, from national labs, from wherever. When ALCOM was funded, my understanding—you probably know more than I do—is that a lot of—NSF does not pay assistant professor salaries, and they don’t like to pay full-time research staff in large numbers. So, at that point the University converted a lot of those positions to tenure line faculty positions. Mary Neubert told me that she was offered a lowly assistant professorship when she was like the most renowned person in her field in the world. And she’s like, “You can take your faculty position and shove it.” She felt like I did when the people at Exxon offered me to join the graphics department. So, she decided to stay a senior research fellow. As far as I know, she was really the top synthetic liquid crystal chemist in the world. I didn’t overlap with her professionally but I had the opportunity to meet her socially, and was very impressed.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, she’s a very impressive person.

SELINGER: I don’t really know what her orientation is, but she is, how shall we say, not—I think she described herself as “not the marrying kind” or something like that. I think that because she didn’t conform to gender expectation for whatever thing, I think she was the victim of not just gender discrimination but like women are expected to behave certain ways. The MIT self-study on the status of women in physics brought this up. It has been a long time. The story is told in that video, Picture a Scientist, a wonderful movie. That women are expected to behave in certain ways, to dress certain ways, to groom certain ways. Hair, makeup. “I’m not wearing makeup today. My hair isn’t properly dyed.” Women are expected to be warm, nurturing, cooperative. Women who have not conformed to gender stereotype have experienced not only what I would call informal discrimination but—there was one faculty member from Chemistry who was dismissed, even though she was tenured. There were other issues, and there were lawyers involved, so I don’t know all the details, but my impression is that it’s not just Kent State; it is the world—that women in general who don’t conform to gender stereotype—it’s men, too—if men don’t conform to gender stereotype they can be mistreated in the workplace. I don’t know what was going on here—when did Mary start? Was it in the sixties? In the seventies?

CRAWFORD: It was in the sixties. I think she was hired in either ‘67 or ‘69. It was pretty early. She was one of the earliest research fellows of the LCI. She started when it was in the Lincoln Building. Which interestingly enough, [laughs] when Glenn Brown started the LCI, that building wasn’t a university building, even.

SELINGER: He just rented it?

CRAWFORD: He wanted it off campus. He wanted the Institute off campus for some reason. I don’t know why.

SELINGER: You know who’s in our graduate program now?

CRAWFORD: Now.

SELINGER: Axel Saupe, grandson of Alfred Saupe.

CRAWFORD: Oh, yes. I’ve heard that.

SELINGER: He has been working with me this summer.

CRAWFORD: Oh, interesting.

SELINGER: He told a story that his grandfather really did not like the fact that his office was like in the basement, so he asked—when they moved to what is now the SRB[7]—that he wanted to be on the ground floor. Little did he know the ground floor is below grade.

CRAWFORD: Oh, no!

SELINGER: My office is on that floor, now. I moved my office over to SRB after I shifted my tenure to Physics, because I’m teaching over there.

CRAWFORD: You were just talking about the experience of women in science, and so I have a couple questions about that, and then we can probably wrap up. I have to ask you about this article you published in the MRS Bulletin in 2013.

SELINGER: Oh, I’m so glad you saw that! “Toying with science.”

CRAWFORD: Yeah. I wonder if you could, again for the recording, tell us a little bit about what that article was about, and why you decided to write it.

SELINGER: Okay. The story we often tell about why boys end up pursuing STEM and girls don’t is because boys’ toys, which include chemistry sets, building model airplanes and cars, erector sets, LEGO, that they are sort of like pre-engineering activities, whereas girls’ toys—the EZ Bake Oven, the Barbie dolls, the craft projects, the fiber arts—that those are kinder, küche, and kirche, right? They’re designed to train housewives. And I’m like, “Oh, I beg to differ.” I learned a lot of geometry from the toys and crafts that I worked with as a child. The simplest thing—I learned about the square lattice from the checkerboard. I learned about the triangular lattice from the game we used to call Chinese checkers. I don’t know if that name is still considered—like have we cancelled Chinese checkers? Do we call it something else now?

CRAWFORD: I’m not exactly sure.

