Oral History Interview with Jonathan Selinger by Matthew Crawford

July 12, 2023
July 13, 2023
Location: Office of Dr. Jonathan Selinger, Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio.

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

DR. MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kent State University. Today is July 12th, 2023, and I am interviewing Dr. Jonathan Selinger. We are conducting this interview at Dr. Selinger’s office at the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute on the campus of Kent State University. Dr. Selinger, thanks for agreeing to speak with me.

DR. JONATHAN SELINGER: Thank you, Matt.

CRAWFORD: I want to start off with a couple of questions about how you see yourself professionally. First, could you tell us what your current title and institutional affiliations are?

SELINGER: Sure. I am Professor of Physics at Kent State University, and I have an endowed chair with the title of Ohio Eminent Scholar.

CRAWFORD: How do you identify yourself as a scientist, and what do you see as currently your main field of research?

SELINGER: I think of myself as a theoretical physicist, and I would say I mainly do research on liquid crystals and other related soft materials.

CRAWFORD: By soft materials, what does that generally refer to?

SELINGER: It means materials with some intermediate amount of order; so, less order than full crystalline solids and more than ordinary isotropic liquids. They're characterized by some intermediate order. That’s the kind of thing I’m going to describe.

CRAWFORD: Obviously we want to spend quite a bit of time talking about your work in physics and with liquid crystals and soft materials, but to give us a little context of who you are and your biography, I wanted to start by asking you what year you were born, where you grew up, and what your early childhood was like.

SELINGER: Okay! I was born in 1961 in Albany, New York. My family moved around several times while I was growing up. When I was a baby, my parents moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then in 1968 to Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where my father was the dean of Bard College. At that time, we had a rented house just on the Bard College campus, and my brother and I could just ride our bikes around campus. It was kind of a nice situation for little kids! I guess that was the time when I first became interested in science, I guess starting with the space program. The 1960s were like the golden age for the American space program and the time of the Moon landings. I was so excited about all that. I dreamed of becoming an astronaut, as I’m sure so many little boys did at the time. Yeah, I was excited about that.

My brother and I read a lot of science fiction at the time from these authors like Arthur Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov. We were excited about the vision of the future in those science fiction novels. Also, Isaac Asimov wrote a lot of non-fiction. He wrote many, many books of essays about physics, astronomy, math, chemistry, everything. That was my first introduction into real science, I would say, from his work. What else do I remember from those days? We launched model rockets. I was fascinated with making and launching these model rockets. That’s probably the closest I have ever come in my career to experimental physics.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: We stayed in Annandale-on-Hudson from ’68 to ’75, so for me that was like age 6 to 13. Then, in ’75, we moved to Hawai’i, where my father became the associate dean of the Law School at the University of Hawai’i. My parents sent my brother and me to this private school, Punahou School, in Honolulu. It’s P-U-N-A-H-O-U. I went there all through high school, so that was ninth through twelfth grades. I loved it there. That was a great experience for me. It was a traditional school that had been founded by missionaries, and so it was inspired by the tradition of New England prep schools, but it also was in the environment of  Hawai'i , and so had maybe more of a humane attitude than one would traditionally see in prep schools. The biggest thing I got from that school was the sense that you need both high intellectual standards and caring about other people. That you can’t choose one or the other; you need both. That’s what I really loved about Punahou. I had a nice set of classes. I worked hard in my classes in math and science and other subjects as well. I was on the school’s math team. That was my favorite extracurricular activity. We went around competing with other schools around O'ahu. What else can I tell you? Another person in that class was Barack Obama, who went on to great things on his own.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: I didn’t really know him that well during high school, because—well, because I was a nerd and he was a jock.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: And—just sort of differing groups of kids, right?

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Perhaps if I had known that he was going to become president, I would have been a better friend, but—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: —that doesn't sound too good for me.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: I met him again in 2006—

CRAWFORD: Oh, really!

SELINGER: —when he was a U.S. senator and he came through Ohio campaigning for Sherrod Brown. I introduced myself to him after a speech that he gave—that’s when we got that picture over there—and he claimed he remembered me. But he’s a politician; he has to say that.

CRAWFORD: Right. [laughs]

SELINGER: He didn’t say, “Oh, yeah, you were the nerd with the calculator on your belt all through high school.”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Anyway, that was high school. One other thing that I did during high school years was going to a great summer program. It was just called the Summer Science Program, which was held, at that time, in the Thacher School in Ojai, California. It was a program where groups of kids had the project to observe an asteroid over several weeks—

CRAWFORD: Wow!

SELINGER: —using a telescope, and then find its position relative to the background stars, and use that information to calculate its orbit. They had a lot of classwork about math and physics and astronomy during the daytime, and then these observations at night. This was a program that had been started, oh, probably about 1959. I assume that was a post-Sputnik thing, meant to prepare American kids for the Cold War. I went in 1978, so that was the summer between 11th and 12th grades. The program is still around. It has branched out to be not just astronomy but also biochemistry and molecular biology, and is now at several college campuses around the U.S. That’s, I think, a great program. It has prepared a whole bunch of PhD scientists. So if you know any kids interested in science, you should send them to that!

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: That was between 11th and 12th grades. Then, 12th grade, of course, I applied to colleges, and I, in the end, decided to go to Harvard. The same time that I went to college, my family left Hawai'i. My parents moved to Detroit, where my father became the dean of the Law School at the University of Detroit. I did not go back to Hawai'i that much, after that. So, too bad.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: They just about had to drag my younger brother onto the plane, to get him out there.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Yes, so then I started Harvard, in ’79, as an undergraduate.

CRAWFORD: I definitely want to talk about your undergraduate education, but just a couple of follow-up questions. You mentioned early on being interested in space, in the late sixties, and getting interested in science. Did you watch the Moon landing on television?

SELINGER: Yes. Yes, I did.

CRAWFORD: What was that like?

SELINGER: Well, I was tremendously excited about it, at the time. Watching on television then, you could hardly see anything. The television pictures were so bad at that time.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: But next year, we're going to do it again, in HDTV, I guess. That’s the plan.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Yeah, I watched it. I was excited about Apollo 11. Apollo 12 launched on my birthday. I was very excited about that. With Apollo 13, I followed the whole story, about how they tried to save the astronauts, how they succeeded in saving the astronauts. Yeah, so I followed all those space flights very closely at the time.

CRAWFORD: You've referenced this, and I realize we're talking about from age six to age 18, but during this period when you're through school and high school, as you mentioned, it’s the Cold War. Did you have an awareness of the Cold War at the time? How do you think maybe retrospectively the context of the Cold War shaped your interest in science in any way? Or was it too abstract?

SELINGER: No, I thought about it a lot. The main impact on my thinking in childhood was worry about whether I was going to be drafted. There was a draft during the Vietnam War. I was too young for it. Then it stopped I guess about ’73, ’74. I can’t remember exactly, but about then. I was probably 12 or 13 at that time. So that didn’t impact me, but I worried about it when I was a kid.

CRAWFORD: Because there’s the famous arms race and the space race. Were those things that you were thinking about as well, at all? Or space was just exciting in and of itself?

SELINGER: Yeah. Yeah. I thought about the space race. I wanted to keep track of how we were ahead of the Soviet Union. For the arms race, well, I was aware of the dangers of nuclear war, and the science fiction that I read certainly included some number of post-apocalyptic novels about what would happen after a nuclear war, and so, I thought about that.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned this early interest in space, and then you were just talking about this summer program at the Thacher School, that sounds like it was focused on astronomy, because you were studying asteroids and so forth. Was space and astronomy the running theme up through high school? In other words, when you went to college, were you thinking maybe a career in astronomy or studying astronomy?

SELINGER: That was probably my single biggest interest within science. I hadn’t thought that much about specializing, but I would say yes, astronomy was the biggest focus of my interest up until then.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like your family was supportive of your scientific interests, obviously if they're sending you to this summer program and so forth.

SELINGER: Yeah, absolutely.

CRAWFORD: Did you have any family members that worked in science? It sounds like your father was an academic.

SELINGER: He was an academic. He was a law school professor, though he took a seven-year break from law school to be the dean of the college at Bard, which is a liberal arts college in New York. My mother was an elementary school teacher. Yeah, they were very supportive at the time. But I think they would have been supportive of my interests in any area. My brother was especially interested in the arts, and now he has become an English professor, and they were supportive of his interests all through that time. When we were at Bard College, my father introduced me to some of the science faculty who tried to give me little introductions to some things. I remember one professor showing me how to use a slide rule. When I received a slide rule as a gift, at age 10 or so, he showed me how to use it. That has not been an extremely useful skill in my career but—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: —whatever! I went to a different summer program at an earlier age, when we were living in New York. It was I guess between seventh and eighth grades, so this would have been 1974, I guess. This was at the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. That was a place where I studied computers. At that point, it was still a little bit unusual to study computers, not like now. I learned BASIC [the computer language] programming at that stage, and I loved it. After I came back home, I wanted to have some way to do more computer programming, and home computers were not available at that time. My father arranged for me to be able to use the one computer terminal at Bard College—

CRAWFORD: Wow! [laughs]

SELINGER: —which was connected to some research computer for upstate New York. I don’t know if it was run by IBM, or—actually, I have no idea who actually ran the computer.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: So I learned programming in APL, which was a funny language that—it had weird symbols like hieroglyphics—

CRAWFORD: Really! [laughs]

SELINGER: —instead of English words. That’s what I remember about it. That’s all I remember about it.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: But yeah, that was an opportunity to do a little bit of computer work in eighth grade. Then later in Hawai'i, Punahou had a small computer and I did BASIC programming on that.

CRAWFORD: Great. That further sounds like your parents and your family was really encouraging of your interest in science and everything.

SELINGER: Oh, yeah, very much so.

CRAWFORD: You start at Harvard in 1979.

SELINGER: Mmhmm.

CRAWFORD: I don’t know if this question goes without saying, but why did you decide to go to Harvard as opposed to somewhere else? Or were there other places?

SELINGER: I really wanted a combination of science and other subjects. I didn’t want a place like MIT or Caltech that specialized in science. And so, when I went to Harvard, I took a lot of courses. I took way more than the required number of courses. That included physics and other subjects. I did a lot of philosophy and history and other non-scientific subjects, more than I was required to.

CRAWFORD: Why did you do that, or why was it important for you to go to a university that was more than just science or engineering focused?

SELINGER: One thing that made a big impression on me at that stage of life was this TV show called The Ascent of Man. Do you remember that one? It was Jacob Bronowski, giving his series about the history of science. But more than the history of science; the history of all intellectual thought, tied in with science. I saw it and thought, “I want to be like that. I want to be able to talk about how my view is of the whole history of human thought.” I had the idea that a general college education would help me along that path.

CRAWFORD: Do you think it did?

SELINGER: It helped.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: But it’s a tall order, right? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah, right!

SELINGER: It’s a challenging thing to be able to do something like that.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: I’ve done some tiny little bit, but I—don’t know how far I’ve really gotten.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Aside from this blueprint from, say, The Ascent of Man, of this kind of general intellectualism, did you have other goals for your undergraduate career, going into it?

SELINGER: Well, I wanted to do that general intellectualism, as you just said. I wanted to be prepared for graduate school. I wanted to begin doing scientific research. So, to do well in my classes and to start doing some preliminary research, to be ready for graduate school. And I did, and so that worked out. I guess I was not prepared for how competitive things would be. That it was intense, and especially in the freshman year, when there were a whole bunch of excellent students from all around the country, and it was natural to try to see where you stand, with respect to all of the others. It’s not that people were actually doing anything bad to each other. Absolutely not. But it’s just a matter of ego, of seeing how you feel in comparison with the others. And, you know, I was not at the top. There were a whole bunch that were excellent students in science and math. So that’s one thing that perhaps I wasn’t prepared for. Coming from Hawai'i had been a somewhat more isolated sort of environment.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: So, that was one surprise for me freshman year. I guess another surprise was about learning the difference between pure math, and math applied to physics. I thought at that time that it would be good for me to do rigorous math, as rigorous as possible. But I didn’t really know anything about what rigorous math would be like.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: So I enrolled in the toughest possible math class in freshman year—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: —and it was tougher than I expected. And it was tough in ways that were less related to physics than were most useful for me. And so, after that year, I kind of backed away from rigorous mathematics. I’d say throughout my career, I have kind of a mathematical way of thinking in comparison with the general population, but not in comparison with mathematicians. In comparison with mathematicians, I have more of a concrete, practical way of thinking, as is the case for many physicists.

CRAWFORD: This distinction that you're talking about between pure mathematics and mathematics applied to physics, is that one essentially rooted in abstraction versus application, or—?