SELINGER: But it has a triangular lattice with marbles. Every site has six neighbors instead of four. I learned geometry from playing those two games. I had actually a pegboard as a child with little tile, to build mosaic pictures. And so the idea of having a square lattice with spins; I’ve been playing on a square lattice my whole life. That was one thing. Another issue was I learned about weaving, knitting, and crochet, and macrame. I learned about chirality from macrame. I learned a stitch you can use with four cords to make a ribbon, and the ribbon can twist to the right, if you make all righthanded stitches—or, you know, knots. If you make all lefthanded knots, it twists to the left. And if you do a mix—right, left, right, left—it’s just flat. Okay. So, liquid crystal molecules come in handedness, and molecules come in handedness. And so, I learned about what happens when you mix chiralities. I remember asking my mother, “I know what happens if I do right, right, right. I know what happens if I do left, left, left. I know what happens if I alternate. What if I do right, right, left, right, right left?” And she’s like, “I don’t know! Just try it.” And you still get a twist, but it takes longer to turn around, because one right and one left cancel each other. I learned about enantiomeric imbalance from playing macrame in Bluebirds, which is like Girl Scouts. Bluebirds is the first stage of Campfire Girls. So I learned about chirality from the craft of macrame. I learned about topological defects from crochet. I learned about rotational symmetry from the potter’s wheel. I learned about rotational symmetry from the wood lathe. My father taught me how to use a wood lathe. And how to use a drill press and a band saw. He engaged me as his little helper in the workshop from an early age. So if he was refinishing a desk, and there needed to be some powder rubbed into the wood, I was a little creature, I could fit under the desk and rub the wood, and he’s like, “Come help me.” That was my job. I don’t think he had me paint the desk until I was a little older.

CRAWFORD: I’m curious to get your thoughts—I did actually read the article; I’m not just asking because I didn’t read it, but—

SELINGER: Do you happen to have a daughter? One or more daughters?

CRAWFORD: Yeah, I have a daughter.

SELINGER: Well, so, you can think about the—there are all kinds of fun activities for kids of all genders, and I think the toy stores have maybe gotten a little bit less gendered in their marketing approach for toys.

CRAWFORD: But I guess the question I was going to ask you is, to what extent is what you’re saying—because it totally makes sense—also partly a critique of what we consider science to be?

SELINGER: As it happens, Sabetta Matsumoto is a professor of Physics at Georgia Tech University. When Sabetta was a postdoc, she gave a science café presentation at a restaurant in downtown Santa Barbara. I attended it, together with a colleague who brought along his spouse who is a clothing designer. Sabetta is all about physics and geometry of textiles. She works a lot on knitted fabrics and how their mechanical properties depend on the knit. But what she was doing at the time was demonstrating what happens if you sew together patches of fabric that are pentagons or hexagons or heptagons or whatever, and she made this really beautiful structure, I think with all heptagons, that had negative Gaussian curvature and two pass-throughs. It was this really gorgeous thing she had made. And she gave all this talk about the geometry of clothing. So if you just stitch together hexagons you can make a flat fabric and you can use that for a tablecloth if you want to, or a quilt. If you add a pentagon, you get bowl-shaped curvature we call positive Gaussian curvature. If you add a heptagon, a seven-sided piece, you get negative Gaussian curvature like a saddle.

I turned to my colleague’s spouse, the clothing designer, and I said, “If we put the pentagons and the heptagons in just the right places, could we make a dress that would fit any woman like a glove?” And she’s like, “Let’s try!” So she brought a dress form, like a mannequin thing, to the Physics Institute. I cut out hundreds of little pieces of papers with pentagons, hexagons, and heptagons, about one inch on an edge, on a side and we had a wine and cheese party for all the faculty, and we played, “Pin the polygon on the dress form.” And we made a fit. As you might imagine, parts of the shape—this is a female dress, form, right—have positive Gaussian curvature like a bowl, right? So you would expect to find a pentagon there. Then in the small of the waist, you get something that’s more saddle-shaped and there will be some heptagons there. And the rest will mostly be hexagons. So she took this thing home and she made it into an actual dress. We had to actually buy a special mannequin that was like, “That’s the thing we’re fitting.” Then Sabetta took it to a conference and showed it at the conference— it was the Bridges conference that brings together math, science, and art. So, the actual dress was made. And Sabetta still has it. I had dinner with the clothing maker when I was in the D.C. area recently, so we’re all still—and I saw Sabetta at the conference—we’re all still in touch. So one of my ideas was that we wanted to create a numerical tool that would take a body scan, like our fashion school has a scanner—we can just put a human there; I’ve been in the scanner—you can get a point cloud. And then from the point cloud, we could generate the pentagons, hexagons, and heptagons, and then build the dress for a specific person. We have not done it. There was a colleague at UCLA in mechanical engineering that wanted to work on that project with me, but I’m sad to say he was tragically murdered.

CRAWFORD: Ohhh.

SELINGER: I know. There has been a lot of really scary things that have happened. I think it was the beginning of June 2016, maybe, when it happened. It has been enough years that I’m not crying every time I think about it now. But yeah, he had a former PhD student who was mentally ill who came and murdered him with a weapon.

CRAWFORD: Oh, geez. Wow.

SELINGER: So I lost my collaborator. So I just like—I can’t work on that right now. So I kind of put it aside, but maybe I’ll come back to it at some point.

CRAWFORD: Again keeping with this theme of women in science, from your perspective, what are the ways that the scientific community in general, or physics in particular, can improve or encourage and support women in science better?

SELINGER: One is, again, about not enforcing gender stereotypes for anybody. We want to make the whole physics community a place where everybody feels safe. One of the issues is the culture of overwork. The idea that being a research physicist means you have to really put in 60 to 80 hours a week of work is repellent to anybody who wants to be present for their children, male or female. So it tends to attract a certain class of people who are willing to delegate to their co-parent most of the hands-on parenting. I was the child of such a marriage. My father worked many, many hours as a physician in private practice. Not part of a big—just him, shingle on the door. As a self-employed professional, he was on call 24/7 for his patients, for a large fraction of his career. Mom couldn’t leave us home with Dad for any amount of time; Dad could get a phone call and have to leave any time. Okay, so it used to be that that’s who you had to be, to be a scientist. I think we have a little bit more—expectation of work/family balance. There are stories of childless faculty, not at Kent State but elsewhere, who talk with students—they’re in their office until 1:00 a.m., and they’re seeing students one after the other until 1:00 a.m. I would never ask that of my students here. When the grant proposal is due, I will certainly be up at 1:00 a.m. working, and I might be up at 1:00 a.m. any night of the week working, but I don’t give my students an assignment on Friday afternoon and ask them to finish it by Monday. That’s not the thing we do. So a little more respect for work/life balance. Because not everybody has a family. It has been particularly with my student who is at Los Alamos, because he serves two managers, me and his manager at Los Alamos, and he’s 20 hours a week each. I can’t expect him to do any work on days that he is working for Los Alamos. I just have to live with that. It’s okay. So that’s one way.

I’ve been in leadership with the APS. I got elected as a general councilor to the APS Council, and then they elected me to the board of directors. We’ve had a lot of women serving on the board. I was not the—in fact, I think we were majority female, which is really bizarre. Women are overrepresented in leadership there. APS has the mission for our meetings to be a safe space, where everybody feels welcome and nobody is made to feel unwelcome. I served on an NSF panel last week, and there was a really interesting situation where there was a female African American member of the review panel expressing one opinion about a proposal, and a significantly older white male member of the panel expressing a completely different opinion. Differences of opinion are not unusual, in a panel. Some people can like a proposal and other people may not. They feel the weaknesses are too weak and they don’t want to fund it. It was one of the first proposals we looked at, and I thought, how interesting that we have—and I wanted to see how the rest of the panel would respond. Would they ignore one or the other? And they showed respect to both. And they both expressed very reasonable opinions in very clear ways. And they didn’t criticize each other; they just in a very civil way expressed different opinions, and nobody assumed that his opinion held sway because he was older and maler and whiter [laughs]. Just like when I had dinner with the family in Germany; it’s like, we’ve come a long way. We’ve come a long way. Everybody gets treated with respect, and everybody has something important to say, and we will not assume that the pale male person, the older person, is the authority.