SELINGER: Yes, I think so. It’s akin to the distinction between physics and engineering. That here at Kent State, I teach engineering students. I teach basic physics to engineering students. I teach the fundamentals of physics. And I’m sure some of them wonder, “Why do we have to learn this stuff? Why can’t we just learn the practical stuff that we need for engineering?” So, maybe pure math is to physics as physics is to engineering, in that sense.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Maybe another way to ask this question is, could you give an example of a problem or a question that’s more of a pure mathematics type of question versus something that is more mathematics or physics?

SELINGER: One thing that I remember from the beginning of freshman year was how the math class would build up different sets of numbers. It started with integers, and then it went from integers to rational numbers. So, it started by saying, “Rational numbers are a pair of integers and then you make equivalence classes between different pairs.” So, each equivalence class is a rational number. The cynical way of viewing this is that it’s saying that one half is equal to two fourths. If I wanted to be cynical about it, I would say we spent a week proving that one half is equal to two fourths. From the physics point of view, who cares? That’s just an obvious thing, that we want to move on from. So there was a lot of study of how to give basic proofs of those things, which were just not really relevant to anything that I wanted to do in physics. On the other hand, in fairness, maybe I just didn’t understand things so well at the time, and if I were to go back to those subjects now, when I have more of a perspective, maybe there’s more that I would appreciate. I have been interested, at various points in my career, in mathematical concepts like non-Euclidian geometry, that thinking about more exotic mathematical concepts really appeals to me, and I try to use them in physics, when I can. I don’t generally do rigorous proofs about them, but I appreciate using them. Perhaps it just went a little too quickly for me, at the beginning of college.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] I’m curious about what you were saying about the competitiveness. One basic question would be, was that across the University and all the students? Was it especially acute among physics students? Or was it just a general sort of establishing the pecking order kind of [laughs] thing?

SELINGER: I don’t know. I think it was different in different communities of students, and I was aware of it among physics students. I think there were other groups, say, of pre-medical students, where they were actually concerned about grades, because grades were really important for admission into medical school. So there, it was more explicitly a competition for grades. Whereas for physics students, it was just for pride, rather than grades.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] You're studying physics at Harvard in the early 1980s. What was that like? What stands out to you from being a physics major at that time, or at that institution, aside from the things that you've mentioned?

SELINGER: I got involved with research as an undergraduate. As we discussed, my first interest at that time was in astronomy, and so I first got involved with research in astronomy in the summer after freshman year. Harvard’s Astronomy Department is combined with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and so it’s a very big facility that they call the Center for Astrophysics. In the fall semester of freshman year, so right from when I first arrived, I took a freshman seminar related to probability and statistics in astronomy. That was an opportunity to meet one Astronomy professor. Later on in the year, I asked him about whether there could be any summer jobs in research, especially because I wanted to stay on campus in the summer since my parents had moved away from home, and there was really nothing for me to go back to. That professor, I knew. That was Charles Whitney. He directed me to this professor, Robert Noyes, N-O-Y-E-S, who was doing solar and stellar physics.

Noyes hired me for that summer, between freshman and sophomore years. That was for a project analyzing data that was meant to look for sunspots on other stars. The notion is that sunspots emit in specific spectral lines, and so people had been measuring the intensity of those spectral lines in a whole collection of stars, and had been measuring that intensity from one day to the next to the next, and they could see cycles for how the intensity would go up and down with a period of about a month. That’s similar to what you would see from the Sun if you look at the intensity coming from sunspots, so that was an indication of the rotation rate for stars other than the Sun. Other people associated with that project had also been measuring the same spectral lines over many years, not just over months. Over years, there would also be longer-term cycles which correspond to the 11-year cycle of the Sun, how the number of sunspots go up and down, and other aspects of solar activity go up and down. Yes, so I worked in that project for the summer after freshman year, and also continuing part time during sophomore and junior years. One of the main people who supervised me was a postdoc named Sallie Baliunas, who has since gone on to be noted as a climate change skeptic. I’ve always wondered about that aspect of her career but I have never been in contact with her since then. That was one research project that I was involved with, so it tied in with astronomy. I never actually looked through a telescope on that, but I was analyzing data from telescopes, just using the computers at the Center for Astrophysics.

The second research project that I got involved with was related to nuclear physics. In the spring of sophomore year, I wanted to do some other kind of research for the summer, and so I talked with my undergraduate advisor, I talked with lots of people, and I eventually got connected with this research project run by Richard Wilson, which involved nuclear physics. It involved looking for signs of the weak nuclear interaction in interactions between neutrons, which are normally dominated by the strong interaction. But it would look for a weak parity violation as a signature of the weak interaction. This was research that was conducted at the Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble, France. I mainly got excited about it because of the travel opportunity, that he sent me over to France for the summer to work on that, which was my first trip to Europe. And, oh, I was so excited about traveling around. I got this Eurail pass, which was what students had in those days. You just pay once, and then you can take the trains as much as you want. Every weekend, I would go off to someplace else around France, Italy, Switzerland. So, yes, I was really keen on that sort of thing. Scientifically, I learned some things. I don’t have really clear memories of a lot of the science, but I know I did some simulations for what we would expect in a model for that experiment. I did a few more practical lab things but I don’t remember them terribly well. That was in the summer between sophomore and junior years, then again in the summer between junior and senior years of college, so I did that for two summers. It was a good experience scientifically and a great experience in terms of travel, those two summers.

Then one other important aspect of undergraduate life was that I met my wife then. This was Robin Blumberg, now Selinger. She was a physics student one year after me, and we met the beginning of my junior year, her sophomore year. We were in the same dorm at that time, the same Harvard house, and we met in the apartment of the physics tutor in the house. He was throwing some party for the beginning of the semester. We met in whatever that was—September of ’81, I guess—and started going out in maybe January of ’82. She was at the time doing undergraduate research with Professor Gene Stanley at Boston University in the area of statistical mechanics. He connected us with a research opportunity in Germany in the summer after my senior year, after her junior year, so we went over to Aachen, West Germany. We worked in two different labs at that time. I was working in the Physics Department and she was in the Chemistry Department. Yeah, that was a good summer. We lived in the home of her advisor. I worked on a problem related to diffusion which led to my first publication. That was in the summer of ’83.

I’m getting things out of order in this story, because before that, I needed to apply to graduate school, during senior year, which was a stressful thing because of my relationship with Robin at the time. It was a complicated story that I don’t really want to talk about, but in the end, I did get into graduate school, at Harvard, and so I did stay on there. Then a year later, she also got into graduate school at Harvard, and so we stayed there. Then we got married in the summer of ’85, so it was after my second year of graduate school, after her first year.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like you had a number of fairly significant research opportunities as an undergraduate.

SELINGER: Yes, I did.

CRAWFORD: Would you say that was typical for your peers at Harvard to be doing research at that level? Were you encouraged by the program to do that much research, or was that really your own individual drive?

SELINGER: I don’t remember that much guidance from the program. I interacted through the program directly through classes, and I had an undergraduate advisor, Bill Press, who has since moved to Los Alamos, I think. He gave me good advice when I asked for it, but there wasn’t a lot of overall guidance from the program about, “Now you should get involved with research.” They pretty much left it for students to take their own initiative to contact people. It’s not like the way that Kent State now advertises so many places for undergraduates to get involved with research. It was left more for the individual students to figure out. But it was certainly available for any students who wanted to do it, and it wasn’t that hard to arrange, so a lot of the other students that I knew did things like that. One other bit of guidance that I didn’t get from the program—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: —was that no one ever gave me a cue about, “Now it’s time to choose what kind of physics you're interested in.”

CRAWFORD: Oh! Okay!

SELINGER: There was a kind of general message of, “You should keep your options open and you should learn about lots of different subjects of physics.” The three undergraduate projects that I told you about were in three completely different areas of physics. Then when I started applying for graduate school, people asked me, “What kind of physics do you want to do?” Which is a—normal question to ask somebody at that stage.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, sure. [laughs]

SELINGER: And that hadn’t occurred to me! And I had this thought of, “Oh! Am I supposed to know now what kind of physics do I want to do?”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: So, I went into graduate school without a clear idea about that, which was probably something that I should have had an idea about, at that stage in my life. So, in the first year of graduate school, I took courses in different areas, and I got interested in statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. It’s hard to remember exactly how that interest developed. I guess I liked my classes in that subject, in the first year of graduate school, and I started doing a reading course with Professor Bert Halperin about the renormalization group, which was a concept of physics that was meant as a model for phase transitions. It’s a way of looking at systems on larger and larger length scales and seeing what features persist as you go to larger and larger length scales. That is a way of tracking what’s going to be the long-range order inside of a material. I was interested in that as a mathematical concept.

Then for the summer between first and second years, I started working with Professor David Nelson on a project about the structure of glasses, especially metallic glasses, looking at how metal atoms could form a glassy state which is not a crystal, like typical metals. His idea there was that there was a favorable local packing of the atoms which would be one atom surrounded by 12 neighbors to make an icosahedron. That’s one of the Platonic solids. That is the optimal local packing but it cannot extend to fill up space. But then he noticed that it could extend to fill up space if space were curved. So, he made a theory for an ideal glass structure that would fit in a non-Euclidian geometry and then was frustrated in ordinary Euclidian space. He had been doing research on that for a couple of years, I guess, when I started working for him. I was very excited about the non-Euclidian geometry aspect, just about the cool mathematics associated with that project. He had me work on one aspect of that project, so I had one publication on that. It was just on one specialized aspect of that project. He had done a whole bunch of things related to that area.

That was one thing that got me excited, so I asked David Nelson about continuing to do a PhD with him. He advised me through the oral candidacy exam in the fall of second year—I think that’s when it was—where I had to do a literature review related to a particular topic. He suggested the topic of the thermodynamics of glasses, especially the idea of two-level systems that would control the specific heat of glasses at low temperatures. So, I presented that as an oral exam, and answered questions about that subject. It was at some point in the second year of graduate school. Then, after that, I became his student. He guided me towards liquid crystal research topics at that point, so he wanted me to shift from this work on glasses that he was mostly doing with another student, a more advanced student. He had ideas about liquid crystal research. So, I started working in that area. That’s what I worked on for most of my PhD, so that became most of the chapters in my dissertation.

CRAWFORD: You said that you were excited about non-Euclidian geometry, and this was one of the things that drew you into this research that Dr. Nelson was doing.

SELINGER: Right.

CRAWFORD: What was it that excited you about non-Euclidian geometry?

SELINGER: It was just the unusual mathematics. It was visualizing mathematical concepts that are so different from what we encounter in everyday life. I told you a few minutes ago about how I did not do rigorous math, but I liked the less rigorous version, of thinking about unusual concepts. I think I still do! So, I enjoyed visualizing what would be a structure on a three-dimensional sphere embedded in four dimensions, and what would be the packing of neighboring atoms inside a sphere, like that. Then I could actually make up a coordinate system and say which sites are neighbors with some other sites in four dimensions. That was just a level of abstraction which I found very stimulating.

CRAWFORD: Sure, sure. The other question would be, the work that Dr. Nelson was doing and then what you end up doing with liquid crystals, that sounds to me, as kind of a non-specialist—and forgive me if this is a mischaracterization—

SELINGER: No, not at all.

CRAWFORD: —sort of dealing with the geometry of these molecules and how they're interacting and so forth—

SELINGER: Yes, yes.

CRAWFORD: —what’s the larger interest or larger question that kind of drives that kind of work?

SELINGER: I guess it’s the connection between the microscopic structure of the pieces and the macroscopic properties of the material. For the case of packing spherical molecules, it would be thinking about, what is the favorable packing, and is it possible to extend the most favorable packing over a long range? And if not, what does the material do? Then, liquid crystals have similar considerations but with more complicated molecular shapes. Sometimes you have rodlike molecules and then the issue is, do they align with each other, or not align? And, depending on whether they align or not align, what are the phase transitions in the material? What kinds of structures can you observe? What are the optical properties? What are the electrical or magnetic properties? I guess that’s the main motivation for research in this area.

CRAWFORD: Let me ask one more question that stood out to me and my research assistants when we were looking at your publications and so forth. You mentioned this idea of, or connected to Dr. Nelson’s theory, about certain geometric shapes, non-Euclidian shapes that are frustrated in ordinary Euclidian space. Hopefully I’ve gotten that right!

SELINGER: Uh-huh!

CRAWFORD: We were interested in this idea that you—even in some of your most recent publications, you talk about this idea of geometric frustration.

SELINGER: Yes.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what that means to you, or in your field.