The other thing is, I learned a lot from the history of Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who was such a wonderful writer. Oliver Sacks failed at a lot of stuff. He was a complete screwup as a researcher. He lost his experimental sample that he had worked so hard to purify from who knows how much tissue. He lost his research notebook when he dropped it on the highway.He was such a complete screwup. He couldn’t get his papers published because he was trying to tell stories from the patient’s perspective, and the doctors were not having it. The scientists were not having it. And then he found complete success. So when I have a student who fails my class, I don’t say, “What a loser. Go get a life somewhere else.” I’m like, if you assign a squirrel to swim in the swimming pool, or you assign the fish to climb the tree, you will think this person is a loser, right? We just haven’t found what their—or maybe I need to teach it a different way. I see the potential for success, in the failure. I’ve also seen people who didn’t achieve success on the first try achieve really great success in other tries. One of the worst things I’ve ever seen in terms of negative behavior towards women in a scientific context was just before the pandemic, the last conference I attended. It was on a college campus, and it was small. It was a workshop with maybe 30 people. Young, female, postdoc giving a very interesting presentation. And a member of the audience who was from a Southern state, who did not work for a major university or industry or national lab—he was working in a small little organization that had some funding from somewhere—asked her a really basic question about her work, like the very fundamentals of the field. She looked kind of surprised to hear such a simple question, but she treated him with respect and she answered the question. Then he responded, “Oh, I knew the answer. I just wanted to see if you did.”

CRAWFORD: Oh my gosh.

SELINGER: And everybody in the room went—[long gasp]. So it still happens. It’s hostile. It’s inappropriate. If he had worked at a university we could have complained to his chair. If he worked at a national lab we could have complained to his group leader. As it was, there was nobody to complain to. So anyway, the director of the Institute that was hosting the event probably gave him a good talking-to. I talked to the postdoc after. She’s like—. There’s creeps out there. We know they’re still there. So the American Physical Society, we’re running a conference, there is 50 parallel sessions, maybe 60 or 70. There’s a different chair in each room. The chairs need to watch to make sure that there’s not—and it doesn’t have to be a female speaker; it could be any speaker could be treated disrespectfully. We try to maintain a positive welcoming environment. And you know what? The person may be giving a talk that’s completely wrong, and you may see the mistake on slide one. You still don’t embarrass them by saying there’s a mistake on slide one.

The other issue is, I would say—I always tell my students, “Go watch that old television show Columbo.” What does Columbo do? He doesn’t say, “You’re lying.” He says, “Now, let me see. You told me this thing, and then you told me this other thing, and I don’t understand how they could both be true. Can you help me understand?” So you come from a position of, “I’m confused, help me understand.” If there’s a contradiction, the criminal always says, “You caught me,” right? But if it’s the scientist, maybe there is an explanation. Don’t assume that you’re right and they’re wrong. Be respectful. If you think there is a mistake, ask the question in a way that says, “I’m confused. I don’t understand how this is true and this is also true. Please help me understand.” Not, “I think you’re an idiot.” Well, “I think you’re an idiot” used to be the standard. We have to teach people not to behave that way. You know how maybe in old comedy or if you are familiar with how things used to be, that like putting other people down was a game, the put-down game. Like, “Your mother wears army boots,” or whatever stupid thing. Physics used to be like that, that people were always trying to prove that they were the smartest one in the room. We’re trying to get past that. So, ask questions in respectful ways, and don’t assume that you’re right and the other person’s wrong. Ever. Even with a student that has made a mistake, don’t tell them they’re an idiot. Be a coach. Be a coach. Help them achieve excellence. Don’t try to destroy their ego. Build it up. Help them feel positively towards the work, and when they do things right, give them great praise, and help them achieve excellence. But every now and then, we have to give an F. It breaks my heart. I’m sure you know how that feels.

CRAWFORD: Yes. Unfortunately.