SELINGER: That’s an idea that I’ve come back to over many years, including in some of my most recent work. Let me put it this way. In a crystal, you have a regular packing of molecules, so you have the idea that all the pieces just fit together and make some structure. But you could say, “What if they didn’t fit together? What if there were some natural packing but it just left gaps, or overlapped in some way?” An example of that would be, what if you want to tile your floor with pentagons? If you have a bunch of regular pentagons, and you try to fit them together, you could have three of them around some central point, but there would be a little gap left over. If you try to cover the whole floor that way, there would be lots of gaps, all over the place. But, if your floor were curved, just the right amount, then it would work; you could cover a sphere with pentagons, and they would fit with absolutely no gaps. They would fit just perfectly, if the radius of the sphere is correct relative to the size of the pentagons. That sounds like a weird example, but I think what a lot of research has been finding is that that’s actually kind of a common situation. That there are a lot of situations with materials where there is some local structure that just doesn't fit, like trying to pack pentagons. Because it doesn't fit, the molecules have to do some kind of compromise, so they have to do something which is not the local optimum. That compromise might be uniform everywhere in the material, or it might be that there will be some regions of approximately the right local structure which get separated by defects. Let me put it this way. Nelson was working in some early aspects of that back in the 1980s, and it has become an even bigger subject of research since then. I was planning to talk about that later, in the context of more recent work, but—

CRAWFORD: We can go back to that. I thought since the concept had come up, it would seem like a good time to ask that question.

SELINGER: Yeah, yeah, that was great.

CRAWFORD: I want to step back from talking about the content of your research and to talk a little bit about, what did it look like to do this kind of science as a graduate student? Were you working at a computer? Were you working in a lab? Were you collaborating with other people? What was the lived experience of doing that kind of science?

SELINGER: At that time, there was a special office area for the graduate students in theoretical condensed matter physics at Harvard. It was on the top floor of the Gordon McKay Lab, which is not the main physics building at Harvard but a few yards away from the main physics building. There were about five faculty and 15 students doing research in that area. The students had a cluster of about eight offices on the top floor of that Lab. We were a pretty cohesive group of students. We discussed the research a lot. We were mostly in that office area all day. Some were there all night. I wasn’t, because I was married at the time.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: In that area, we had a couple of computers, but not one for each individual student. Computers were not that common, yet. And so we took turns working on the computers, either for calculations or for word processing. But most of the time, we were sitting at our desks doing calculations with pencil and paper, or meeting with each other and talking, just at a blackboard somewhere. We had our own student seminar series. We called it the Underground Seminars, because faculty were not allowed.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: We gave seminars for each other, among the students. And also the postdocs were invited, for that. Not the faculty. Sometimes, we brought in speakers who were students or postdocs at other universities. MIT was nearby, and Boston University. We took turns being in charge, organizing those seminars, and the faculty just paid for the refreshments.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: I learned a lot from that! That was actually a nice setup. I’m still in contact with some of those students. Many of them have gone on to be faculty at other U.S. universities now. That was a good experience. I would say I generally met with David Nelson about once a week. He would give me suggestions for what to work on, and then I would go off for a week or so and try to do those things, either with pencil and paper calculations or on the computer, and then I would come back and show him the results and get his advice. Maybe we met more frequently when we were actually preparing a paper or writing a talk, but normally I’d say about once a week. For preparing talks at that time, we didn’t have PowerPoint. We didn’t have laptops. What a physics talk meant at that point was using an overhead projector. You know what an overhead projector means?

CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah. [laughs]

SELINGER: That projects what is on a transparency, so that’s a piece of plastic, like eight and a half by eleven inches. We mostly prepared those things by writing with a pen, on the plastic. Occasionally if we needed to show a figure that was actually data, there were ways to photocopy something that was printed on paper onto a transparency. So, we did that sometimes—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: —but most figures were just cartoons drawn with colored pens on plastic. There were two kinds of those pens, one kind that was called permanent, and one kind that was water soluble. Permanent really meant alcohol soluble. So one of the tricks that I had to know about was that if you made a mistake and wanted to change something, I could get rubbing alcohol to erase what was written and then write over it. Then, David Nelson taught me the trick of when presenting a talk, that you should have your transparency written out in permanent pen, and then you should get excited about things and write on the transparency in water-soluble pen, to say, “Oh, I’m so excited! I have to write this extra equation to explain something to you!” so the audience could see it being written in real time. Then you can go back after the talk and erase the part that’s in water-soluble pen and then do the same trick the next time you present the same talk.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: This is very similar to what people do with PowerPoint now, where they have text that appears as you move in time through a single slide. That sort of thing is a lost art now. No one knows how to do that anymore.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: But that was the kind of practical skill that I had to learn in graduate school. In general I would say I learned a lot about giving scientific presentations from David Nelson. He was, he still is, an excellent speaker, and really taught me a lot about giving oral presentations that still influences me even in the days of PowerPoint. He also really cared about written presentations as well, as I still do now.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like you did quite a bit of work with your advisor around papers for publication and presentations and so forth. Since you're just mentioning giving oral presentations, what would you say are the key elements of giving a successful oral presentation of scientific research?

SELINGER: I think the most important thing is to have a model of the audience, of what the audience already knows, and what the audience is interested in, and to try to present things at that level. I think that for beginners in theoretical physics, there’s a tendency to get really excited about the equations and to assume that you have to present derivations in detail, and that is usually not the right thing to do. Usually the audience has only a limited interest in that, and that it's okay to skip steps and to get to the main point and emphasize what’s the main point that the audience ought to remember. That’s what I try to do and what I try to present to my students. David Nelson coached me a lot with presentations at that point in my career, and I still do with my students now.

CRAWFORD: Again, this might sound like somewhat of a basic question, but there are many different things that one does as a scientist—as an academic scientist, but really any kind of scientist—there’s the actual research, there’s presentation, there’s publication. How important would you say are presentations and publications to science or to you and your career as a scientist?

SELINGER: Oh, very important, I would say. I think that’s an essential part of what we do, and it’s something that I’ve tried to be good at, both for teaching formal classes and also for whatever I’m presenting at conferences, or in any kind of scientific setting.

CRAWFORD: You've already alluded to the ways in which giving presentations has changed, obviously with the introduction of PowerPoint. What about publication? From your time as a graduate student to, say, today in 2023, has the process or the experience of publication changed significantly, or it is more or less the same?

SELINGER: Writing an article, it’s the same scientific challenge. It’s the same challenge of writing an explanation of why you're interested in a subject and then explaining what are the steps. That’s the basic thing which is still the same. For the word processing technology, early on, even in the eighties, we were using this software called LaTeX—L-a-T-e-X—which is a scientific word processing system. Word processing maybe isn’t the right word; typesetting, let’s call it. It’s meant for typesetting equations, and text that has a lot equations, and it comes out looking a lot better than Microsoft Word. We were using it already in the eighties, and I still use it now. I sometimes use Microsoft Word for papers when my collaborators really want that, but normally it would be LaTeX. Actually in the eighties, it was just TeX—T-e-X. Then LaTeX was introduced a little bit more afterwards but it’s a similar idea. Anyway, so those basic things are the same.

One basic thing that has changed is that in graduate school I was mostly writing the rough drafts with pen and paper and then entering it into a computer later, when I had access to a computer. Now, I do everything on the computer, right from the beginning. Another change has to do with preprints. When I started, the concept of a preprint was something that you mailed, in an envelope. The notion at that stage is that when we finished a paper, we would submit it to a journal, so that meant mailing it to a journal in an envelope. At the same time, we would mail copies to other physicists that we thought would be interested in it. In parallel with the journal review process, we would also be sending it to professional colleagues around the country, around the world, and they would find out about it sooner, and they would also have the opportunity to make suggestions if they had any suggestions. Then there were different stages in the evolution of what came after that. One stage of evolution was that once email became common, we would email preprints instead of mailing them, to other physicists that we thought would be interested. That was around the end of my time as a graduate student. I sent just a few emails during graduate school. But then, later, there got to be a systematic archive of preprints which was this website called xxx.lanl.gov. Do you know about that part of history?

CRAWFORD: No!

SELINGER: I’ll give credit to two people. One of them was actually an undergraduate with me. Her name is Joanne Cohn, C-O-H-N. When she was a graduate student or a postdoc—I’m not sure which—she had the idea of becoming a clearinghouse for the distribution of preprints, so that people could send her preprints and then she would send them out to anyone who was interested. So it wasn’t just a matter of being on the mailing list of any individual author, but that she could make a systematic clearinghouse for preprints, in her field of particle physics. Then, after that, the next stage of evolution was done by Paul Ginsparg—how do you spell that? G-I-N-S-P-A-R-G, or something like that—who figured out how to make computer scripts that would do the job that Joanne had been doing.

CRAWFORD: Oh!

SELINGER: At that stage in the late eighties, early nineties, everybody had been thinking, “In the near future, the internet is going to revolutionize scientific communication.” Ginsparg figured out, “Oh, I can do that now, with the computer on my desk.” So, he wrote software so that people could send their preprints in LaTeX format to something running on the background on his desktop computer, and it would collect them and once a day send out mailings to everybody who subscribed around the world.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: It was a system that was entirely driven by automatic emails at the beginning. It later evolved into a website, which is called arXiv.org—a-r-X-i-v—dot org, which is now a central place for preprints not just in physics but in other subjects as well. It was a part of distributing information about COVID during the pandemic.

CRAWFORD: Oh, interesting! Wow.

SELINGER: Yeah, so that has been an aspect that has evolved over the years. That’s an aspect of preprint communication, so that is entirely unrefereed communication, which has its roots in particle physics and has gradually spread to other areas of physics, and then other areas of science. I think the basic idea there was that refereeing is not—well, I was going to say refereeing is not essential; that’s too negative—but that we're willing to distribute articles without a formal refereeing process. That’s maybe different in basic physics research than it is in other areas of science, because it’s a smaller community, so there is less at stake in terms of patents than there would be in other areas of science, and there is less at stake in terms of patient care. It’s not as if you're going to kill a patient by doing something that is written in an unrefereed article. I think that’s one reason why physicists have been more open to adopting this kind of quick communication than scientists in other areas.

CRAWFORD: I totally understand what you're saying. You talked a little bit about the idea with sending out preprints, when you talked about when you used to actually put them in an envelope, was to send them to people that you knew, or that were working on, I presume, similar topics or adjacent topics, that might be able to give you feedback. That makes sense. What’s this thing about quickness? Why can’t you wait for it to go through the referee process? [laughs]

SELINGER: Gee, I never thought about that question! [laughs] I guess we're just excited! And we have done something, and we're really proud of it, and we want to share it with other people who might be able to build on it, in some ways. When it’s within a small community, we're not so much worried about priority, about being scooped. Or to put it another way, sending out preprints is another way of establishing priority, right? That once you've sent things out, then a whole bunch of people know that you have sent things out, and that is a way of marking your priority, right? Now it’s in a formal way on the arXiv website that it’s documented in an unchangeable website with a certain date. But back in the eighties, it was more informal, that the expert people that you sent things to know that you sent it to them on some date.

CRAWFORD: That makes sense, and I can see how this kind of arXiv website functions both to facilitate communication but also to kind of establish your connection to a topic or a particular—I don’t know that you can answer this, because I don’t know your experience perhaps working with journals, but how do journals [laughs] feel about this?

SELINGER: In the beginning, I think there was conflict between the American Physical Society journals and arXiv. I don’t know the details, because I was pretty young at that stage. But there’s a nice accommodation between the APS journals and arXiv or other preprint servers that has been at least for 20 years. The accommodation is that the journals do work of checking the science through the referee process and then sort of certifying it. That a journal publication is what goes on somebody’s CV and is marked as a credential. That’s the final career benefit of a publication. So I would say that for many years now, there has been a good coexistence between physics journals and preprint websites. It has come later for more general science journals. It’s a more sensitive subject for other areas of science that have more issues of patents or patient care, and so journals that cover those kinds of science as well as fundamental physics need to think about those issues. For a long time, I think journals like Science or Nature had restrictions on what could be put up on websites like that. I think now, there’s more of an accommodation, even with those journals, and that if you read the terms of service for those journals and see how they've evolved over the years, there’s more freedom to put articles up on preprint websites, although I couldn't tell you the details.

CRAWFORD: I think you've already answered this question with your observation about how publishing in a journal gives a kind of credential to a publication that doesn't exist with a preprint, but are there other motivations for journal publication beyond that, or is that the main one?

SELINGER: I would say that’s the main one, at this stage. One other thing that has changed over my career is the set of journals that we submit to. I think that now, people care more about publishing in high-impact journals. When I was a graduate student, as far as I can recall, the prestigious place to publish was Physical Review Letters, and that was our dream, was to get publications into Physical Review Letters. Then for articles that did not get there, or for articles that were just longer articles that couldn't fit into the four pages for Physical Review Letters, we had the other Physical Review journals. We also had a few physics journals that were published in other countries. As far as I can recall from the eighties, that was the universe of scientific journals that I lived in. It was very rare for physicists to try to publish in Science or Nature or other general interest journals. I think as people have gotten more competitive over the years since then, there is more attention to the impact factor of journals. That’s not even a concept that I knew about back in the eighties. Now, people are aware of impact factors and they see that journals that publish other kinds of science as well as physics have higher impact factors, and want to publish there, and so try to put articles in other places as much as possible. That has been a change in this sort of credentialing function of journals over all these years.

CRAWFORD: I want to ask one more quick question about this history that you're telling, and then maybe just a couple more questions. I know we're getting close to our time here. It’s a little bit past 11:30.

SELINGER: That’s fine. No problem.

CRAWFORD: Is there an expectation to do preprints? In other words, say if you just published a paper in one of the appropriate journals without submitting it as a preprint, would the members of your professional community look askance at that?

SELINGER: You mean now, or in the eighties?

CRAWFORD: Either one.

SELINGER: It’s common to send preprints. I don’t know about an expectation to do that. I think there are some people who don’t do that, and sometimes it’s because they are trying to publish in these high impact journals, and they think the high impact journals don’t want it. I think that impression may be a little bit out of date, but I’m not exactly sure about that. So, I would say for people in my field of theoretical physics of liquid crystals, it’s not a bad thing if they skip preprint publication. It’s possible that it would be considered a bad thing in particle physics or nuclear physics. They might have different community standards. I’m not exactly sure.

CRAWFORD: I guess in part it’s a question about expectations of openness or transparency and things like that.

SELINGER: Yes, absolutely. At a later stage in my career, when I was at the Naval Research Lab, which [laughs] we haven't gotten to, I’d say my supervisors there came from more of a chemistry background, more of a background concerned with intellectual property, and they were a little bit more reluctant to do preprints. So, it varies with community, and we all work in different overlapping communities with different standards that way.

CRAWFORD: I think in our next session we'll move on to start talking about your career, your work at UCLA and at the Naval Research Laboratory. But I just want to ask, in 1989 you're finishing up your PhD in Harvard; what are you thinking is the next step? Or as you're going through grad school, what were you thinking about where you might want to end up post PhD? Did you have any particular plans or aspirations?

SELINGER: I wanted to continue on doing basic physics research, basic theoretical physics research, which would probably mean a job as a professor at a university. Also, at that time, there were a few companies that did a lot of basic research, and I also dreamed about opportunities at a company like that. At that time, the most famous was Bell Labs in New Jersey, which was a tremendous center for basic condensed matter physics research. It was really the elite postdoc job for any student in condensed matter physics, theoretical or experimental. So, I knew some of my fellow students who got postdocs there. I tried and didn’t succeed, but I got to visit and give talks there. That was a great experience. That was a great part of American science, at that time, which is gone, sadly. Another industrial lab in my field was the Exxon Research and Engineering, also in New Jersey. That is also a place that I visited. That’s also a place where I interviewed. I knew a lot of scientists working there. They did great research in fundamental physics, both theoretical and experimental. I did get offers there, although it didn’t work out from the two-career point of view. So, those were industrial opportunities that I would have been really excited about.

But other than that, I was thinking that I would want to get a job as a physics professor, and I knew that becoming a postdoc was a necessary stage on the way to that. I knew that I’d need to apply for postdocs at the end of graduate school. Robin and I together, we understood that the dual career search would be a challenge for us. We did finish graduate school at the same time, in 1989. It took six years for me and five years for her. We finished that, and through the last year of graduate school, we worked really hard at the job search. It was really symmetrical between the two of us at that stage. I would not say that either of us took the lead at that stage, but rather we each applied to a very long list of jobs around the country, and we then did a lot of interviews around the country, and we each had some set of offers, and the one city where we both had offers was Los Angeles. So, at that stage, I had an offer for a postdoc at the UCLA Physics Department, and she had two offers in L.A., actually. One was at the UCLA Chemistry Department for a postdoc, and the other was at the RAND Corporation. That was a sort of think tank in Santa Monica, where the job would be more technology evaluation rather than basic physics research. She opted for the one at the UCLA Chemistry Department. So, we both moved to UCLA to become postdocs in ’89. That was a successful dual career search. It was stressful, of course. It was very stressful for us, at that stage of our lives. And for a long time, we were not sure whether it was going to work, but in the end it did, so we were very fortunate that way. These were nice situations for both of us at UCLA.

CRAWFORD: Great. I look forward to following up with that at our continued session tomorrow. Thank you so much.

SELINGER: Great. Yeah, this is a natural breaking point. Fine, let’s stop here. I’m glad you're interested in all this stuff, and so we'll continue on that.

[End Part 1]

[Start Part 2]

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 13th, 2023, and I am interviewing Dr. Jonathan Selinger. We are conducting this interview at Dr. Selinger’s office at the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute on the campus of Kent State University. Dr. Selinger, thanks for speaking with me again!

SELINGER: Thank you, Matt!

CRAWFORD: In our discussion yesterday, we had just finished discussing your time in graduate school.

SELINGER: Right.

CRAWFORD: We're going to move on to talk about your career since then. I know you finished your PhD in physics at Harvard in 1989. And, as you mentioned at the end of our session last time, you and your wife ended up moving to L.A. because you were able to solve the two-body problem, and [laughs]—

SELINGER: Right.

CRAWFORD: —and both get positions in the same city. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your time at UCLA. I think you said it was a postdoc position.

SELINGER: That’s right. Yeah, Robin and I moved to UCLA in the summer of ’89, so I became a postdoc in Physics and she was in Chemistry. She is a physicist, but there’s overlap between those fields. For me in the UCLA Physics Department, my main supervisor was a Dutch physicist named Robijn Bruinsma, which is R-O-B-I-J-N, B-R-U-I-N-S-M-A. We worked on, I guess, three main topics. The first thing was related to liquid crystal-like phases of polymers. The second was quite different. It had to do with random magnetic systems, and that was in collaboration with the experimental group of Ray Orbach, O-R-B-A-C-H. The third had to do with Langmuir monolayers; that is, monolayers of surfactant molecules on the surface of water. There was great experimental work on that area by Chuck Knobler, K-N-O-B-L-E-R, in the UCLA Chemistry Department. So we were working on modeling those experiments and identifying liquid crystal-like considerations that went into the behavior of those materials. So, that was three projects at UCLA. In the time I was there from ’89 to ’92, the last year was also part-time at Caltech. The reason for that was that there was a UCLA postdoc ahead of me, Zhen-Gang Wang—Z-H-E-N dash G-A-N-G, Wang—W-A-N-G. Do you want me to keep spelling things like that?

CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah, that’s great. It’s perfect to have it on the transcript.

SELINGER: He was a postdoc at UCLA a little bit ahead of me, and he got a job as an assistant professor in Chemical Engineering at Caltech. So, I went over to work for him maybe two days a week in the last year. That was part of making the budget work. During that time also is when Robin and I had our first baby, born in 1991. Apart from the baby, the main thing on my mind at that time was about finding a long-term job. That’s what postdocs are always thinking about. That’s part of that career stage. That was a big story there. How can I say it? Let me try to say this one carefully. At that stage of life, during the time of pregnancy and infant rearing, Robin was torn between priorities of her career and of family life, as so many young parents are at that stage of life, and she sort of went back and forth between those things, which is totally understandable. And there were at least some times during that period of 1990, 1991, 1992, when she wanted me to sort of take the lead in finding a job somewhere, and she would then find something that would be geographically compatible. So I thought, “Okay, no problem, I got this.” But I was wrong. It was much harder than I thought!

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: And that was the shock of my life. I would say that was the formative experience of my whole career—that it really was hard to find a job. I was looking for a job as an assistant professor of physics, and so I did a long list of applications through the year ’90-’91, and those did not work out. That’s why we decided to stay in L.A. for another year. Then I did another long list of applications in ’91-’92, and those didn’t work out either. I should say except for a couple of small universities that I didn’t like at that time and decided not to go to. That was a shock for me, because up until then, everything had been going well in my career, and I didn’t realize that it would be so difficult.

CRAWFORD: I’m just curious—maybe you're going to talk about this—but what do you think the difficulty was? Was it the physics job market was contracting at the time, or—?

SELINGER: There are two things that I can point to, and I’m sure these were both factors, but probably there were a lot of other factors, too. One was that this was a time of big change in the industrial labs around the U.S., especially Bell Labs. That’s something we talked about a little bit yesterday. There were a lot of great scientists at Bell Labs and other industrial labs who were sort of dissatisfied with the changes in their company, and so they decided to look for jobs as physics professors in universities. It didn’t happen all at once, but over several years, they gradually applied for jobs as university physics professors and found them, and that was big competition for people coming into the job market. Another factor was, I think, immigration, that this time was just at the end of the Cold War, and so there were a lot of great scientists from the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries who had the opportunity to immigrate to the U.S. These were great scientists, and it was of course good for the country that they were coming here, but that was difficult competition for other people who were applying for jobs at the same time. Or perhaps those two are just my excuses in retrospect [laughs]. Who knows how it would have happened in other times. Impossible to say.

CRAWFORD: It makes sense, in the sense that clearly these are two sources of additional job applicants that might not otherwise have existed. I know you didn’t actually work in the industrial labs, but do you have a sense of what was changing in these labs such that physicists were deciding to leave industrial labs at this time?

SELINGER: I think there was a lot less emphasis on basic research and more need for shorter-term applications. That was especially an issue for Bell Labs, operated by AT&T at that time, because that was the beginning of competition in the phone system. Earlier, the phone system had been a monopoly, so they could charge everybody in the country a few pennies extra on their phone bill to pay for running a great industrial lab. It was like taxes, basically; a tax on owning a phone. In the eighties, we started to get competition in the phone service, and so AT&T was now competing with all these other companies that weren’t running industrial labs, and so they needed the lab to produce more immediate results to benefit the company. I think that’s the main thing.

CRAWFORD: Do you think also—again, obviously you weren’t working in university administration—but was it also the case that universities maybe found these scientists from Bell Labs or other industrial labs kind of appealing, because they're coming with industry experience as well as the ability to teach physics? Was that in the air at all at that time?

SELINGER: I never heard anything about that. It’s possible, but I never heard anything about that. It was just that they had great accomplishments in research. Right, okay. So, I needed something, right? We had to support a baby. I was pretty nervous at that stage and was asking everybody I could find. At one point in an American Physical Society March meeting, I met up with someone from the Naval Research Lab. That was this liquid crystal physicist named Shashidhar. That’s first initial “R,” last name S-H-A-S-H-I-D-H-A-R. I was talking about science with him, and I asked him, “Are there any job opportunities at your lab?” He put me in touch with people there, and he flew me out for an interview. It was a long, complicated process that I don’t really want to go into, but eventually they did offer me a job. That was mainly thanks to the division head, Joel Schnur, S-C-H-N-U-R. I really have to recognize that I sort of owe my career to him, because if that job hadn’t come through, I don’t know what I would have done. I didn’t have a backup plan, at that stage.

So, that was the time to move to Washington DC. I went to work at NRL.[1] Robin fairly quickly got a job as a postdoc at the University of Maryland in College Park, so just in the Washington suburbs. I would say that even though it wasn’t my first choice at the time, moving to NRL actually worked out pretty well for me. Over a few years, I grew to really appreciate the situation there. I think the main thing that was good for me there was that I was, for most of the time, the only theorist in the division. I was in a division called the Center for Bio/Molecular Science and Engineering. Schnur was the head of that division, and Shashidhar was the head of the liquid crystal group within that division along with his wife, B. R. Ratna—R-A-T-N-A. When I was working there, I had a lot of opportunities to collaborate with experimental groups working on different subjects, and that was a pretty good situation for a young theorist, because, oh, I could work on modeling different kinds of experiments and then be a coauthor on a lot of different papers, and then go off to conferences and give talks about the theoretical side of that research. Because I was the only theorist, there was no problem for me to have identifiable credit for whatever I did. That was maybe more of an issue for young experimenters working on those projects.

Some of the things I worked on—I worked on lipid molecules that would self-assemble into micron-scale cylinders which we called tubules. I worked on several projects related to liquid crystals, including some work on ferroelectric smectic liquid crystals that we thought might be useful for specialized display applications. And, worked on liquid crystal elastomers, in a project headed by Ratna, for shape changing materials. I also worked on biosensors. There was a big effort within that division to make different kinds of biological sensors to detect hazards that American troops might encounter. That was biologists and chemists working on those things. There were times when there were some interesting mathematical modeling kinds of questions. Those were not closely connected to my research background, but I was able to contribute something to that, so I had two or three publications about those kinds of things. Overall, I’d say a pretty good situation for me, as a young scientist.

During that time, Robin did her postdoc at the University of Maryland. She then moved to another postdoc at NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology. We had our second baby. She then got a position as an assistant professor at the Catholic University of America, in Washington, so that was a good, stable job situation for both of us. She sometimes came over to collaborate with people at NRL, with me and with others in my division, so we had some joint papers during that time. We also had a great collaboration for several years with this guy Mark Green at the Brooklyn Polytechnic University. He was a polymer chemist who had done some interesting work about the chirality of polymers. Chirality means handedness, so the difference between a right-handed and a left-handed chemical structure. He had done work about what happens if you make a polymer that has a random sequence of right-handed and left-handed units. How does the polymer decide which way to twist? We worked on modeling that, and it turned out that was actually related to the random magnetic systems that I had worked on at UCLA, so that was kind of an interesting side benefit from that experience I had had. So that was time at NRL.