SELINGER: But here’s one of the things I do. When I was teaching that giant course, I’m using online homework; I set things up—if you tell the students, “You’re going to lose points if you get the homework problems wrong,” they will buy the answers. There are websites that sell them. You can always pay someone to do your homework for you. I set things up so students have 50 tries to get every problem right. There’s no multiple choice. You have 50 tries to get it right, and the answer is going to be a number, and your number is going to be different from anybody else’s number, because all the problems, the numbers are all randomized. You have 50 tries. Just do the homework. If you can’t figure it out in 50 tries, for heaven’s sake, go see your TA and get help! Or talk to a tutor; the tutors are free. I’m just trying to make it easy. If I were sitting with a student and they made a mistake, I wouldn’t slap them on the wrist. I would say, “Please try again.” So I’m trying to set up structures for that.

We know that students come to Kent State with a huge range of preparation levels. Beverly Warren, President Warren, expressed it the best—“Our mission is to take students from wherever they are, and take them to places they never dreamed of.” Okay, so we create a system—there’s a wonderful book you might like called The Only Woman in the Room that tells the story—I don’t remember the author’s name, forgive me; she teaches creative writing at University of Michigan, or at least she did last time I checked. But she was a physics major—I think she was at Yale, and she was just a few years ahead of me. She described what it was like to be one of the only female physics majors and what a hostile environment it was. A lot of the kids in her class already had AP physics and they’re in the class where she’s seeing all the material for the first time, and she felt like chopped liver. “Why am I here? I don’t belong.” Imposter syndrome. All that stuff. She went to the professor and said, “I need your signature to withdraw from this course, because clearly I don’t have—I shouldn’t be a physics major.” And he’s like, “Well, those people that you feel like are so far ahead of you, pretty soon we’re going to get past all the material they saw in high school. We’re going to be on an even footing.” I need to create that even footing. It’s an issue for getting women to succeed in computer science. Harvey Mudd College had a big project where they separated out the students that had already had the material in high school and the ones who hadn’t, and didn’t make them compete with each other. So, it’s like the shallow on-ramp. Like make it easy for them to get in and to achieve success and get started. And do I care if you got it right on the 12th try instead of the first try? The key issue is that you figured it out. I don’t care if you had 11 tries where I said, “Try again.” I don’t need to take off credit for that. Shallow on-ramp, and then everybody can achieve success. Well, they all have an equal chance to achieve success. I love the fact that when the state of Ohio changed the rules that the state share of instruction depends on how many students pass. I don’t know if you’ve been at Kent State long enough that you experienced that transition.

CRAWFORD: Yes.

SELINGER: Yes. That—I think it was—was it President Lefton who said, “Let’s hire a giant team of tutors to help all our students pass.” Not lower the threshold; raise the kids. That’s huge. Because before that, only kids with money could have tutors. Now everybody can have a tutor. That’s another invisible barrier. So, Kent State has a really important mission in terms of promoting social mobility for children who grew up in impoverished circumstances, or say less than privileged circumstances. And I keep finding little barriers. One of them is the rule that students enrolled at the Kent campus have to have a certain number of Kent campus credit hours, or else they lose their eligibility for certain kinds of financial aid. I hate that rule. I’ve talked to our dean, and she said she would get rid of the rule, but the rule seems to be impossible to kill. It hasn’t gone away. That means that students that don’t have enough credit hours, number one, they can—if they’re taking too many courses on a regional campus, they can lose their financial aid. So then they have to add an extra Kent campus course that they didn’t really need anyway. Who does that help? That’s one of those little invisible barriers that our students that come not from positions of privilege experience that nobody else is even aware of. It’s our mission as faculty advisors to find those little bumps in the road and try to smooth them out. So we have a Women in Science group on campus. Have you heard of it? It’s called Scientista.

CRAWFORD: I’ve only heard of it because I read your CV.

SELINGER: Scientista, I was afraid it was going to be discontinued because the leaders graduated, but I received an email from the outgoing leadership just like last week; they found new students to sustain Scientista.

CRAWFORD: Is this a newish group?