CRAWFORD: Could I just ask a few questions?

SELINGER: Of course, of course.

CRAWFORD: One question first off would be, if you could explain what NRL is, for people who might—because I think we hear Naval Research Laboratory, and that could call up all kinds of [laughs] images. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what NRL was doing.

SELINGER: Sure. NRL is a lab for the Navy. It’s the main lab for the Navy. The Navy has probably a hundred labs around the country—the defense research establishment is huge—but this is like the central lab for the Navy. It is located in Southwest Washington DC, in an area that’s mostly military facilities. It has about, oh, I’m guessing, 1,500 scientists and engineers working there.

CRAWFORD: Wow. Are those all civilian, or a mix?

SELINGER: Almost all civilian. A few in uniform, but almost all civilian. It has a Naval captain in command, and also a civilian director of research. It’s meant to do research that will help the Navy in some way or another, but that includes a lot of basic research that people hope will help the Navy some years down the road. The way the research is organized there, let me try to describe that. American defense research is compatible with American culture in that it is all based on money.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Other countries might have military research that’s more of the command and control style, but for us, it’s all based on money. So, the way things are supposed to work is that if a scientist at NRL, say, has an idea for, let’s say, stealth technology, to make a hypothetical example, then the NRL scientists would think, “What will it be useful for?” Maybe it could make invisible patrol boats someday. Then the NRL scientist is supposed to call up the Naval Surface Warfare Center and find the program manager who is responsible for patrol boats, and say, “I have this idea that will eventually lead to invisible patrol boats, and if you give me some money, I will develop this technology for you.” Then the program manager says, “All right. Write me a proposal for that.” So the NRL scientist writes a proposal, sends it over to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, and they send a budget of, say, a million dollars a year for some number of years. Then, the NRL scientist would use that to conduct the research, which mostly means paying salaries.

At a place like that, everybody’s salary has to be billed to a project, including senior investigators. It’s not like a university where faculty salaries are guaranteed by the university and you just have to bill postdoc and student salaries. At a place like NRL, everybody’s salary has to get billed to a project, and it’s salary plus overhead, and it’s a lot of overhead, on something like that. So, you would generally have to bill something like $300,000 a year for a scientist who takes home $100,000 a year, something like that. So, doing research there is expensive, and so that’s why they need these big budgets coming in from other defense agencies. So, when I was there as a young scientist, in general I would talk with PIs, and for each fiscal year, we would make a plan for how I would contribute to their projects. Then some percent of my time would be billed to each of these projects, for that coming fiscal year. For me, at the beginning, it was a postdoc at NRL, still, but then after a year and a half, they put me on the permanent staff. But it was the same on the permanent staff. It just meant more money—more money for me to take home, and more money to be billed to a project. I contributed to a lot of different projects, and the PIs of those projects were responsible for making the connection with ultimate applications and bringing in the funding to pay for those things. That was, I think, a very good situation for me as a young scientist. I think it became less good for me as the years went on there, because I was gradually advancing through the organization, and eventually I was expected to move on to a later stage where I would become the PI for projects, and I’d be the one responsible for going around the Navy and getting funding to build invisible patrol boats or whatever it would be. That was a job that I didn’t really want to do. That was not aligned with my goals for my own career.

CRAWFORD: Why was that?

SELINGER: I think it’s just a matter of personality. I think some people, including many scientists, have more of this entrepreneurial personality, that they love going out and getting funding, or if they don’t love it, they love having big groups of people doing research with them, and they are willing to accept the duty of going out to get a lot of funding in order to have what they want, a big group working for them. That’s not my personality, right? That’s not necessarily correlated with other aspects of success in science, but that’s a necessary part of doing science in any setting, but it’s especially important in that kind of setting.

CRAWFORD: I’m also curious too, just how you're describing what these PIs are doing, having to run research groups and then negotiate with different parts of the Navy about getting funding and stuff, would it be fair to say they spend most of their time doing administrative work and less time doing actual science, or was that not the case?

SELINGER: They spend a lot of their time doing administrative work. It’s hard to say what the proportions are. They spend a lot of their time in meetings, some of it with the sponsors and some of it with the people who are working for them. In those meetings, they tell the people who are working for them what to do next. And you might or might not consider that doing science. That’s a matter of discretion. I think they spend relatively little time in the lab touching equipment with their own hands. So, that’s the situation in general at NRL. Perhaps if I had stayed there longer I would have adapted to that situation, but, well, other things happened instead. Before I go on to that, let me mention a couple more things about NRL. I was there from 1992 to 2005. That, of course, included 9/11. On that morning, I was getting my car serviced, and so I watched on TV in the waiting room of the garage. So I didn’t go into NRL on that day. NRL is actually across the Potomac from the Pentagon—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: —and so people who were there had the full chaotic experience. Some of the people in the biosensor projects had the presence of mind to take their sensors up onto the roof, to study what was coming off of the Pentagon.

CRAWFORD: Interesting.

SELINGER: So that’s—being alert to what was going on, right? Right after 9/11, that’s something that most people have forgotten, but there came all these anthrax attacks. At the time, everyone assumed that that was coming from the same foreign country that had attacked us on 9/11. I think now we know that that was not the case. But we thought so, at the time. Those attacks were mostly against government agencies, as I recall. A lot of those attacks were coming through the mail. So at that point, they started sending all of our mail coming into NRL to be irradiated somewhere, to kill off anthrax, and so, we mostly lost mail delivery at NRL for a year or so. When it came, the cellophane was sort of crispy from the irradiation. That’s when we started mainly shifting to email, so that was part of the transition to the email culture that I experienced. Of course, at that time came a big change in our priorities towards doing things to support the War on Terror, and so that was a big part of how people had to design projects and present them to the rest of the Navy.

CRAWFORD: I think some of this has been implicit in what you've been saying about the NRL and how it’s organized and the kind of work that it’s doing, but what was the transition like, or how would you compare doing science in an academic setting like you were doing at UCLA or as a grad student, versus government or military setting? Was there any significant difference? There’s obviously organizational issues, but in terms of research culture or something like that.

SELINGER: At NRL there was a mix of basic and applied research. A university has much more emphasis on basic science. So, I was much more in contact with applied research at NRL than I had been at UCLA. But it was understood that there were different categories of projects. Each project was clearly identified one way or the other. There’s a numerical system of budget categories within the Department of Defense, so 6.1 means basic research, 6.2 is the next stage of advanced applications, and then it goes on to 6.3, 6.4, et cetera which are getting further towards actually developing technology that some company will produce and the military will buy. NRL does the first three stages of those things—6.1, 6.2, 6.3—and then the Department of Defense has other labs that do further stages. Of course it contracts with corporations that do the further stages, leading into manufacturing. That’s for NRL in general.

For me personally, I worked on a combination of 6.1 and 6.2 projects. The 6.1 projects were always supposed to produce publications in the open scientific literature. The 6.2 projects—some publications. That was less of a priority and it was maybe more balanced with other kinds of technical reports. But in all of these situations, we were producing some publications and were giving some talks at conferences. We had to get approval from security people, but that was never a problem. The NRL was also interested in intellectual property, I think more than is typically the case at universities, because of the greater emphasis on applications, and I would say especially before 9/11. During the Clinton administration, there was a lot of emphasis on the idea that now that the Cold War is over, the Defense labs should do things to support American industry. So there was a time when we were really looking to develop technology that would be licensed to industry, and I think my division, this Center for Bio/Molecular Science and Engineering, was particularly advanced with that. Early on in my time, Clinton’s secretary of Defense—what was his name? Bill Perry, I think—came through our division—I met him then—just because he wanted to observe how defense labs were doing that sort of thing. I did actually have three patents from my work there; or, maybe two from when I was at NRL, and the last started then but finished at Kent State. One of them actually made a little bit of money! I was amazed by that.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: That was a combination of basic and applied research. Maybe it’s sort of intermediate between working at a university and working at a corporate lab, in that sense. That’s the formal structure. Just informally, in terms of the mentality, I think that most NRL scientists are interested in being a part of the worldwide scientific community. They don’t think they're isolating themselves within the defense research establishment. They want to be a part of the worldwide scientific community. They want to interact with scientists at conferences and to go give talks at universities, and they just care about their reputation that way. I really appreciated that, at the time. That was not true just in my division; I think that was true up to the director of NRL, who wanted his lab to be well respected in the worldwide scientific community.

CRAWFORD: You were talking about publications. Was there an expectation that you would publish?

SELINGER: Oh, yes!

CRAWFORD: That was part of that—

SELINGER: Oh, absolutely.

CRAWFORD: Because publication is the currency of science, in a way.

SELINGER: And it was part of the annual evaluation there, and so people were definitely evaluated based on publications, based on high impact journals and citation statistics, that sort of thing. It was like any other scientific institution in that way. There was even more evaluation at NRL. There was an annual evaluation there, which we don’t have for faculty at Kent State.

CRAWFORD: As you may know, in the history of science, this basic versus applied distinction between different kinds of scientific endeavors has at various times been a fraught distinction. In other words, there were times in the 20th century, for example, where applied research was looked down on and basic research was prioritized. It sounds like in the 1990s, things have changed quite a bit, and maybe that hierarchy between the two didn’t really exist? Or was lessening?

SELINGER: I think a lot depends on who you asked, at that time. I’m sure there are some people who felt that. But yeah, things were changing, and I think at universities, a lot of faculty were becoming more open to applied research. At a place like NRL, the mission of the organization is applied research, but it was remarkable, and I think really great, that they included basic research as a part of how they internally thought of their goals.

CRAWFORD: Again, based on your time there, and you said that the director really wanted the NRL to be seen as kind of a world-class research institution, in your experience do you think that was the case, that the broader scientific community saw NRL as a peer institution?

SELINGER: Yes, I think so. And I think that’s still true. As one example, we had a visit from Pierre-Gilles de Gennes early in my time there. That was just shortly after he won the Nobel Prize for liquid crystal research. He came in and went around NRL, which is kind of a mark of respect for the lab. That was a funny visit in the sense that it was sort of organized by the French Embassy together with the leadership of NRL, rather than by scientists directly. He walked around NRL with some guy from the Embassy carrying his briefcase—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: —and spent an hour talking with the captain about the importance of Franco-American cooperation, and then came to our Center just briefly. So he had maybe half an hour scheduled for our Center. We made kind of a poster session for him, then. I put on a poster about my work about lipid tubules. He just went around from poster to poster, and for each poster he gave his little pearl of wisdom and then moved on.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: For my poster, he saw the stuff about tubules, and I mentioned how people had just discovered something like tubules in the digestive system, and he said, “Oh, I see. Tubules made of shit.” And that was my pearl of wisdom from the great man!

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Such is my brush with greatness! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Wow. [laughs]

SELINGER: Right, okay! Moving on, from NRL!

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: I think it was a really good situation for me in the early stages of my time there. It became somewhat more stressful for me as I got more responsibilities in terms of program management towards the end. Also around that time, Shashidhar left for a job with a private company. He was one of the people who had been between me and the Navy, and so that was one layer sort of removed. Also around that time was when this opportunity at Kent State came along.

CRAWFORD: Thinking about your transition to Kent State, you mentioned while you were at UCLA you worked on a number of different projects; some involved liquid crystals but not all of them. It sounds like it was a similar sort of situation at NRL?

SELINGER: That’s right.

CRAWFORD: At this point, as you're working at the NRL, are you seeing yourself as a liquid crystal scientist, or soft materials, or—?

SELINGER: That’s an interesting question. I guess I thought of myself as a physicist working in soft materials. Or I should say maybe the term “soft materials” was just sort of gradually coming in at that time. There was an earlier term of “complex fluids,” which was especially promoted by the scientists at Exxon that I mentioned yesterday. That term of “complex fluids” has sort of been superseded by “soft materials.” I guess I always thought of liquid crystals as sort of my home discipline, and then I would go off to other kinds of physics, and come back to that.

CRAWFORD: I then I guess have to ask about this term soft materials. If it’s kind of coming into use or coming into existence, even, in this period—the 1990s or so—that suggests to me, just as a historian of science, that there’s interest developing in a certain kind of phenomenon that people want to study. So, I guess it would kind of be two questions. Why the shift to the term soft materials? What does that signify that, say, complex fluids doesn't? Or why was that term needed to pull all these phenomena together under one umbrella? Then the other question would be, why was there so much interest in soft materials at that time?

SELINGER: Sure, okay. I’m not sure if I know the answer; let me try to think out loud. When I was in graduate school, I didn’t know either of these terms—"soft materials” or “complex fluids.” At that point, the concept that I thought about was condensed matter physics. Then within condensed matter physics, there was the distinction between classical and quantum. Informally, people often said h-bar equals zero, versus h-bar equals one. H-bar is Planck’s constant divided by 2?, which is a parameter associated with quantum mechanics.

People who spend their careers in quantum mechanics often choose a system of units such that h-bar equals one. That’s normal for people in high-energy physics, for example. Then, people who work in areas of physics that don’t involve quantum mechanics neglect all of those effects. So, we could say, “We just assume h-bar equals zero, so that we don’t think about those things.” That was the distinction at the time. I was certainly on the classical condensed matter physics side. At that time in the eighties, we thought of ourselves as the minority; that the majority of condensed matter physics was involving quantum mechanics in some way, for semiconductors or superconductors, things like that. Their work, you might also call solid state physics. That was an older word that came before condensed matter. We thought that that was the majority, and then there was a minority that was looking at the classical side. I’m not sure if that was really true in terms of statistics for the profession, but that was our perception. Liquid crystals was one area of classical condensed matter physics, h-bar equals zero condensed matter physics. Polymer physics was another. Then there were other kinds of basic statistical mechanics of phase transitions that didn’t involve quantum mechanics.

Around that time in the late eighties, there grew to be another area of research in classical statistical mechanics which had to do with membranes and microemulsions. So, what happens if you have oil and water and maybe some lipids or surfactants that would go to the interface between those things? That those systems could form interesting geometrical structures. For example, membranes might be flat or curved, and you might care about what’s the curvature of the membranes. That would be a kind of two-dimensional non-Euclidian geometry. David Nelson worked on some of that on the basic theoretical physics side, and the group at Exxon worked on a lot of that, on the both theoretical and experimental sides. The group at Exxon I think encouraged the term “complex fluids” to be a broad term that would include membranes and microemulsions along with liquid crystals and polymers. I think that’s a fair description of the history, at least within U.S. science at the time.

There was also quite a lot of work in France on materials like that, and a lot of that was started by Pierre-Gilles de Gennes and by the other people who were associated with him, his students and members of his groups, and they went on to do their own great research. I think that de Gennes was using the French word “matière molle” which translates to soft materials. I think that word translated into English is what eventually became the most popular term to describe this kind of science. Over the years since then, that has gradually expanded to include other types of research. Now there’s quite a lot of research on active materials, for example, which would probably go under this same heading. That’s my impression about the history of these scientific terms. If you ever actually find out whether or not I’m right, you can send an email.

CRAWFORD: I’ll let you know. [laughs] In part, I’m curious—there wasn’t any particular practical needs necessarily that was driving interest in these kind of phenomena? Obviously they all eventually have some kind of applications, but—

SELINGER: I think some of the work at Exxon was motivated by their applications, and so they were thinking about things like enhanced oil recovery, about the beginning of fracking. They were also thinking more downstream, as they would say, of how to process petroleum products. That was I think their ultimate justification.

CRAWFORD: Thanks!

SELINGER: Good, good. These are great questions, and I wish I knew the history better.

CRAWFORD: I think partly just my impression is that there’s still a lot of work to be done on the history of soft materials, but I would say materials science in general—that kind of broader umbrella of work.

SELINGER: Yes. The term “materials science,” it was already established by the eighties, but it wasn’t long established by the eighties. There had earlier been terms like metallurgy, for things that people did. Then a bunch of areas of metallurgy, ceramics, polymers, other things, were brought together under the name materials science. That happened not long before I was a student.

CRAWFORD: You were saying that in your final years of NRL, you were kind of moving up the ladder. I know from your CV at one point you were deputy head of the Laboratory for Bioscience Sensors and Biomaterials.

SELINGER: Yeah—that title sounds good.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: It mostly meant writing reports for upper management. It was not actually a very important responsibility.

CRAWFORD: Maybe it’s just a way of saying—because you were kind of saying that—it sounded like you were moving more into these kind of administrative type positions.

SELINGER: Yes. But my time still needed to be billed to research projects, and so everything depended on money, of course, still, as it does for everybody at a place like NRL. But it was less the case that I could rely on more senior people to bring in that money, and more my responsibility to do that. In some alternate universe, perhaps I would have eventually become good at that!

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: But then this job at Kent State came along, and Oleg Lavrentovich approached me at a conference and encouraged me to apply. They had gotten funding from the state of Ohio for this endowed chair in theoretical physics of liquid crystals. This was a position called the Ohio Eminent Scholar. As I understand it, it was meant to recruit someone from out of state to come into Ohio to do research and teaching in this area. The people from LCI[2] did the work to apply for that kind of funding from the state of Ohio and they were successful with that. They advertised it as a job for people to apply for, and Oleg encouraged me to apply. It was a long and complicated process that I don’t especially want to talk about, but eventually they did offer that job to me. Then the question was, what about Robin’s situation? She was I think a tenured associate professor at Catholic University already, at that point. But at that time, we didn’t have to move, so we had some ability to negotiate, and so eventually we negotiated with Kent State to have two jobs here. So, we both became professors at Kent State. We moved here in 2005.

CRAWFORD: Had you had interactions with the LCI before you came here, professionally, or with individuals from the LCI?

SELINGER: Oh, sure, sure, I guess beginning with when I was applying for all these jobs when I was a postdoc at UCLA around 1990, ’91, ’92, Kent State was on the long list of jobs that I didn’t get. And then, afterwards, after I went to NRL, I was in contact with Kent a bunch of times. I came here for the International Liquid Crystal Conference in, I think, ’96. I came one other time to give a colloquium in the Physics Department. David Allender, I think, invited me. Also, when I was at NRL, there were people passing through NRL who had had different kinds of connections here. We had Greg and Renate Crawford as postdocs at NRL, briefly. Do you know who they were?

CRAWFORD: Yes.

SELINGER: They were former students of Bill Doane here at Kent State. Right after Kent State, they were postdocs in the group with me at NRL. They didn’t stay for long, maybe just one year, and then Greg got a job for Xerox in California, and the two of them have moved on and have had great careers since then. That was a connection. We had Sam Sprunt as a postdoc at NRL after he finished at MIT. He was a PhD from MIT and then a postdoc at the Magnet Lab, and after that Magnet Lab was shut down, I think, is when he moved to NRL and was a postdoc at NRL for a year, and then he became an assistant professor at Kent State. Then, at conferences, I met people from Kent State all the time. Kent State was and still is a big part of worldwide liquid crystal research, and so I was in contact with those people, in terms of research interactions, quite a lot. Oleg approached me—I think it was at the International Liquid Crystal Conference in Edinburgh in 2002, about applying for this job, and it finally worked out around 2005.

CRAWFORD: Did you know him before?

SELINGER: Oh, yes. From conferences. Yeah, so I had met him many times before that.

CRAWFORD: You've talked a little bit about your reasons for wanting to leave NRL and then obviously this job opens up, and the fact that they can offer both you and Robin a position. Were there other things that attracted you about coming to the LCI or Kent State, other reasons for coming here?

SELINGER: An academic career was what I had been looking for, previously, and it hadn’t worked out in the job search in ’92. But I had the feeling like this was a career goal that I had deferred, and now I was able to come back to it. And, I was able to come back to it coming in as a full professor, and in fact with an endowed chair, so I bypassed being an assistant professor. So I was never an assistant professor in my life.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Which, in retrospect, is probably a good thing! Right?

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: It’s not the way I had planned for my career to go in advance, but in retrospect not being an assistant professor is probably an ideal way to structure one’s life. A distinction between academics and a government lab like NRL is that in academics, there are very separate career stages. There’s graduate student, and then postdoc, and then assistant professor, and then tenure, right? And there are big jumps from one of those things to another. And a big jump like that is the sort of thing that looks good when you're the person at the top, and not so good when you're the person on the bottom.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. [laughs]

SELINGER: Whereas at a place like NRL, it’s more of a gradual career progression that I could start as a postdoc and then got hired onto the permanent staff, and then just gradually from year to year I would pick up more responsibilities and get paid more. So, it was the smooth career progression rather than a bunch of jumps. Then, I could go from that smooth career progression into becoming a full professor. So, I never had to go through the big jumps. So, yeah, just as well. I was going to say something; I forgot. I guess that was something that drew me to this. I guess you’d say, for someone like me who had been working in a government lab for 13 years, so I was in my mid-forties at the time, I didn’t want to become an assistant professor. I didn’t want to put myself into that position at that stage where I felt like I was already pretty advanced. I didn’t want to then put myself up for a tenure review that might or might not be successful, when I already had a permanent situation where I was. So I only wanted to move to an academic job if it would be at least with tenure. And so this was even more so, with coming to an endowed chair.

CRAWFORD: Were there other opportunities that you had pursued, or was this sort of the first one that came along that seemed like the right fit?

SELINGER: There was one other that came along about the same time, but it was not successful.

CRAWFORD: So, you come to the LCI in 2005. My sense of the history of the institution at that time—and obviously you were here [laughs]—that the Institute had just a few years prior finished with the ALCOM[3] grant, which I think ended in 2002.

SELINGER: Yes.

CRAWFORD: And that had really—again, in my perception—that grant, because it was so large and so all-encompassing, had really defined the LCI for the nineties and early 2000s.

SELINGER: I think that’s true.

CRAWFORD: You're coming in a few years after ALCOM had ended. What’s going on with the LCI at that time? Is the Institute still looking for a new direction, or did it feel like there was a sense of where the Institute was going, or were they still trying to figure things out and you were expected to be a part of that defining of the Institute? Or maybe that wasn’t happening at all! [laughs]

SELINGER: This was relatively early on in Oleg’s term as director of the LCI. I think he came in with a really strong scientific vision about how he wanted to continue research on liquid crystals, both basic and applied, and then expand it into biological applications. He had a great interest in connections between liquid crystals and biology. He was then developing some technology for a liquid crystal based biological sensor. He had ideas for expanding that. So I would say, yeah, he had a really strong scientific vision for how the research could go. And, yeah, that was very inspirational. I really admired Oleg as a leader of that. Now, at that time, we did not have any central group grants, so there were a lot of separate individual grants for projects. I think we were also getting support from the university, to pay for faculty salaries, which is the main expense in any academic program. So, at that time, the LCI was functioning as if it were a separate academic department. Formally, LCI was the name for the research side, and the educational side was called the Chemical Physics Interdisciplinary Program. Robin and I were appointed as professors of Chemical Physics, so were appointed with tenure in the Chemical Physics Interdisciplinary Program, and there were about 10 faculty like that. So this was separate from being in the Physics or Chemistry Department. We were not in those departments, at the time.

CRAWFORD: Was it a graduate program only, at that time?

SELINGER: It was graduate program only, master’s and PhD. We were at that time having individual research grants for individual research projects, and I think we had university funding for faculty salaries and for the first- and second-year graduate students. I think that’s where the money was coming from. You should probably ask other people like Oleg to be sure about that, but that’s my understanding of where the money was coming from, that was paying me. Oleg had great ideas for research directions, and he encouraged faculty to move in those research directions, but there was no central planning of research. He didn’t have a position that would allow him to do central planning. It was more encouragement of people to work on things. Now, over the coming years, we had several attempts to bring in group funding. Some of those were MRSEC proposals. That’s M-R-S-E-C. It stands for Materials Research Science and Engineering Center or something like that. It’s a type of NSF[4] grant. Unfortunately, those were not successful. We also had a couple of attempts to bring in other funding as Science and Technology Centers, so that’s the same category of funding that ALCOM was. One of those attempts under Oleg’s leadership was almost successful. We came extremely close to getting funded and just missed it. I don’t remember the year. I’m guessing around 2010, but I’m not exactly sure.[5] The history of LCI might have been very different if that had been funded. But it wasn’t. I would say after that time, there were a lot of individual investigators doing their own research projects, which were sort of loosely coordinated by the LCI director but not closely planned by the LCI director. I can talk about my own research; I can talk about administrative things. What are you interested in?

CRAWFORD: Let’s talk about the research that you did after you came to the LCI. What were you working on?

SELINGER: It has been 18 years, so there have been a whole bunch of different research projects. Let me tell you about one line of interconnected research projects that I’ve been working on over several years. This line of research started with flexoelectricity. Flexoelectricity means that if you bend or splay a liquid crystal, that you get some electrostatic polarization. It’s one of these words where the first half of the word means the cause and the second half means the effect. So “flex” is what you do to a liquid crystal, and electricity is the effect, what happens. This has been known in liquid crystals for many years, since, I guess, work of Bob Meyer at Brandeis in the 1970s.[6] In the early 2000s, the group of Tony Jákli discovered that there was a really big flexoelectric effect in bent-core liquid crystals. These are liquid crystals that are shaped sort of like bananas. In the ordinary nematic phase of these materials, there’s long-range order in the long axis of the bananas, from tip to tip of the bananas, but the sideways axis that shows which way the bananas curve, that was random. But, if you apply a bend deformation, then that sideways axis becomes ordered, it tends to align, and it makes a big amount of polar order, order that is described by a sideways vector, and that is experimentally observable as an electrostatic polarization, which Jákli’s group could observe.