SELINGER: New-ish. It started actually—Harvard is part of the story, too. Two sisters who graduated from Harvard with STEM degrees—I don’t remember—not physics, maybe more life science—I don’t know, maybe biochemistry, I don’t know exactly what—started this group called Scientista. A student here on our campus, a physics major named Brandy Grove, decided to start a Kent campus chapter and asked me to be the faculty advisor. But even they had to be aware—their first logo had two x’s—like two x chromosomes, because women have two x chromosomes, right? But we recognize that trans women are women, and we don’t want them to feel left out because they don’t have two x chromosomes. So Scientista got a new logo. Right? And we have trans members. And it’s really interesting; the trans member experienced life as a male science major and then as a female science major, and could tell us the difference, from their experience, which was—illuminating.

CRAWFORD: I’m sure. [laughs]

SELINGER: Are you interested in women in science as like a research topic?

CRAWFORD: Definitely.

SELINGER: Well, I’m interested in talking with you about how the history of women in STEM in particular is part of this conversation. I mentioned Rosalind Franklin before who did the x-ray studies that revealed the double helix structure of DNA. She did not share the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick. I think she had died by the time they got it. And you can’t win a Nobel Prize when you’re dead. They did not include her as a coauthor in their paper, but they certainly accessed her data. There are various theories about whether she was angry that they accessed her data. There is evidence that she continued to be not only professionally collegial with them but also like personal friends with them. I have no inside story on the story of Rosalind Franklin, but it’s an interesting episode in the history of science. There’s also another really famous woman in science, and I’m wracking my brain—I’m so tired I can’t think of her name—who translated Newton’s Principia from Latin to French. What is her name?

CRAWFORD: Yeah—it was— Émilie du Châtelet.

SELINGER: Yes. Emily. I called her Emily; is it really Émilie?

CRAWFORD: I think it might be Emily.

SELINGER: Maybe in English it’s just translated to Emily. I always make a point of talking about her in my Newtonian mechanics instruction with the College Physics 1 kids, because she’s never mentioned in the textbook. Newton did not understand what’s conserved in a collision. She did experiments. She talked about force vive, which turned out to be essentially kinetic energy. All this F=ma stuff that I do. We have to think about we stand on the shoulders of giants, and Emily is one of those giants. So I always show her picture, talk about her history. She was not well behaved by the standards of her day. She had a child by a man that wasn’t her husband, nor the man she was living with at the time. You study that era of history more than me. What do you know about Emily? And a play about her life was presented at Kent State not that long ago.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly the case. She understood Newton’s work at least as well, possibly better, than he did.

SELINGER: Let’s say she asked some really important—so he was confused about what’s conserved in a collision. And honestly, our students are confused, too. It’s hard to keep track. Momentum is always conserved. Energy is not conserved in a collision. If the two objects stick together in the collision, we call it fully inelastic, and a certain amount of energy is lost when one thing slides over the other. One speeds up, one slows down, so they have the same final velocity after the collison. What’s confusing is we treat the collison as happening in a tiny amount of time, in an instant. The reality is, it takes time for one to speed up and one to slow down, and there’s equal and opposite force pairs that cause them to accelerate until their velocities match. And that’s just not really well explained in the textbook, and I always have to make up examples where it’s actually an extended period—like if you have a sled with some soft padding on it, on the ice, at the ice rink, and you get yourself going at a good speed and leap onto the sled, you need to slow down and the sled needs to speed up, so there’s some sliding, some kinetic friction, hopefully will not hurt your knees too much. So you’ll slow down and the sled will speed up until your velocities match and then you can move at constant velocity. In the collision, we treat that as an instant, whereas it really takes some time. And until you actually envision it as something that takes time, you can’t really understand where the energy goes. It goes to friction. So when I teach physics, I try to use something like that where you can imagine doing the motion with your own body, to help understand it. Anyway, I bring up Émilie du Châtelet, bring up Rosalind Franklin. In the history of computer simulation, The New York Times did an obituary for the coauthor of the scientific paper that led to this Metropolis algorithm, and I’ll have to remember what her name was. There were five coauthors, and it was two husband-wife pairs. Rosenbluth? I think she was a Rosenbluth. I don’t remember exactly, I’m sorry; I can find you The New York Times article. But telling the story—she wrote the code. And then her career in science ended. She had kids and she dropped out of the workforce.