I got interested in modeling why was that effect so big, and that’s something that I started doing with my student, Subas Dhakal, who was one of my first students at Kent State. The idea there was that these materials would be just on the verge of developing polar order. You understand that a nematic liquid crystal is a phase that has orientational order, but it’s two-way orientational order. The molecules are aligning along some axis, and they could be either up or down along some axis. But, what if you had a system that was on the verge of becoming more ordered than that? It was on the verge of becoming a polar ordered phase. That would be, say, a phase that has one-way order along that axis, or a phase that has strong nematic order, say, in the z direction, but it’s going to develop some one-way order in the x direction, perpendicular to the main nematic order. That was the theoretical concept that I had in mind. That’s also a theoretical concept that Bob Meyer had had in mind 20 or 30 years earlier, but I didn’t realize that at the time.

I worked with Subas to model that through a lattice simulation. I thought, let’s do the case first of pear-shaped molecules, so molecules that just have one main axis but they're thin on one end and fat on the other end, so that if they would develop nematic order, two-way order along this axis, then the fat sides and the thin sides would cancel each other out. But if they developed one-way order along that axis, then the fat sides would need to be spaced more widely than the thin sides, and so that would make a splay. Or vice versa; if there were a splay, that would induce one-way orientational order. Subas simulated that. It did come out the way that we expected. So then he simulated the case of banana-shaped molecules, and that also came out the way that we expected, so that it provided a model for how, if you have molecules that are in the nematic phase but close to a polar phase, on the verge of developing one-way polar order, then they would have a big flexoelectric effect. That kind of went along with the experiments of the Jákli group. That was stage one in this sequence of projects.

Stage two was that when another student [Shaikh Shamid] was simulating these things, he didn’t just simulate them in the phase that was on the verge of developing polar order. He also simulated what happens if you actually go into the phase with polar order. Then, the simulations do something more complicated, because then they have full-fledged polar order which makes a big splay, or a big bend, and there’s a question of, how can a structure with a spontaneous splay or bend arrange itself? By coincidence, around this same time, so around 2010 or so, experimental groups were studying phases that were actually kind of similar to that, and I didn’t realize it at the time. There were experimental groups who were studying this thing called the twist-bend nematic phase, which is something that was predicted theoretically by Ivan Dozov—D-O-Z-O-V—and it had also been predicted 20 or 30 years earlier by Bob Meyer. But Dozov didn’t realize it, either, at the time.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: Then it was found experimentally around 2010 or so. I was discussing my work at a conference with Tim Sluckin—S-L-U-C-K-I-N—and he pointed out this connection to me. It turns out that these things that my student had been simulating in the polar phase were actually kind of a model for what had been observed experimentally—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

SELINGER: —and predicted theoretically by Dozov, and much earlier by Meyer. That made the beginning of my connection with research on the twist-bend nematic phase. That was a big area of research in liquid crystals in the years after 2010. Some people at Kent State got involved with experimental research in this area, especially Oleg Lavrentovich and Tony Jákli and Sam Sprunt. I collaborated with them on modeling for their experiments, and also developing further theoretical ideas. That was one of the areas that I worked on around that time, and a lot of that was with my student, Shamid—S-H-A-M-I-D—and a lot of that was in collaboration with David Allender, theoretically, shortly before he retired. Right, okay. So that was the second stage of my research on this aspect.

The third stage also happened because of a couple of accidents at that time, things that I didn’t realize were related but turned out to be related. Part of that was something that happened at a conference in Aspen. There’s the Aspen Center for Physics. I went to a conference then on the theme of geometric frustration, as we were talking about yesterday. This would have been around 2017; I’m not exactly sure. At that conference, I met up with a couple of French physicists. Rémy Mosseri—M-O-S-S-E-R-I—and Jean-François Sadoc—S-A-D-O-C. Those are people whom I had met briefly way back in graduate school in the context of this work on the curved space model of metallic glasses. They had spent those intervening 20 or 30 years living in curved space. They had done everything in curved space, over all that time, and were real experts on curved space. In Mosseri’s talk, he reminded everybody that there had been a curved space model for some aspects of liquid crystals that had been created back in the 1980s; that is, for the blue phases of liquid crystals. That was work of Jim Sethna at Cornell, S-E-T-H-N-A. Mosseri mentioned that as part of the introduction to his talk, and then he talked about other aspects of curved space models for geometric frustration.

Afterwards, when we were discussing, I guess I asked Mosseri and Sadoc, “This work on blue phases is a model for an ideal curved space structure for liquid crystals that want to have some twist.” That the optimal local packing has twist, because they're chiral molecules. Then I said, “For these bent-core liquid crystals, the optimum local structure has bend. Could there be a curved space model for something where the optimum local structure has bend?” Mosseri and Sadoc jumped on that, and within, I don’t know, 24 hours or so, they had some model for how there could be an ideal local structure in a different curved space than the one for twist, so that the ideal twist structure would be in a curved space with positive curvature, like the generalization of a sphere, and the ideal curved space structure for bend would be in a curved space with negative curvature, like a generalization of a saddle. They were interested in this kind of thing, and I thought, “I’d like to collaborate with them on making up this kind of structure.” This was one thing that happened around 2017.

I’m going to tell you another thing that happened in 2017, about, that was unrelated at the time but turned out to be kind of related, and that is that Tony Jákli came to me with a question from the students in his class. He was teaching them about liquid crystal deformations, about splay and twist and bend, which maybe you know about. Then he said the students in his class were interested in a configuration where the molecules, say, were tipping outwards in the x direction and tipping inwards in the y direction. I’m doing that with my hands here, but that’s not going to show up on your audio recording.

CRAWFORD: Right. [laughs]

SELINGER: They wanted to know, what is that? Because it’s not splay or twist or bend, but it’s something; what is it? At the time, I thought, well, it must be something related to saddle splay, which was sort of an obscure part of liquid crystal science that I didn’t know that much about at the time. But that was a fairly unsatisfactory answer. Then, with that as background I will say, I made a trip to Paris to collaborate with Sadoc and Mosseri for about two weeks, maybe in 2018, about that. We wanted to characterize all the possible liquid crystal deformations and see how they would fit into all the possible types of curved spaces. Mathematicians have a list of all the possible types of curved spaces, three-dimensional spaces that are curved; there are seven of them. That’s not obvious but it’s true. Well, actually one of the seven is flat, so there’s flat, plus six curved structures which are the same at all positions. There is, I’m sure, an unlimited number which are different at different positions, but there are seven that are the same, homogenous at all positions.

We wanted to match up the liquid crystal deformations and see what kinds of deformations would fit into what kinds of spaces. We made a lot of progress on that in those two weeks, but there was some aspect of the energy calculations that didn’t come out quite right. I kept hacking at that, I think maybe after I came back to Kent, after that trip to Paris, and it turns out that the thing that didn’t come out right was the same as the thing that Tony Jákli had been asking me about shortly before. And so, that got me started on making a systematic way to categorize deformations in liquid crystals, and it led me into thinking about how liquid crystals have actually four kinds of bulk deformations, not three. And so, there’s the splay and twist and bend that probably other people have told you about, but then there’s a fourth kind of deformation also. That fourth kind of deformation does not really have a name. I made up a name for it, of biaxial splay, because it’s this thing that’s sticking outwards, say, in one direction, and inwards in another direction, and that sort of reminded me of a biaxial nematic liquid crystal where the two directions perpendicular to the director differ from each other. Later on, I made up a different name for it, tetrahedral splay, because I thought it actually has the symmetry like a tetrahedron that’s lying on its edge. So there’s one edge this way—I’m doing it with my hands again—another edge this way, and then all joined up.

I got really interested in that, because it was sort of going back and rewriting the very basics of liquid crystal science. It goes back to what Frank did back in, I guess, 1958 or so. I was really intrigued by that prospect and wanted to work out the consequences of that. I asked a whole bunch of other theorists whether they had ever seen anything like that. Most of them said no, they had not. Eventually, I asked my colleague Randy Kamien—K-A-M-I-E-N—from the University of Pennsylvania, and he pointed me to one very recent paper that had actually developed a related idea. This was a paper by Tom Machon and Gareth Alexander in the U.K. They had developed a related sort of mathematical analysis of director deformations just a couple years prior, so just maybe in 2016.

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow.

SELINGER: They had done it for the purposes of topology. It was in what was a pretty complicated math paper that they had written. They did topology with it, but it turned out that I thought that it was actually especially useful for the purposes of elasticity; that is, categorizing the way that liquid crystals could deform, and categorizing how that impacts the free energy of liquid crystals. So I came up with a way of rewriting the Frank free energy in terms of those four deformation modes. Published an article about that probably in 2018, and of course gave credit to Machon and Alexander for the mathematical construction there. That was really a further stage in where I ended up that was motivated by this story about flexoelectricity. I also published a paper together with Mosseri and Sadoc about how these four liquid crystal deformation modes could fit into curved space. Each of them fits into some of the types of curved space. So, we categorized that whole stuff. I don’t know if anyone will ever really be able to use that work, but if we find a black hole and it turns out to be full of liquid crystal, we figured it out first.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: I can say that part! I would say since that time, I’ve been really interested in this area of four deformation modes rather than three deformation modes in liquid crystals. I’m continuing to pursue that. I’m also interested in the application of that to biological membranes, and so I hope to work on that at some point in the not too distant future. That’s kind of a long series of interrelated scientific stories. I’m not sure whether you're interested in those scientific aspects or if you want to know about the administrative aspects or other things.

CRAWFORD: The way you've told the story is a fascinating account of how you moved from these initial questions about flexoelectricity, as you said, and then thinking about these questions of deformation and so forth. One thing that I wanted to ask about early on, because you started off talking about how you and your grad student were working on these simulations of molecules—you said you had asked this question about, well, if you have a pear-shaped molecule—again, this is probably a fairly basic question, but about the role of models and simulations in your work. In that instance when you were thinking about a pear-shaped molecule, you weren’t necessarily thinking of a particular type of liquid crystal molecule, right? This was just sort of hypothetical?

SELINGER: Yes, symmetry-based. It’s a great question. And I should say, there are many styles of simulations. Some are really based on molecules made out of atoms, and some are more abstract than that. In my career, I don’t do that much simulations, but I’ve done some, and I’ve supervised students doing some. Robin is much more of a specialist in simulations, and so her career has really been devoted to computational simulations of materials, whereas a bigger proportion of mine is on pencil and paper theory. Speaking just for myself, I would say that I’m really passionate about the pencil and paper theory and about thinking about the symmetries of order parameters and how that leads to predictions for what sorts of physical effects might happen. Sometimes I want to do simulations or supervise students doing simulations that would really test the ideas from pencil and paper theory, and check whether there’s some basic thing that we just didn’t think about when we were doing the pencil and paper theory. So it makes kind of a sanity check.

Usually what I have done is very abstract simulations, so it’s simulations where we just say, let’s have a lattice, and on every lattice site there’s a vector that represents the orientation of the molecules. Or, maybe there are two vectors if you need two vectors to represent a more complicated thing like a banana. Then, let’s make up some interaction between the vectors on neighboring lattice sites that would have the right symmetry for the thing that we want to simulate. Then, let’s minimize the energy. Or, let’s do a Monte Carlo simulation to see what happens at a finite temperature. I may have said we're simulating molecules—you may have that on your recording here—and so, I have to justify myself: I didn’t really mean simulate molecules. I really meant, let’s have a lattice of vectors like that, which to the abstract way of thinking in my head at least, that implies simulating molecules. But there are other more professional simulators around the world who really do simulate molecules, and I don’t do what they do, and so I have to respect what they do, and they should be entitled to their own terminology.

CRAWFORD: One follow-up question. You used this phrase “pencil and paper theory.” What do you mean by that?

SELINGER: What I mean by that is thinking about what are the symmetries of objects in the world, and so what kinds of mathematical objects describe them? In my style of theory, we imagine that the world is made of order parameters. The world is characterized by order parameters. We don’t think that much about atoms and molecules. This is a style of thinking that probably goes back to the great Soviet theoretical physicist, Landau. He was applying this to superfluids and superconductors, even if he didn’t have a real microscopic theory of what is superfluidity or superconductivity. Many theorists over the years have applied this style of thinking to liquid crystals. We would say, for example, that the nematic order parameter is a tensor, a tensor of rank two that’s traceless and symmetric. Then if we want to think about flexoelectricity, we would say, how could a tensor like that be coupled to a vector that represents polar order, that represents the net electrostatic dipole moment. So we would think about how to construct a free energy function which is a scalar—a free energy has to be a scalar—and so it should be some combination of these ingredients. There should be ingredients which represent nematic order, that’s a tensor, and derivatives that represent the way that the tensor depends on position. And a vector that represents polar order. So we would say, how can we put these pieces together to make a free energy? What are the terms that are allowed by symmetry? Then we would say, how do we minimize this free energy?