CRAWFORD: There’s a long history in physics and physics-related fields like astronomy, where—this is going back to the 18th century at least, where—

SELINGER: Yeah. The women at the Center for Astrophysics—

CRAWFORD: —doing the calculations.

SELINGER: —the Harvard Observatory.

CRAWFORD: Doing the calculations.

SELINGER: They were the computers.

CRAWFORD: They were the computers, exactly. But in the 18th century, some observatory in Germany—I can’t remember the names either, because I’m also getting tired [laughs]—but I think Maria Winckelmann was her name—her husband was like the head astronomer, and she had been helping him his whole life and knew just as much, if not more, and then he passed away and there was this whole debate about, “Can we put a woman in this position? Of course we can’t.”

SELINGER: Oh, and then there was The Other Einstein, right?

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah, right. Yeah.

SELINGER: So nobody really knows how much the spouses contributed. One of the issues for me, when I came up for tenure at Catholic U, some of my papers were coauthored with Jonathan, the ones I had done with the NRL collaboration, and some of the papers were independent of him, were things that I did that were more metallurgy. I was asked, for any paper that had more than one author, “What was your role in this paper?” And so, I had to explain, if it’s an analytical theory, Jonathan probably did it. If it involves a computer simulation, you can be quite sure that I did it, or one of the students under my direct supervision. So that made it easy for us, to ascertain who did what. On this work with the Frank-Read source, this was one where the original inspiration came from me, but a lot of the perspiration came from Jonathan. And his student did really beautiful work. My student also did some really interesting work. But as far as our collaboration goes, it really is a match made in heaven. The other thing I’d like to reflect on, about the story of how I met Jonathan—when we were undergraduates, our housing assignments were decided by a lottery that uses a pseudorandom number generator, okay?

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: You list your choices for which house at Harvard you want to live in as an undergraduate, and then based on your lottery number, you’re going to end up in one of those houses. He and I were both unlucky and didn’t get our first choice, and we were in—not in the same year; he was a year ahead of me—but we both ended up in Mather House, which is nobody’s idea of the best place to live as an undergraduate at Harvard. But if that random number generator had put me in another house, I probably would never have met him. Because we were in different class years. I had no classes in common with him. He did not sing in the choir. We would never have met, except maybe at the Hillel, but neither one of us was a frequent attendee at Hillel. So, my whole life was decided, apparently, by a random number generator.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Can I ask just one final conceptual question? What is a pseudorandom number?

SELINGER: Okay. A truly random number—I mean we think of randomness like flipping coins, right? A pseudorandom number generator is an algorithm that starts with one, say, seven-digit integer as a seed, and then does a calculation that produces a number between zero and one. From that, another one, and another one, and another one. So you get a sequence of these numbers, which we can then—if you make a statistical analysis of how many of them are between zero and 0.1, between 0.1 and 0.2, and so on, you would get a flat distribution. And you could even grade it down like 0.05, or 0.01—flat distribution. But if you start with a different initial seed, you’ll get a different sequence. These pseudorandom numbers play a really key role in modeling stochastic processes. There’s one in every slot machine, every digital slot machine in Vegas. We just had actually the big APS American Physical Society big meeting of the year, March meeting, was in Las Vegas this year. So Monte Carlo simulation was on my—I did not gamble, but—but yeah, the whole field of statistics moved forward for two reasons. One, because of gambling, and one because of insurance. It’s all about the statistics and who’s going to live and how long.

My first opportunity to have fun with a computer was the summer before I went to Boston University to my first internship. I was taking a summer school class to get it out of the way to make room for another course I wanted to take in high school. Then I had a gap of an hour or two, and then I had a tutoring job. For that gap time, I was allowed to take the TRS-80 computer and just set it up somewhere in the building, wherever I could find free space, even on the floor in the hallway if necessary, and I could just play with it. So, I started out—I could draw on the screen. The pixels were probably as big as my little fingernail, but there were pixels. And so I thought, well, I’ll draw a parabola. But then I discovered that the zero-zero point wasn’t on the bottom left where I expected it; it was at the top left. When x got bigger, it went across the screen, but when y got bigger, it went down. I was like, okay, how do I then change my equation so that it will go the other way? Then I started drawing families of parabolas, and they intersect, and they make pretty pictures. And using the computer not just for work but for play became a thing. So, now my work is my play. I love my work! Even after I become emeritus and don’t have to work, I will keep doing physics, because I just love it! I’m not just drawing parabolas now, but I just find making models of how patterns form in nature immensely illuminating. There’s deep physics in it. And entertaining! And the excitement of discovery. Like when I discovered that Frank-Read sources happen in liquid crystals, from looking at a colleague’s experiment, that’s an exciting moment in my life.

I had an opportunity—there’s a wonderful—I don’t know if I would call it a textbook, but a scholarly book about dislocations in crystals. It was originally written by two quite well-known scientists, Hirth and Lothe. A colleague from Ohio State decided a new edition was needed, because there’s so many new discoveries, so he published a new edition. It’s Hirth, Lothe, and Peter Anderson is the new leading author of this updated scholarly book. I had a chance to talk to him, I don’t know, a year ago, and we talked about the Frank-Read source. He’s like, “This is so exciting. The next edition of the book, it has to go in.” It’s fundamental materials science. It just makes me so happy. It’s fundamental materials—if we could just get this paper published, I’ll be so happy. So, who knows? Maybe that will be the one thing that people remember more than the dancing polymer, from my career. It’s still called a Frank-Read source. And it’s even more exciting to me—so the guy, Frank, of the Frank-Read source—Read is another person. Thornton Read—apparently two scientists had the same idea at the same time, and instead of trying to compete, they were really civilized and decided to publish together, which is so sweet. Then he’s like one of the fundamental concepts in liquid crystal science, the Frank free energy, which describes the energy of a non-uniformly aligned liquid crystal, with terms like twist, splay, and bend. Did you hear those words?

CRAWFORD: Yep!

SELINGER: It’s the same guy! Twenty-five years after his death, we have brought his two fundamental contributions together! I love that, too. It’s part of the history of science.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, or like a collaboration across time. [laughs]

SELINGER: There is another play about Émilie du Châtelet called Legacy of Light. Have you seen that one?

CRAWFORD: No.

SELINGER: Which tells the story across time.

CRAWFORD: Oh! Interesting!

SELINGER: It’s got a magic realism aspect that characters from different eras are interacting with each other, across time. It was produced at one of the theaters in Cleveland. We have a tradition where whenever there’s a play that has a science theme, we would get together a bunch of people from Kent State, including students and faculty, and anybody else who wants to go, and then colleagues from Akron and Case and Cleveland State, whoever, and all go to the theater. The Actors’ Summit was a theatre that was in Hudson and eventually it moved to Akron—we know the—we’ve been going to Actors’ Summit as long—until they closed it. We started attending as soon as we moved to Ohio. They put on the show about Rosalind Franklin, which is—I think it’s called Photograph 51? I’m like, is it 52? Is it 57? I think it’s 51. We brought just a ton of graduate students. There’s a joke in the story where one of the characters who is a graduate student says, “Well, I attended the seminar. Well, at least, you know, I made the coffee for the seminar,” or something. And the students just started laughing their heads off, and the actors are like, “What?” Because our students make the coffee for the seminar, right? It’s like, nobody can understand it. So being a scientist does involve coming up through the ranks. I never had to make the coffee, but I did plenty of other things.

CRAWFORD: I want to thank you so much, Dr. Selinger, for sharing your story with us. I really appreciate you
taking the time.

SELINGER: The pleasure was mine. Thank you.

[End]

________________
[1] Liquid Crystal Institute
[2] Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute
[3] National Science Foundation
[4] Department of Energy
[5] Materials Research Science and Engineering Center
[6] Interdisciplinary Research Groups
[7] Science Research Building