So, we might construct some assumption—we would usually use the German word “ansatz”—as an assumption that we put in for how do the nematic order and the polarization depend on position. Then, the ansatz would have some parameters in it. One parameter, for example, might be what’s the wavelength of a periodic deformation. Another parameter might be, what’s the amplitude of a periodic deformation. We would put these parameters into the ansatz into the free energy, and get out a free energy in terms of these parameters, and then say, how does the free energy depend on parameters like wavelength or amplitude of the deformation. And then minimize. And so we would say, what wavelengths or amplitude gives the lowest possible free energy, and how does that vary as a function of temperature, say as you pass through a phase transition. So that’s a general style of working that I’ve used for many kinds of projects over the years. Sometimes it is done with pencil and paper. Sometimes it is done using this software called Mathematica from the Wolfram corporation, which is software for doing mathematical calculations. Not necessarily numerical, but it knows calculus. It knows how to do derivatives and integrals, and so that’s often useful for minimization problems like this.

CRAWFORD: I know it’s noon now.

SELINGER: I’m okay, as far as time goes, if you are.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, I’m sorry for not saying something earlier.

SELINGER: You may have time constraints, also.

CRAWFORD: No, I still have time.

SELINGER: No, no, I’ve been talking about myself, which is my favorite subject!

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: And so, that’s how it goes on.

CRAWFORD: Okay, I just wanted to make sure. Again, forgive me if this is a very basic question, but you mentioned a number of times in talking about how you're doing this work, you're looking for the lowest free energy. Why is that a particular goal?

SELINGER: That’s the state that will normally happen physically. The free energy is a combination of energy and entropy. And so, at low temperatures, it’s dominated by energy. At high temperatures, it is dominated by entropy. Physical systems normally move toward the state of lowest free energy, so by determining what wavelength or amplitude gives the lowest free energy as a function of temperature, that’s making a prediction for what wavelength or amplitude will be observed in an experiment, as a function of temperature.

CRAWFORD: So, is one of the goals to eventually compare these calculations to experimental results?

SELINGER: Yes, yes, absolutely. That’s always a goal. Sometimes, the work is closely tied to experiment, and sometimes it’s a little bit more distant. When it’s more distant, at least the goal is to figure out what sorts of stories to tell, and you would tell those stories in interpreting an experiment. For example, when I started thinking about this fourth mode of deformation, in a liquid crystal, that’s an extra character in the cast of characters for this story. Then, what I’ve done is go back to old experiments and talk about, how would I explain old experiments using this as one of the characters in the story to tell. I claim that this makes a more compelling story, for explaining old experiments. And my hope is that other people will then use it as a way of explaining future experiments as well.

CRAWFORD: When you're constructing these—I don’t know if models is the right word—

SELINGER: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: —models, I’m wondering, how do you assess their sort of efficacy or utility? Is it just through experimental results, or are there other criteria that you're using to decide that this is a good model or a useful model or something that’s accurate? Or something that tells a good story, as you put it.

SELINGER: There are a lot of different criteria. I think for me personally, what I most look for is getting the basic features of an experiment right. I know in your historical work, you've done a lot with Copernicus, right? The analogy with Copernicus is that when he had the idea of planets moving around the Sun, that got some of the basic features of planetary orbits right from the beginning. The fact that planets could move in a retrograde way, it got that basic feature right. It didn’t get all the details right.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: So there was still a lot of work yet to be done to figure out those things. And, not minor work; there was still a lot of important work yet to be done. But switching from planets moving around the Earth to planets moving around the Sun got the basic thing right. I think, in my own work, in many projects over the years, that’s the sort of thing that I’ve been looking for. That if you tell a story with the right characters, with mathematical objects of the right symmetry, and putting them together into a free energy in the right way, that that should explain at least the basic features of the experiments. I’m personally less motivated to get all the details of the experiments right. Sometimes I’m motivated to do that. Other times I hope that other people will come and do those things.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] That makes sense. You're looking for a kind of Johannes Kepler to your Copernicus. [laughs]

SELINGER: That may be a little bit too grandiose, but—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: —something like that, but scaled down to the nano scale.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Right, yeah, of course. Of course. I’m sure you've done a lot of work at the LCI in the last few decades, and happy to discuss further. I guess one thing that I’m curious about is, how do you see the LCI has changed since you've come in 2005?

SELINGER: Administratively there have been big changes.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, those have been the major changes.

SELINGER: I’m sure you've heard other people’s points of view, pro and con, about all these changes over the years. I’ll tell you my perspective about that. When I came, the LCI was getting a lot of support which I think was coming from the University, although it’s possible that I’m wrong about that. We were doing that for running this excellent research program. Now, there’s a reasonable question of whether a university will be motivated to support a research program, even an excellent research program. Perhaps for many years, that was something that the University was motivated to do because it was bringing in these big group grants, like the ALCOM grant that you mentioned. And also perhaps because there were a lot of really excellent students who were coming to Kent State who were motivated by wanting to go into liquid crystal science and technology, especially students from Eastern Europe and East Asia.

Over the following years, those things became somewhat less true. The external funding decreased. It didn’t decrease to zero, but it decreased. And I think the population of student applicants who were mainly motivated by wanting to go into liquid crystal science and technology decreased. Not to zero, but decreased. Based on that, there was somewhat less motivation for the University to put support into this research program. There’s a complicated question for how a university ought to make a transition like that. I have to give a lot of credit to Kent State that it has wanted to make a transition like this in an ethical way. For students, that means that they have to continue things for several years so that students can finish the program that they enrolled in. For faculty, it’s trickier, because a faculty career lasts for decades, and so it’s harder for a university to figure out how to make a transition like that for the faculty who have come here for research in liquid crystals. I think it is to Kent State’s credit that it didn’t make any abrupt changes. That there was some talk of possible abrupt changes during the time when Tim Moerland was the Dean of Arts and Sciences. He sometimes used sort of harsh language, which sometimes got bad reactions from people. You may have heard stories about this in connection with LCI or you may have experienced this in connection with the History Department; I don’t know. But in any case, those things didn’t happen.

Instead what happened, I think mostly under Dean Jim Blank, was that Kent State made more gradual changes. And so, gradually, the faculty who mainly identified as physicists were encouraged to apply for transfers of our appointments into the Physics Department. That’s most of us. But one also in Chemistry, one in Biology, one in Math. I think that’s the group. For those of us who have gone into the Physics Department, we are now regular professors in the Physics Department. The biggest change is that we do undergraduate teaching in addition to graduate teaching. There are pros and cons with doing something like that, as all faculty everywhere in the world know. But it’s a reasonable transition to make. I think that was a reasonable gradual response by Kent State to the changing circumstances. So, I agree that that was the right thing for Kent State to do. From my personal point of view, there are pros and cons, but it seems all right.

At this point, the LCI has been renamed as the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, which is sort of a compromise name. There were some people who thought that it should be just Liquid Crystal Institute. There were some people who thought it should be just Advanced Materials Institute. This is a compromise between those two things. How will it go in the future? I don’t know. The graduate program, the Chemical Physics Interdisciplinary Program, that has been renamed as the Materials Science Graduate Program. It’s a name that is I think a little bit misleading to student applicants because we don’t do all the same things that most materials science programs around the country do. This is not a name that was chosen by the faculty. This is a name that was chosen by Dean Blank. Maybe he hoped that we would eventually move in the direction of other materials science programs around the country. Maybe that will happen in the future. I don’t know that, either. I would consider now that my main involvement is with the Physics Department. That’s where my own PhD students come from, and that’s where I do most of my teaching. So, I feel that connection mostly. But there may be other people who feel mostly a connection to AMLCI.7 You may have heard other things from other people.

CRAWFORD: A little bit of a bigger question. Again, let me know if I’m mischaracterizing, but it sounds like, for most of your career, you've been involved in basic research. You characterize yourself as a theoretical physicist.

SELINGER: Yes.

CRAWFORD: We've talked a little bit earlier about the relationship between basic and applied. My perception as an outsider to the scientific community is there’s just constant pressure, especially from, say, state and federal governments, about applications, and what is science doing for industry, and stuff like that. I’m just curious to hear your sense of the status of basic research in the American scientific community at this time. Is it doing well and flourishing? Do you think there’s more that could be done to support basic research? Is the scientific community really not too troubled by, say, the rhetoric of politicians, or—I mean, certain kinds of rhetoric? [laughs]

SELINGER: I would certainly say that basic research is flourishing in American universities. I have no hesitation about that. I think that has mostly dropped away at American corporate labs. That was the case for many years up until the eighties, and then it mostly stopped in the eighties, with the changes in Bell Labs, and the general changes in the economy. I think people would point to a lot of changes in the American economy around those days. So that’s not a problem that I think about in the context of universities. I’m very comfortable with that, at universities. At universities, there’s a pressure for funding, of course. That is always the case. I think universities are happy with any sort of funding, whether it’s basic or applied.

CRAWFORD: In 2014, you became a Fellow of the American Physical Society—

SELINGER: Mmhmm.

CRAWFORD: —which, the APS explains, “The Fellowship is bestowed on individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise,” among other things. Then in 2020 you became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Again, the Association’s website says, “AAAS Fellows are a distinguished cadre of scientists, engineers, and innovators, who have been recognized for achievements across disciplines.” Becoming a fellow of these two organizations is the result of a process of nomination and election by your peers in science. I’m curious what it was like or what it meant to you to receive these distinctions.

SELINGER: Well, it’s very kind of you to mention those things. Everybody likes to feel like they're making progress in their career, right?

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: People don’t want to think that they became a full professor at age 45 or whatever and then spent the next 20 years in a sort of static situation. So, everybody looks for some markers of progress. Sometimes that comes in the form of a fellowship like this, which is—it’s not a Nobel Prize, but it’s some level of research recognition. Other people get other forms of recognition. For example, my wife Robin has been very much involved with activities of the American Physical Society, and she has become a leader of that organization, and was recently the Speaker of the Council for the American Physical Society, which is sort of the Nancy Pelosi of physics, for one year.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: That’s another kind of progress, which I think she finds very satisfying. For me, I have sometimes tried to be involved with leadership things, but I have lost every election that I’ve been in, for something like that.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

SELINGER: So, that aspect has not worked out for me.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] I always like to ask my interviewees, if you were talking to someone starting out in science, let’s say an undergraduate who is considering a career, or maybe a grad student who is just finishing up, what advice would you give them about having a career in science?

SELINGER: Well, I think that there are a lot of graduate students who are really set on a career as a physics professor in the United States. This includes both American and international graduate students who come here. They are really set on that kind of career. I generally try to encourage them to open themselves up to other types of career opportunities also. Partly that’s because these jobs are really hard to get—that it was hard in my own experience, and it eventually worked out for me, but it took a lot of years—and partly because the jobs as assistant professors are really so stressful. So, especially for American graduate students, I try to encourage them to think about opportunities in government labs, national labs, because those are really intellectually stimulating jobs, and they are good jobs by ordinary criteria of salary and job security, and many of these labs are required to hire U.S. citizens, so that there is less competition for those jobs. For international students, if they come from a country like China that is developing rapidly, I often try to encourage them, think about opportunities in your own country, as well as in the U.S., because they might have special opportunities to get those jobs and move ahead in their careers. For people from other countries that don’t have those sorts of opportunities back home, to think about jobs with American corporations. A lot of that work can be really intellectually stimulating, and it’s a different kind of career path that they ought to think about. I would say, of my former PhD students, most of them are working for industry, and most of them look sort of happy with their situations there. Of students who have gone into the university faculty search, it’s a tough situation. It’s a very competitive job market in the U.S. Often people can wind up going from one temporary situation to another temporary situation and having many years before they can get into sort of a stable career, and they don’t look that happy. So I guess my career advice is to think about that range of possibilities.

CRAWFORD: There are certainly many other things we could discuss, I’m sure, but—

SELINGER: [laughs]

CRAWFORD: —unless you have anything else you’d like to mention before we end?

SELINGER: No, I think that covers it! I’m so glad you're interested in these things, Matt!

CRAWFORD: Yeah! I want to thank you very much for your time for this interview, and really appreciate you sharing your story.

SELINGER: Thank you for compiling these stories, and I’ll be interested to see what my colleagues have to say that are recorded in your archive, also.

CRAWFORD: Great. Sounds good.

SELINGER: Good.

[End]

________________
[1] Naval Research Lab
[2] Liquid Crystal Institute
[3] Center for Advanced Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials
[4] National Science Foundation
[5] Dr. Selinger subsequently clarified that a pre-proposal for the MRSEC grant was submitted in 2011 and the full proposal for this same grant was submitted in 2012. The National Science Foundation declined the application in 2013.
[6] Dr. Selinger subsequently noted that Dr. Meyer was a faculty member at Harvard University from 1970 until 1978, when he became a faculty member at Brandeis University.
[7] Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute