Oral History Interview with Antal Jákli by Matthew Crawford

August 17, 2023
September 1, 2023
Location of Interview: Antal Jákli’s Office at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

DR. MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kent State University. I am interviewing Dr. Antal Jákli. Today is August 17th, 2023. We are conducting this interview in Dr. Jákli’s office in the AMLCI building on the campus of Kent State University. Dr. Jákli, thanks for agreeing to speak with me today. First, I wanted to ask if you could tell us your current institutional affiliation and title.

ANTAL JÁKLI: I’m a Professor of Physics and Director of the Materials Science Graduate Program, and I’m doing research in the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute.

CRAWFORD: Great. How would you characterize your field of research or the kind of scientist that you are?

JÁKLI: I’m a physicist by training. Originally, I was trained to be a theoretical physicist, but I’m mainly doing experimental physics. I’m interested in liquid crystals and in general soft materials. All areas in soft materials and liquid crystals interest me.

CRAWFORD: I know from my own reading in the history of science and talking to other physicists that there is the division between theoretical and experimental physics. What was it like to go from being trained in theoretical physics to move into experimental? Was that difficult at all?

JÁKLI: I think it’s very useful and very interesting. I was trained as a theoretical physicist because in Hungary, there were only a very few institutions with decent instruments, so most of the people tried to do theory, because that was the cheap thing. So I’ve been trained and I got my PhD in statistical physics, but I did my diploma work and then PhD in the Central Research Institute for Physics in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where I joined a lab. I had some theory on some dielectric spectroscopy of liquid crystals, and my advisor told me, “We have an instrument here. Why don’t you try to do experiments and then see if you measure what you were calculating?” That’s how I started. For a while, I did both. Whenever I got stuck in calculations and models, it was refreshing to do experiments. Then whenever I got stuck in experiments, that nothing worked, it was refreshing to go back. But eventually, I became an experimentalist. Except that maybe now that I’m getting close to retirement—I don’t know how close, maybe five, ten years or so—and then especially during the COVID when we couldn't come in, I realized that I really enjoy doing theory. I have a number of students in my lab. I don’t have time to do experiments unless they ask me to show how it works. So, I try to interpret their results. I find it very useful to have an understanding of how the theorists are thinking and understanding what the experimentalist is doing. So, I think it turned out to be okay. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] It seems so! I definitely want to come back to some of these things that you've mentioned as we talk about your education and professional career, but I wanted to start with a few questions on your childhood. I was wondering if you could tell us what year you were born, where you grew up, and what your childhood was like.

JÁKLI: I was born in 1958 in Hungary. At that time, Hungary was a socialist country. Never been part of Soviet Union, was independent, but the system was socialist. But it was kind of the most liberal socialist system. At the time I grew up, I didn’t feel like there was suppression of speech or freedom of that. It was fairly liberal. I was born in a small city close to Austria, like five kilometers from the Austrian border. It was a county headquarter. About 100,000 people lived there. It was called Szombathely. I have a sister and a brother, was the three kids. I grew up in a family—we were fairly poor. We didn’t have a telephone in my whole childhood.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: My father was working. My mother was with us at home. But in this socialist system, it was not an issue. The education was free. So, I went to elementary school. I think all elementary, I got a straight A. And so I went to high school, which is called gymnasium in Hungary. At that time, you had to choose your specialization, even then, after elementary. You had a choice to choose between—there were four classes, or five in one year. I went to the best high school in that city. I think it was ranked number five in the country at that time, so it was a very good high school. There, I had a choice to choose mathematics specialization, physics, or literature, or kind of general. I think there was also a possibility to use language; like the language, they meant Russian language. I chose physics, and then I was admitted. You had to do an entrance exam, even to go to high school. So, I was in a specialized high school which specialized in physics. I realized that my classmates were ahead of me in physics when I went there, so I started reading Einstein, relativity and so on, and by the second, third year, it turned out that I was rank number one in physics, even in that school, in that class.

CRAWFORD: You were reading Einstein at what, age 14 or something?

JÁKLI: It was 14, yeah.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: I was really, really impressed by that. I was really amazed. And I think I could understand somewhat.

CRAWFORD: Can I just ask, what impressed you about it?

JÁKLI: The whole thing that that time is relative, and then it’s how you measure, and what happens when you are traveling with high speed and so on, it was really interesting. There were some competitions in countryside and just the school side, and I was quite good. Not the best in the country in the high school, but was the best in the high school, in physics. So, it was kind of natural to go to physics. Although it was not that simple. I was hesitating between history—I really enjoyed history; I still like reading books about the Middle East, and that’s what really—I liked that, and especially Hungarian history. And, we had a fantastic history teacher. He was an older guy, but he had very interesting stories and so on. But people convinced me that maybe you will have a hard time to live well, or I don’t know—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: —how much you will earn, and so on. You might understand. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Mmhmm. [laughs]

JÁKLI: Then I decided either go to engineering or straight to physics. Then someone visited—the Eötvös University—and there was a physicist training. Just not the physics, but especially training to be physicists. Then that classmate said that “All these physicists are crazy.” So, I was a little bit hesitating to be engineer or physicist.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: At the end, I flipped a coin, and physics won by 4-3. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: So, I ended up in the Eötvös University, as a physicist. We had to do entrance exams, and I was fairly good, I think; it was almost 100% or something. My parents didn’t know what physics means. My father was a locksmith. Although he had inventions, and he liked to figure out things, but they didn’t encourage me to do that.

CRAWFORD: Really!

JÁKLI: They didn’t They thought that it’s something like electrician or—

CRAWFORD: Really! [laughs]

JÁKLI: —fixing electricity, and so on. But I was the first one in the whole family—my mother had seven siblings, my father had eight, and in the whole big family, I was the first go to university.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: So, it was kind of surprising for them. I did enjoy also playing soccer. I did sports in the high school. I started as a sprinter, and then I joined the soccer club in my hometown, which at that time was in the first division. So I was in the junior team, and then when I was 18, I think some people got injured in the adult team, so two times, I had the chance to play among the adults.

CRAWFORD: Wow!

JÁKLI: Then I got entrance to the university. At that time, the system was that if are a healthy man, you have to serve one year in the military, so they deferred your admittance. So, I didn’t have to make another exam, I was accepted, but I was accepted a year later. So, I had to go to the military. In the military, I didn’t have a chance to play soccer too much. I was officially trained to be a sniper, but it was very funny how they decided this. They decided that they had a unit of like seven people, and they said that the tallest one has the biggest weapon; the second tallest, something which you can put on your shoulder—and then I don’t know the English name, and then it has a—you could shoot the tanks or other—so it launches—

CRAWFORD: Like a rocket launcher or something?

JÁKLI: Rocket launcher, yeah. A small rocket. And the third one will be the sniper. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: The smallest one will be in tank because—it’s the small guy. [laughs] So it’s based on that. I didn’t shoot any better at the beginning. [laughs] But I got a different training. At the end, I think I had to shoot well. I had to go to military for another six months after I already had my PhD, because the compulsory service was 18 months. So, if you were not going to university, you had to serve 18 months in one, but if you went, you were admitted, you served one year, and then six months, after that. After I had been in the military, I never touched any gun. I don’t have any gun. I don’t want to shoot. I’m not—I didn’t really like to be there, but I had to be. Then I entered in this—Eötvös University is in Budapest; it was not in my hometown. So, I left my hometown, and I completed whatever was needed. I also got straight A in the university. Somehow, I could follow—I had some classmates who were not that diligent or they just followed their own way. It turned out that I was performing quite well in the university, too. At that time, we didn’t have that bachelor and master system. If you go to university, there was some training—like physicists, you couldn't do bachelor. If someone went to be like a teacher, they went to a college. They didn’t call it university. They called it high school, actually, which here would be just the whatever after elementary school. But at this time, they would call it here college. It’s an undergraduate training. They had to be there for three and a half years, I believe. So like teachers, they didn’t have to go to university, or some other thing. The physicists, they had to do for five years. This comes with a master right away, so I got a master. I didn’t have a bachelor in physics because you couldn't stop after three years and so on; we have to do it. I did my master research in this Central Research Institute for Physics, and that’s when I learned about liquid crystals. I had a teacher who had been teaching solid state physics in university, and he told me that he thinks that I would like to learn about liquid crystals.

CRAWFORD: What was the name of that teacher?

JÁKLI: Geza Tichy.

CRAWFORD: Could you spell that?

JÁKLI: Yeah. Geza is G-E-Z-A, and the last name is T-I-C-H-Y. I really liked him, and then I think he liked me, too. He suggested me to go to there, that place, and study liquid crystals, because liquid crystals is kind of one-man physics. He said that you learned theoretical physics, but if you do liquid crystals, you can make your own sample, you can make experiments, and you can make your own theory. Nuclear physicists or particle physicists, they were part of a big group of hundreds of people, and you are doing one very specific thing. He said that “You will not like that.”

CRAWFORD: Why did he think that?

JÁKLI: Because he saw that I performed well in all different topics, not only just this one. I still liked history and reading. He said, “You like to do different things.” And I really thank him because he was completely right. I enjoyed it.

CRAWFORD: Pursuing a field of physics or a topic in physics that allowed you the kind of variety—?

JÁKLI: Yeah, because it’s relatively cheap. You don’t need very heavy instruments. You can do things in an x-ray facility and so on. But you just make your own liquid crystal film, which would be relatively cheap, maybe $50 or less, and then you make your own experiments. You need to apply voltage, and then you have a microscope, and you can—so that’s what I did, and that’s how I started doing experiments. In my master thesis, I did actually theory, still. But when I did my PhD in the same place, that’s when my boss told me that maybe it's time to learn how to do the experiments.

CRAWFORD: I see. So, was your master’s thesis on liquid crystals?

JÁKLI: Yeah, it was already on liquid crystals. Then I got admitted to the PhD program there, and I started doing experiments. I started working on ferroelectric liquid crystals, which were very new at that time. Still I’m working on right now—again I’m working on ferroelectric liquid crystals. There are different liquid crystals that could be ferroelectric.

CRAWFORD: Could you, just for the recording, explain what a ferroelectric liquid crystal is?

JÁKLI: Ferroelectric materials have been known since 1910. They were crystals. This is the name such as that it’s something like ferromagnetic. Ferromagnetic, there is a spontaneous magnetization. And these has a spontaneous electric polarization. So basically, molecular dipoles are all, or on average, pointing in the same direction. Normal liquid crystals, what you use in this place, they are not polar. So, it doesn't matter if you apply—so if you apply AC field, it doesn't matter if you have a positive or negative; you have to apply AC field. It’s something like, you can switch—like when you press a button and you press the bell, the bell is ringing as long as you are pushing. After you are not pushing, it’s not ringing. These nematic liquid crystals are rotating or changing properties as long as you are pushing the button, or you apply a field. Ferroelectrics are like you have a switch. You turn on the switch and then the light is on. In fact, some of them you can even turn the switch to zero position and it will be still on. So, it remains stable. You switch one direction, you can take it off, it remains there. And when you want to switch to other direction, you have to apply, like turning off, or in the opposite direction.

CRAWFORD: Is that a bistable liquid crystal?

JÁKLI: It can be bistable, yeah, very good point. That’s how we called it, yeah. So, this offered new displays where you don’t have to refresh. Here you still—there’s a refresh rate of a few hundred hertz, you refresh the picture. So, it will use electricity, draw some energy, as long as you are watching it, and when you turn it off, it’s not. But when the picture is on, the display is on, it use it. But this one, you would just change the pixels, and then you wouldn't use any energy. It’s like a picture. You can turn it off and the last picture on your TV would stay there. That was the wish that would happen. It didn’t really happen like that, but they are much faster, and also these nematics switch in about a millisecond, or a few milliseconds; those were switching in microseconds, so—

CRAWFORD: The ferroelectrics?

JÁKLI: The ferroelectrics, yeah, so that was a big thing about those. Then I did my PhD, and by accident, I observed that when you are switching them, they are also making sound.

CRAWFORD: Huh!

JÁKLI: They are vibrating. It turned out that it was completely understandable, if had read about that, that they are also piezoelectric. Piezo means that if you are applying field, you can get mechanical deformation. Or, if you apply mechanical deformation, you can induce electricity. Interestingly, piezoelectricity was discovered earlier than ferroelectricity. This was discovered by the Curie brothers in 1890. Then later it turned out that all ferroelectrics material should be piezoelectric. No one observed that. That’s what I observed during my PhD, and that was my PhD work.

CRAWFORD: I see. Is that what accounts for the vibrating? The mechanical deformation?

JÁKLI: Yeah. And so, we even made some speakers from
ferroelectric liquid crystals where you can hear the—as what field you apply.

CRAWFORD: Really!

JÁKLI: And you could also see it! Because it also changes the picture. And so we had patent that we can make a speaker from that, and a speaker can be just a flat thing, and then you can make—my big dream was I can make a display when you can make a voice coming from the mouth of the people who are speaking. Wherever it’s coming, you can make it like that. It didn’t really turn out to be working completely like that. One reason is that piezoelectricity not only it makes vibration, but it might only ruin the display on long term, or something. We also had some patents—well, that was later, then. So, I was working on that, and we had a visitor in that institute when I finished my PhD. It was Peter Palffy-Muhoray, who is working here in this Institute. At that time, he was in Canada. He had Hungarian heritage. He was born in Hungary, too. He visited my advisor, kind of. We really liked each other because he did experiment, and—well, he liked to work at night—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: —and still like to work at night, I believe.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: —and then I worked the daytime. We didn’t have too many instruments, so he needed something, and took it from me, and in the morning, I go back and I took it back from him.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: It was kind of a teasing with each other, but he had a good sense of humor. We were telling jokes to each other. He said that he has a postdoc position after I finished. He was, at the time that after he visited, he said he is moving to Kent State, and then he will have a postdoc position and I should apply. I applied. I didn’t hear anything, but then I got a letter from Alfred Saupe, who was a very famous scientist, that he would like to hire me as a postdoc. Not Peter Palffy. Peter had a position for optics, and then I didn’t do optics, so I was not the best suited for that. But he talked to Alfred Saupe about me, who just lost a postdoc, his postdoc didn’t work well, and so he had to say goodbye to the postdoc, and Peter said that I will work, he can guarantee, or something. So, I ended up the postdoc of Alfred Saupe, who was actually much considered to be a much higher position, because he was very famous. The interesting thing that Alfred Saupe was famous about his theory. He did Maier-Saupe theory, which he published, 1958, when I was born. Then by the time I joined his group, he became an experimentalist, too. So, I felt that his theory was when I was born and he also became an experimentalist; kind of interesting. And it was a fantastic thing. So, I came here in ’89, as a postdoc. This building was not there.

CRAWFORD: Right, the current building that we're in.

JÁKLI: There is a Science Research Building which belongs to Physics and Chemistry; that was the Liquid Crystal Institute.

CRAWFORD: Was that the first interaction you had had with the Liquid Crystal Institute, applying for the postdoc upon Dr. Palffy’s recommendation?

JÁKLI: No, I had another interaction with Bill Doane, at a socialist liquid crystal conference, which interestingly Bill Doane attended. At that time, they had a separate conference for socialist countries—

CRAWFORD: Really!

JÁKLI: —in liquid crystals. That was in Bulgaria. I think it was ’87 or something.

CRAWFORD: You say it’s interesting that Bill Doane attended. Because he’s not coming from a socialist—?

JÁKLI: Yeah, because it was not a socialist country, U.S. But I think they invited people from other countries, too. And especially in ’87, it was almost close to the transition when some socialist countries became democratic countries, like Hungary became in ’90. It was one of the first, I believe. Anyway, then we were playing cards with Bill Doane.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: He was a very nice guy. Then I think I won one dollar from him, and then—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: —he said, “Okay, I will give it to you. I don’t have it here.” [laughs] Then he forgot to give it to me. And when I came here, I reminded him [laughs]—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: —“You owe me one dollar.”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: And he invited me for a lunch. [laughs] “This is with—whatever interest.” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: He also talked about the PDLCs[1] and others they discovered here, so I knew. So, I had these two things: I knew from Peter that this Alfred Saupe is here, very famous, and then this is the biggest institute in liquid crystals.

CRAWFORD: Were you aware of the Liquid Crystal Institute just professionally?

JÁKLI: Yeah, I had even seen the movie in Hungarian, which I think is called The Strawberry Statement here, the title of the movie. In Hungary, the title was Strawberry and Blood. I think they translated it like that because in Hungarian, it’s shorter. It’s cooler.

CRAWFORD: Could you say it in Hungarian?

JÁKLI: Yeah, Eper És Vér. So, I knew about that it was famous about the demonstrations, and then four students were shot. And then there—I really loved Neil Young music. I had kind of a band, with my friends who were playing, and I was kind of translating from English to Hungarian, and they were singing. They really loved Neil Young, so I was translating Neil Young songs to Hungarian. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: I was organizing concert for them, and then heavy instruments I was carrying. [laughs] Otherwise I didn’t play any instrument, but I liked the music, and that who was the singer was my friend. That’s how I was affiliated with that. I really loved Neil Young because of that. So, I found it really appealing to come here.

CRAWFORD: Right, because you knew about Kent State from kind of the popular culture references, but then also the LCI.[2]

JÁKLI: Also, I knew about meeting Bill Doane and Peter Palffy, and that’s how I—yeah.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned there was the socialist conference on liquid crystals. Did you go to that conference regularly as a graduate student?

JÁKLI: Yeah, I think that was the second of that conference. The first one was in Halle in ’85, in Germany. Which is interesting, because after my postdoc I lived in Halle, Germany, for two years. The second one—so it should have been in ’87—was in Borovets, in Bulgaria. That’s where I met Bill Doane.

CRAWFORD: Just thinking more broadly, was that fairly typical in science at the time? In other words, in other fields like solid state physics, would there be a socialist solid state physics conference?

JÁKLI: I don’t know, but probably. That reminds me of something. During the time when Peter was in Hungary, there was an international liquid crystal conference in Germany, which was in West Germany at that time. There was East Germany and West Germany. Peter told me that I should go, and I said, “Oh, I don’t have money for that.” He said, “Don’t worry. I’ll help you to write letters asking them to support you, waive your registration or something. And I’m going there with my colleague. We’ll go by car, and we can take you.” So, I got a visa for one entry to West Germany. At that time, you couldn't go everywhere in the world. I could go to everywhere in socialist countries, but not in West Germany.

CRAWFORD: I see. Is that why a socialist conference in liquid crystals existed? Because it was easier—?

JÁKLI: Yeah, because you would need to have a special permission. You couldn't even travel there, yeah. I think that was the logic. The funny thing was that we went through Austria. The plan was I could transfer through Austria and then enter to West Germany once and then come back. Peter forgot about that, and then we were looking for some hotel, on the borderline in Germany. Sometimes it went over to Germany, sometimes Austria, because there was no real border. Just like now there is no border between Hungary and Austria. Then I was sitting in the backseat, and I said, “Peter, I have only one entry!” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: But fortunately, no one asked my [laughs] passport. It was really funny, though. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: Worried that, “If you go to a hotel, I have to go
back [laughs]!” because that was it. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: But they didn’t ask my passport. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: So that was my first travel to—

CRAWFORD: What year would that have been?

JÁKLI: I think it was ’88, probably. Maybe I had been in Italy before, but just the first international liquid crystal conference—I had been in Italy I think before, but there you had to have a special permission and so on.

CRAWFORD: How difficult was it to get that permission to, say, go to—?

JÁKLI: I think it was fairly easy. I think I even got some scholarship from George Soros at that time—

CRAWFORD: Oh, really? Okay.

JÁKLI: —to cover my costs in this conference, and so on. It is an interesting thing about Soros, because—this is politics—the current Hungarian prime minister got a Soros scholarship, studying politics in England. One year he spent in England, and he learned English, and he learned politics, and he learned from Soros. Then now he’s a big opposition for Soros.

CRAWFORD: Right. You're talking about Viktor Orbán?

JÁKLI: Viktor Orbán. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Interesting.

JÁKLI: Anyway, I also—I think not only once but several times I got, so this was very useful for us. Soros was born in Hungary but became very rich in the U.S.

CRAWFORD: I know you said that Hungary was a socialist country and you never felt like there was any oppression or issues with freedom of speech and so forth. But being part of this socialist world, did you feel like you had full access to the world of science? Like did you have access to journals and international communications and things like that?

JÁKLI: We had access through—this research institute was the biggest one, and kind of the richest. We had journals. Not all the journals, but we had like Physical Review Letters, Physical Review, and so on. But not the full access. So, go to a conference in a non-socialist country, you could—at that time, you could get permission—you had to have a visa. So, you had to have a visa, and you had to get a permission, to go. But again, that was just a few years before the changes. And kind of from the beginning of eighties, it was in the air. People started to criticize why there is only one-party system. They were not sentenced to go to jail just because they were criticizing. So, everything was opened. There was even private industry.

CRAWFORD: Wow, okay.

JÁKLI: Small companies could be private. And kind of Hungary was a pioneer in that one. I think because in ’56 there was a revolution, which was suppressed by the Soviets, but after that, there was kind of a deal between the Hungarian president and the Soviets that, “Look, we don’t want another uprising, or other things, and we can make it a little softer.”

CRAWFORD: I’m curious how it compares—because I talked to Dr. Lavrentovich, who grew up in the Ukraine, which is a different country and much more part of the Soviet system.

JÁKLI: Yeah, it was part of Soviet—

CRAWFORD: I know he talked about when he was in graduate school, I believe roughly around the same time as you, if he wanted a journal article, like a copy of it, you had to like submit a form, because the photocopiers were controlled by the state, it sounds like, because they were worried about samizdat and underground literature and stuff. You didn’t have anything like that?

JÁKLI: No, no, it was much, much better for us. I was fortunate to be—there was still Soviet Army in Hungary. And the person who first said that the Soviet Army should go out was Viktor Orbán, who is now—people say he’s a big friend of Putin, which I don’t believe so. I don’t think so. He is just a strange politician.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: He want to get connections. Anyway, I don’t want to go in politics. My wife is a political science professor, and my daughter is also a political scientist. So [laughs]—I don’t want to go into politics, but it’s interesting.

CRAWFORD: Yes, it is, for sure. I think it’s interesting for me to think about how political contexts can influence how science was done, especially during the Cold War era and so forth. Perhaps we should stop there for today and we can pick up at our next session.

JÁKLI: I will think about maybe I have some more memories if there was some suppression or what, but as far as I remember, the things were much more liberal, at that time.

CRAWFORD: Great. Thank you for your time, and we'll pick up next week!

[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. I am interviewing Dr. Antal Jákli. Today is September 1st, 2023. This is our second interview session. We are conducting this interview in Dr. Jákli’s office in the AMLCI building on the campus of Kent State University. Last time we had kind of made it all the way through to when you were coming to the Liquid Crystal Institute, but I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your undergraduate and graduate education. I was wondering if you could give us a sense of what it was like to study science. Did you have a lot of opportunity to collaborate with faculty? Did you have research opportunities? Was there good student culture? I just wonder if you could give us a little bit of a sense of what it was like learning science, either in an undergraduate or graduate context, or both.

JÁKLI: As I mentioned last time, I got admitted to a class or a program there; they were training physicists. Not physics teachers or anyone who works or studies physics as a major, but specifically physicists to do research and science. This group, they admitted only like 20 students in the whole country in that program—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: —and out of the 20, like 18 were boys and then only 2 were girls. I hope this ratio changed by now, but it was not part of the culture in the high school education; somehow the girls didn’t like physics. So, we had a very small cohort of people. We took all the classes together. There was no option that I take this credit hour for that time; there was no such things as credit hours. Thinking back, we had to do every semester around 30 credit hours—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: —which is a huge number. So, it was like a high school. Even here, in the high school, sometimes it goes like credit hours, and then people take different approaches. Interestingly, in the first year, we didn’t study any physics. They said that in order to study physics, you have to understand mathematics. So, we had like 10 credit hours of mathematics in the first year, which I think it was a bright idea, because then they could teach physics in another level, because you already speak the language. So, something like you can teach people when they already speak English; if they don’t speak English, you have a hard time to teach them. And so that was the philosophy. Then we learned just physics, or lots of—in addition to physics, we had to study some other courses, but not really important. Like we were supposed to study military knowledge, also, and those who were already in the military, it was waived. We had to shoot, for example. As I said last time, I was in the army and I was trained as a sniper, so there were these two ladies in our group, sometimes we went and helped them to shoot and stuff [laughs] just to pass—that one was not very serious. The other one was the history of the Hungarian workers, or labor—it’s something like teaching us the socialist—about Marx and Lenin and some economy based on their views, which we also didn’t take very seriously, and fortunately no one—we also had to study English and Russian. Russian were compulsory, but we found that English is very important. Even our professors said that English is kind of the language of the physicist. Not the physics, but we have to go to conferences. We even arranged that some of the classes were in English.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: But they were taught by Hungarians. We had some professors who spent some time in England or abroad, and they spoke English. So, we learned the Hunglish, basically. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: That kind of physics-English. Otherwise, I think we just took only physics courses.

CRAWFORD: The majority of the education was focused on physics?

JÁKLI: Yeah. We were involved in research maybe from the third year. We could do some summer research projects. We got involved in those. But otherwise, we rather had competitions. They had problem-solving competitions, and that was something prestigious. They gave us like six problems. We got like a week to solve those. And they were something that they were not solved. You couldn't find literature. Of course, there was no Google, so if you spent too much time on finding obscure books or something, you were not able to solve it. I liked those things. If someone were winning there or were among the best three—this was—the nationwide competition, so even others studying some kind of physics or related to that could participate.

CRAWFORD: Would you say generally competition among science students was encouraged?

JÁKLI: Yeah. It was typically theoretical, because as I said, we didn’t have too many instruments. I was I think ranked number three twice on this one, and the last time I was winning, so I was really proud of that for a while, for that. That gave you something, like at least your classmates, they said, “Okay, you are not that stupid,” or so. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Would it open up other opportunities for you? Like could it lead to collaborations with faculty, or—?

JÁKLI: I think you could get better advisor. In the fourth year, you had to choose an advisor who will advise you during your diploma, or of course the master thesis. I was lucky to get an advisor in the Central Research Institute for Physics.

CRAWFORD: I see. Was this the advisor that recommended liquid crystals to you because they thought it was a good—?

JÁKLI: That was one of my physics teachers who recommended me to study liquid crystals, and that’s how I approached them. I still have contact with my former advisor.

CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah?

JÁKLI: We're still working on—last time when you came, we had a meeting, and my former student and my former advisor was involved in that—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: And the student, my former student, we have a group now working on some specific programs, and we have a meeting on Teams once a month or something like that.

CRAWFORD: What is that like to work on a team that has former students and your former advisor, and these multi-intellectual generations?

JÁKLI: It’s very good, because we kind of know from each other what you can expect. My former student who studied here and then went back to Hungary, he and his current student visited me in March and then they've been here for six weeks, and then we are writing the second paper of this. Of course, it’s not like just from that; they kept working on it there, and us here. So, it was a very, very good one. Both my advisee and his advisee, they are very good experimentalists, but they are not so good in writing. They’d rather spend all the time in the lab, but they don’t want to write.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: I’m a person who says, “Okay, now it’s enough, we have to write it down. We have to think about it.” My former advisor is typically very good in criticizing us, so that’s—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: —which is good. She acts like a reviewer. Then, of course, she has reviewed lots of papers. That’s how it helps us. So, it’s a good group. I’m involved in several group projects. We have a collaboration with Oleg Lavrentovich, and others. So sometimes we have problems—whatever is common interest for us. If it’s not, then I’m doing whatever I am doing, and they are doing what they do. So not only we work together and no one else.

CRAWFORD: What is the name of your former advisor and this former student?

JÁKLI: The former advisor is Ágnes Buka, and the former student is Péter Salamon.

CRAWFORD: Could you spell the last names?

JÁKLI: S-A-L-A-M-O-N.

CRAWFORD: Great. You mentioned 20 students that entered this physics program from around the country. Did you have a sense, or you and your cohort, of what was the career trajectory for physicists at that time?

JÁKLI: We had a sense of that once we were there. One trajectory is to go to a research institute. The other is you go to the university, and you become a professor. Or you go to industry. Industrial jobs were not very common in Hungary around that time. Not too many physicists ended up in industry. I think out of 20, we finished around 13 or 14. Some realized that this is not what they really wanted, and that’s quite common because you have to decide when you are the age of 18 what you want to do in your whole life. Then it’s natural. Some became doctor. Three or four became computer scientists. The computers started at that time, and they realized that this is something very good, and I assume that they had a good choice. And some ended up in industry. A few ended up in the university in Hungary. I think three of us ended up in the U.S. out of that group. One is working in a Berkeley research lab. The other one, I’m not sure; I lost contact with him. But I just heard that he was—he retired already, and then went back to Hungary. But he was in some industry in the U.S. So, most of them stayed in Hungary. We don’t have too many contacts. Sometimes, some of us try to call the team together. You know, “Let’s meet, drink a beer,” or something. Then the last time I think we had only like six people who were available or so. We may not even know what their address is, or so.

CRAWFORD: When you were finishing up your master’s degree, was it just kind of automatic that you would go on to a PhD?

JÁKLI: Not quite. Some didn’t go. Especially those who ended up in industry—like some ended up in a nuclear plant that just opened at that time—I think one or two. And we had some other big companies, and they needed someone with knowledge on physics; they didn’t go to PhD. I guess probably like 8 or 10 went to a PhD. Not only me, some of the others also went to the research institutes, working where I had been working. I think two of us ended up in the U.S. after that. Because there, you had an opportunity to be involved in research, and it was published, and then you had a collaboration through your advisor, and then somehow you got invited or so.

CRAWFORD: Did you ever consider going into industry?

JÁKLI: No, no.

CRAWFORD: Why is that?

JÁKLI: I don’t know. I thought, “It’s too specific. I have to work on some problems.” I was much more interested in a wider array of knowledge, and I tried to find new subjects, and so on. Yeah, I’ve never been interested in that.

CRAWFORD: Then between the research institute track or university professor track, did you have a preference?

JÁKLI: Yeah, in Hungary, I was in this research institute, and when I went back from Germany, ’95 until ’99, I’ve been involved in university teaching at an engineering university; it’s just a kind of an engineering school in Budapest, and I’ve been teaching. Then also gave some classes in my former university in Eötvös University. But not much of that, then. When I came here in ’99, I was hired as a senior research fellow, which were 100% research duties. And I kind of noticed that my salary didn’t increase as much as a professor’s, and also I have seen that—I was involved in teaching, from the second year I came, from 2000. Some of the faculty went to unpaid leave, so they asked me to substitute him. And then this one-year unpaid leave became three years, and then after, he retired. And then as it kind of became my course, I developed the course. Then I talked to—the director, at that time, was Oleg Lavrentovich—that, you know, “I am teaching as much as the others, and I really think that I’m better off to be a faculty member.” And so, I had already been a Doctor of Science degree in Hungary, and he understood that, and he had helped me to transition. Which was not trivial, because here, you cannot just simply transition, because you have to have a position there, also. So, I had to start over as like an assistant professor, but they gave me like three years of credit for my previous teaching, and so on. So, I could go to associate level after three years, and then had to work another six years to go to a full professor level. But at the beginning I felt very bad that at the age of 40-something, I start as an assistant professor. But then I said, “I don’t care. It’s not important.” I could get more students, also, is an important thing. And I kind of like teaching. My students may not like [laughs] if I teach, but [laughs] I like teaching.

CRAWFORD: Well, we never know, right? [laughs]

JÁKLI: [laughs] No! Yeah, I developed a few courses which kind of there was no books, and I wrote a textbook which was based on the course I’d been teaching for five or so years

CRAWFORD: Which course was that?

JÁKLI: This was kind of physical properties of liquid crystals, and I published the book in 2006 with my former postdoc advisor, Alfred Saupe. They gave this title here, One- and Two-Dimensional Fluids, which I didn’t like, but somehow, they found it interesting.[3]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: They still wanted me to have a second edition, but I said that not with that title. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Why don’t you like the title?

JÁKLI: Because it also has three-dimensional fluids! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Oh, right, so it’s not—

JÁKLI: Not really appropriate. But they found it catchy or something. Of course, I have been teaching other courses, and I have a different view what I would write, but on the other hand, I have no time to do that. Writing a book in physics is not that important than in social sciences, I believe. In social sciences, it’s almost imperative that you have a book, and that’s how they know—here, it’s more important to have published papers and citations. You write a book, it takes a couple of years, and then you don’t get as much citations as when you write a paper. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Why is that? Is citations sort of the currency of physics, then?

JÁKLI: I think yeah. The book is not focused that much. There are some review papers which are really well cited, and then to write a good review paper is good. And students always start with review papers. But kind of no one has time to read a book, fully. And I think you need more specialized knowledge, and it’s already too wide for that, so it’s a different thing. To write a good review paper, I think if you can write in the Review of Modern Physics, that’s something. That goes only by invitation. That has the highest impact in physics, like 55 or so. That has some value. I’ve been fortunate to write once a review paper in that, together with Jonathan Selinger and Oleg Lavrentovich. That time, I was invited to write. That was also a very big work. That was like 70 printed pages, and—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: —like 550 citations. But that has more citations or more respect than a book.

CRAWFORD: It carries more weight than a book.

JÁKLI: Yeah, at that time I found that I was proud that I published the book, but I don’t think it’s that important now. We wrote a couple of book chapters, but that has no value at all. Because there are some edited books which someone edits and then asks you to write a chapter, and only the editor gets the credit, so I don’t really like that. Then sometimes they say that, oh, I have seven books, but all edited, and I don’t think it is the same value when you are writing it yourself. It’s more like you have friends, or what kind of a connection; then you can get people to write.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] A couple more questions about your education, and then I want to start talking about your time at the LCI. You've talked about the physics teacher that suggested liquid crystals to you. We talked a little bit about your former advisor. Were there any other professors or individuals that played an important role during your graduate career? It could be other students, or—

JÁKLI: In fact, I had one person, his name is Istvan Jánossy—J-Á-N-O-S-S-Y—who was in the group. Then my advisor was traveling, at that time, for a year, and so I learned a lot from him. Actually I learned more than from my advisor. He has a very broad knowledge on physics. His father was the director of the whole Central Research Institute in the 1950s, and he was born in a family where the father was one of the most famous physicists at that time in Hungary. He had two other brothers, and all three of them became physicists.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: So, it was kind of that physics was in his blood, so he had very good understanding. Lots of times, I had needed something to explain, and he was the one who explained it to me. I really appreciated his help. Still, if I go to Hungary, I still invite him to, “Let’s have a beer,” or a dinner, or something, and ask his opinion on different things. He retired by now. He’s a very shy person, but I learned lots of physics from him. I think I learned the most physics from him in Hungary. Then I learned much more when I became a postdoc here, from my postdoc advisor.

CRAWFORD: Was he like a senior graduate student at the time?

JÁKLI: No, he was already a senior research fellow. Because we were in the Research Institute, so he was at I think scientific advisor level or something. But he had other students. I was not his student.

CRAWFORD: Then, your research for your PhD, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about it, and how you came to the topic. Was it an extension of what you had been doing for your master’s, or—?

JÁKLI: It was kind of an extension. In master’s, I did dielectric studies of normal nematic liquid crystals. When I became a PhD student, just a few years before there were some interesting publications on ferroelectric liquid crystals, new kind of liquid crystals. Then when we discussed with my advisor what should be a good topic, I suggested that I would like to be involved in that one. It was new for her, too, and new for me, so we kind of learned together, and invented a direction which we didn’t expect. Actually, it was during the time that my advisor was abroad. Then I was suggested by Jánossy, who I told you that I learned a lot from, that we would try to align liquid crystals. You can align—I don’t know, it’s too specific. So liquid crystal is like a crystal that you can make monocrystal, but it’s also liquid. But it turns out that you can rub some surface, and you put it between two glasses; if you make some direction in the glass, everything is aligned. But it doesn't work for the smectic liquid crystals which I studied. So, we studied shear flow, which worked. For that I was suggested to use a speaker. So, I had a normal loudspeaker, and then I had a rod [connected from the membrane of the speaker to the glass plate of the liquid crystal film], and then I applied voltage to the speaker, and it was vibrating, and it [made the liquid crystal] aligned. Then by accident, when I applied voltage on that liquid crystal, I heard that the speaker is responding.

CRAWFORD: I see.

JÁKLI: So, the liquid crystal was making the mechanical vibration and then the speaker just amplified. So, you could basically apply the voltage to the liquid crystal, and then it activated the speaker. Then we figured out with Jánossy what was this effect. It turned out this is piezoelectricity, which is a fluid, which is a new thing, because piezoelectric materials were all solid crystals before. That was something which defined that will be my study. So, I got my PhD for studying those piezoelectric effects.

CRAWFORD: Just to be clear, are you saying you discovered that characteristic of these liquid crystals?

JÁKLI: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CRAWFORD: Just by—you applied the voltage—?

JÁKLI: Yeah, by accident. We thought we still had the—if we apply voltage on the speaker, and so on. I spent a couple of years there, so I got my PhD. When I came here in ’89, I got a different project from Saupe. I had to study some viscosities in a magnet and so on. At that time, I did write programs, as everyone, and so I had all the setup, and then it was computer controlled. Then I told my advisor that, “You know, I had an interesting observation during my PhD. I would like to further study it.” I told him that you can make a speaker from these ferroelectrics. He didn’t believe me. But he said that, “If you demonstrate it to me, then you can study it.”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: Then I demonstrated, and then he was very interested in this one. I think basically with him, we figured out the major theory behind it, what is the physical mechanism. In Hungary, basically we just said that by symmetry it can happen, but what is the underlying microscopic mechanism was not clear. Saupe, as I told you, was one of the most famous theorists, when he was a PhD student, and by the time I came here, he became an experimentalist, but he still was really good in theory. He asked me if I had an idea of how to explain. I said, “Sure, I have an idea. I can write it for you. I need a couple of weeks.” I wrote like 15 pages. Then he started reading, and the second equation he said, “That’s wrong.” [laughs] “Let’s start over.” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: When he didn’t understand something, he was so enthusiastic. Then we figured it out, and then we made a theory. Then it was interesting—once he understood it, “Okay, then now we can go somewhere else. It’s not interesting anymore.” [laughs] I think I kind of inherited his point of view [laughs] of how to do this. I really learned a lot. I realized that he was still a theorist. When you are a musician, you understand something is just a little not in tune or something; no one noticed [laughs] about it. It’s the same as you are a chess player or an expert on some subject. Like you are an expert in the 1800s Spanish history or so; you pick up everything which is not right. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Yeah, exactly. Right, right. [laughs] Last time we ended with your transition to coming to be postdoc or a research associate here at the Liquid Crystal Institute. This was in 1989. As you mentioned, you came to work with Alfred Saupe. Unfortunately, he has passed away, so I won’t have the opportunity to interview him, but I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about who he was, what he means to the Liquid Crystal Institute, and what it was like for you to come to work with him.

JÁKLI: In ’58, he published a paper that was the first successful explanation of the isotropic liquid—nematic liquid crystal transition. He explained why something, if you cool down, become a liquid crystal. And so, people have been reading that and citing this. As far as I heard from Bill Doane, in the end of sixties—this Institute was established in ’65 by Glenn Brown, and Bill Doane was one of the first who had been hired. The other one was Jim Ferguson. Then they had some money from, I don’t know, DOE, or DOD, or something, and they were thinking whom to invite.[4] They wanted to invite someone famous. Then that’s how I think somehow, they were lucky to get Alfred, who was not very happy with his situation in Germany, probably, at that point, and then he was happy to come here. So that was a big addition to the Institute. It gave some kind of a fame. Some people just came here to visit just to discuss with him—like de Gennes, who was also a theorist, who got Nobel Prize, he knew Alfred Saupe and then wanted to discuss theoretical works, and some others. But eventually he started working on experiments, especially lyotropic liquid crystals, which is another kind of liquid crystals, what we use in this place. What we use in this place, they are so called thermotropic, and then there’s another kind of whole class of liquid crystals—the lyotropics have much more biological applications. Like cell membranes are liquid crystals. DNA, RNA in aqueous environment they form liquid crystal phases. Some neurons have liquid crystal analogy, and so on. He had been studying that. Then it was a new subject and he started to do experiments, too. He wrote his own programs. When I came here, he wrote his own—there was no programs to do plotting, or making graphs, and so on, or just to run an experiment and so on. As I told you, I was applying to Peter Palffy to come here, but he was a good friend of Alfred. Peter came here I believe in ’85 or so. He said that he just came here because Alfred was here. He knew that Alfred is looking for a postdoc, so he recommended me, and that’s how I got an invitation from him. So, it was actually a bigger thing for me. I really appreciated Peter, but he didn’t have that fame, as him. So, he was really a very particular person. He was very, very strict. If you didn’t understand something and if a student tried to lie or something to pretend that he did something, he was really angry. So sometimes in our group meetings, some people just were crying. But on the other hand, if you told him that, “Sorry, I don’t understand; but I have this idea.” If you were honest, he liked you. I was not a student, so it was not a big deal for me to tell him, “I don’t know,” and he liked that, and he said, “I don’t know either, so let’s try to figure it out.” But the student just felt pressure to say something, and then he got angry with that. But then he also explained how to do, and he helped people. But he just had this kind of a—that’s how his brain worked. So, he asked me, when I came here, to make my own heat stage. A heat stage is a small oven when you can put your material and you can heat, and you have some window you can watch it through microscope and so on, or you can do whatever you want, and you can control the temperature very precisely. It’s because thermotropics, by the name, are very sensitive to temperature. He said that you can buy heat stages, it cost a lot, but if something breaks down you have to send it back to the company, it takes couple of weeks, and then you cannot work. But if you make it yourself, you can fix it right away. Then he always advised us to buy twice as many parts as you needed, because if something breaks down, you know this is the part to replace, and then it’s working in six hours, you fixed it, you can work with that. It’s also very good practice of doing something. You have to go to the machine shop and then make things, and then mechanical work, and you have to control it, which is electronics. So, you learn a big deal of physics and some practical things. I still have it. I still work in that heat stage. I was not very good in soldering; I remember that. [laughs] I spent so much time.

CRAWFORD: Had you ever built your own laboratory equipment before, or was this the first time?

JÁKLI: No, that was the first time.

CRAWFORD: How did you figure out how to do it?

JÁKLI: He gave us some literature to read about that, and you could read. It took a couple of months, but it was a good entry. Then he had a project, he got some DARPA[5] project, and he told me “You have to work on that project.” I liked writing programs already at that time. We learned in the university. That’s another thing we learned that I forgot to say; we learned Fortran to do programming. At that time, you had this punch card. I don’t know if you know that. But you had to write the code, and each command was a punch card, and the stack of the punch cards were the programs. Somehow the light went through this way, and then, I don’t know how it really worked, but you wrote the program and then somewhere they created the punch card and you got a stack of that. Then if you let it fall down, then you were [laughs]—you were screwed! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: You had to make it again. And you put it into this instrument, and either it went through—or not, and then it got an error message. Then you had to figure out the problem, and then you had to create another punch card, and then, you know, three or four iterations. Now, you don’t have to do it. You write a program, and you make an executable something, and the computer is doing it. But I enjoyed that something you can design and tell the computer what to do, and it’s doing it. And it teaches you how to explain things. Because a computer doesn't have a prior knowledge, just have to say that “Go right and left”; you have to tell what is right, what is left, and then one step, two steps, and you have to design, step by step. These days there are higher level languages, when they do some steps, and you can tell it to go to the other store. But at that time, they had like 64 kilobytes, when I was a PhD student. We got the Commodore 64. It means that that was the memory, and the program had to be less than 64 kilobytes. I remember one summer, we were hired by a company doing—what people used—most of them, they were playing games—so to make some games. We had to make a Tour de France game on a Commodore 64. Three of us in a whole summer.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: We got lots of money for that. I mean, at that time. I think I lived for two, three years on that.

CRAWFORD: Wow!

JÁKLI: My parents didn’t have too much opportunity to support me. That was on a source code. It’s very low-level, so every step, you had to save. Because that’s how you could save memory, and so on. And that was an interesting thing.

CRAWFORD: Did the game actually get made?

JÁKLI: The game got made, yeah, and it was used, yeah. Later, in Hungary, we bought—after I went back from my postdoc—so yeah, I might jump too much, okay, but—

CRAWFORD: That’s okay!

JÁKLI: —I went back to Hungary, and then we bought an old house. I already had two kids. The house, we knew that it needs improvement, but we hope that not right now. There was a big storm, and the roof collapsed, and so we had to fix it. That was lots of money, so I found a job, kind of a night job, to do the programming. So that’s what I did after 5:00 p.m. until midnight or so.

CRAWFORD: Wow!

JÁKLI: And I got much more money than for my work. I did it for a year, and then I earned enough money to fix the roof [laughs]. And actually, we even not only fixed the roof, but we made some remodeling and so on. After one year I said—it was nice, it was not very difficult, but it’s not that interesting. You can do it at 10:00 p.m. even if you had a glass of wine or two.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: You could do. You cannot do physics. I have a t-shirt says that “Don’t drink and derive.” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: So, if you want to make calculations when you’re drinking, it’s a problem. Coding was okay; you could do it. But that was another interesting thing. So, I did coding when I was in my postdoc, and then back in Hungary, and also at the beginning when I came here as a younger—but by now, I don’t do it.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: My students do it. But at least I know that how long it takes to—so they cannot fool me that, “Oh, I need a half a year to do that.” No, no, you don’t need that. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] What was it like when you came to the Liquid Crystal Institute in 1989? What was the Institute like? What was your sense of the Institute at the time?

JÁKLI: The Institute was in the Science Research Building. That was the second place. I think the first one was out of campus.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, it was over on Lincoln.

JÁKLI: Over on Lincoln, yeah. The Institute had quite a few people already here, I think. Bill Doane was the director. Alfred Saupe was here. Peter Palffy was here. Phil Bos just came. Bill Doane brought him here. John West was here. John West just retired. And Jack Kelly was here, who was the person who went to unpaid leave and then I was teaching instead of him. There was like eight people. Then later, I think in ’91, Satyen Kumar was here, but he was in Physics, I believe. So that was a very good—that was the time when the polymer-dispersed liquid crystals were invented by Bill Doane, and then everyone was kind of involved in that kind of research. Even Alfred Saupe was involved in that, in polymers and liquid crystals, so we had part of this work. It was a good thing, being involved in some common thing. I think it was a great thing to be in, especially because I learned so much from him. And for me, to be in the States, it was really great. In Hungary, we didn’t have a telephone. I never had it in my childhood. We didn’t have one when I was in Hungary. But here, I remember that I arrived and then—I didn’t have a car, either, but I learned to drive. The first day we came, or second, and Peter told me, and Alfred, that, “You need a car.” Then we went to a place to buy—“You need a cheap car.”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: So, they taught me how to buy a car. We went there, there was a car which I liked. It was a Ford Granada. I believe it’s a 4.2-liter car. It was like 12 years old. But it looked great. It was like for $1,200. Then Peter said, “It’s too much. Okay, it’s not—”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: And then—“Just listen to me.” And then [laughs] we left, and the guy said, “$900.” “No, no.” We left. “Okay, come—” The guy came after us, that maybe $800 or something. And at the end we bought for $660 or something. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Wow, wow! [laughs]

JÁKLI: I was driving it for three years. It was a great car. And so, I really enjoyed it. It’s an automatic. I never drove—I learned to drive stick shift, but it was not a big problem. It’s a problem the other way! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Right! [laughs]

JÁKLI: So that was something really a big feeling for me—“I have a car.” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: And the other thing, I had a phone. And also after two days—“You need to have a phone.” Then they said, “Oh, it takes another two or three days to get it installed.” I think Peter or Alfred or his wife arranged it. They were angry—“Why it takes so long?” I said, [laughs] “Don’t worry. In Hungary, it takes five years!” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: “I’m not impatient.” [laughs] After three days, I had a phone [laughs], so I—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: And you could arrange everything by phone. You called any number and they picked up the phone. Then people were responsible—they could arrange things. Also, people were so nice. When I came here, I was told in Hungary that every 45 seconds somebody is killed in shooting or something. Which is probably still true. But you didn’t realize that if you are somewhere, it’s not happening in the city every day. And people were very helpful, and that was a—I really enjoyed—we had people helping us. You went to garage sales. That’s what you do. We got into Allerton, which is already demolished. That was for international families. And I’m so sorry they ruined it and they demolished, because there were lots of couples and families, international, and you made lots of friends there. Yeah, actually—no, at that time, we didn’t have a kid. My first child was born here. So, we came here, we didn’t have kids. But we were a couple; you could come here. But others had kids. My daughter was born here in ’91, and then when she was born, we got so much help. We didn’t have parents to help us to show how to give a bath, and then what happens if the child is crying, you know. Our insurance was enough to stay in the hospital for 48 hours. The labor was like 17 hours, so basically my daughter was less than 24 hours old, and we had to take her home. We didn’t know anything about it. [laughs] But the neighbors had kids, and they knew that we have problem, and they were bringing food—

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow.

JÁKLI: —and they said—we had a Brazilian couple, they had a child just one year old, and they knew, “That’s how you give a bath to your child.” So, we had—it was fantastic. And all the others, they were helping. And in the Institute. Everyone was helping, yeah.

CRAWFORD: That’s great.

JÁKLI: So, my daughter became American citizen in this way. But we went back in ’92, because Saupe retired in Kent, in ’92 and he got a job as a group leader in a new Max Planck Institute in Germany. Because in 1991, I believe, West Germany and East Germany got unified and then reunified. Then they expanded the Max Planck Institutes to the East German part. He accepted a position there. Then he invited me to become a senior research fellow in that Institute.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: That was the reason my postdoc ended after three years. The grant was over, and then he left, so I had to decide to go back to Europe or not. I also applied to some jobs in California, and I got one job offer, but then I decided to go back to Europe with the family. I don’t know if it was a good decision or not, but that job would have paid much more. It’s in industry, in California. I think my postdoc salary was like 25K in the third year—started at 21K and became 25—and at that time they offered me for $63,000—

CRAWFORD: Wow, yeah.

JÁKLI: —California, so it was really tempting.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: But then we decided, especially my wife decided, that we’d go back to Europe. Because we wanted to get back. So we went back to Hungary, and then like half a year later, we went to Germany, by the time he established the group. He needed some times to get instruments and everything and then to furnish the labs and so on. Then I went to East Germany—became Germany now, the former East Germany, called Halle in Germany. With Alfred, I had my first patent in the U.S., on polymer-stabilized liquid crystals, which are still used, and I still kind of benefit from that knowledge, because we have an industrial grant now where we use these kinds of materials. That was a kind of an invention from us. We also had another patent here, which interestingly was also the first patent for Alfred, too. He was not so much interested in patents. By that time, he said, “Okay, we can make patents.” It was kind of natural that I go work with him, so that’s why. He also offered a good salary. I think it was like 50 thousand German Mark, which was less than the $63,000, but it was still quite good money. I think that in a nutshell, that was what we did here.

CRAWFORD: In this period of time, you've moved from the Central Research Institute that you had been at in Budapest, and then come here to the LCI, and then you're moving to the Max Planck in Halle. How did those different institutes compare in their approach to science? Were they more or less the same, or was there—?

JÁKLI: That was very much similar because Alfred was the director.

CRAWFORD: I see.

JÁKLI: So, I kind of knew his way. Then I was proud that he invited me. It showed that he was happy with me, because otherwise he wouldn't trust me. My job was to set up a lab and then advise two students, and then was working on a project on ferroelectric liquid crystals. So, I kind of could continue the research, what I did here, so that was really good.

CRAWFORD: Did you consider staying at the LCI? Was that an option at all?

JÁKLI: They had an opening, right after that, in LCI, and then I applied for that. I think I applied before I left, so that’s a third option. Then it turned out that I didn’t get that position. Bill Doane’s postdoc got that position. Then I heard the story was that we were kind of split in voting, and then Bill said, “Okay, I have a veto,” because he was the director, and he chose his postdoc. Then when I was invited in ’99, some people felt bad that at that time they didn’t choose me. So, there was kind of a decision of a veto or something, and I didn’t get here, because I was not Bill Doane’s postdoc. But I understand as he knew his postdoc. He’s Deng-Ke Yang, who is still here. He became here a Senior Research Fellow. But in ’99, that was the next time they had an opening, when John West became director and then his position became available. They kind of felt—“Okay,”—so it’s basically in ’99 I came back because I applied that time just for years later, I got accepted. Because they told me to apply, then I said, “Okay, I’ll apply,” and then I didn’t even think too—I was not very hopeful. Then John West called me one morning that, “You've been chosen.” That was in ’98, I think ’98 in November or December. So, I came here, in the winter, was invited to come interview, something, to see where my lab will be and so on, to decide things. It’s interesting, I guess that’s why I could come back, because I was already a postdoc here and then I applied, and some people felt that they were voting for me and I didn’t get it, and then now it’s the time to bring me back. I think that’s how—yeah.

CRAWFORD: That time that you came back in 1999, you had had this position at the Max Planck, and it looks like from your CV you also maybe had some postdocs at the Research Institute in Budapest again?

JÁKLI: Yeah, it was also something like research associate. Because this position in Halle was only for two years. They would like to extend, but my wife didn’t like to be in Germany. It was the former East Germany. People had high rate of unemployment. They didn’t speak English too much. My wife didn’t speak German. I also didn’t speak too much German. There, we also again didn’t have a phone. They said that if all Germans will have a phone, then you will get a phone, too. Then on the wall next to our door was painted that “Ausländer Raus,” so, “Foreigners Out.” So, we were not really happy. We didn’t feel to be welcomed like [we were] in the U.S. To be in Germany as a foreigner is not as good as being in the U.S.

CRAWFORD: As a foreigner.

JÁKLI: As a foreigner, yeah. Because of our skin color, if we didn’t speak, they didn’t know that we are not German. So, there was no problem in the supermarket and—as long as you don’t speak. Or if you just speak a little bit, they—but we didn’t feel like—and so my wife told me, “We have to go back.” We had our second child born in Germany. None of them was born in Hungary. That was an interesting language training for my wife, because in Germany it was free, to have a childbirth, and then she was there for a week. So, she had to communicate! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Yeah, sure! [laughs]

JÁKLI: It was a very different feeling to have a child born in the U.S. and there. The good thing was that Alfred was there, and his wife Brigitte was very helpful. She helped us a lot, was kind of our second parents, they were. Both when our first child was born here, she helped us a lot, and then when the second. So they were there. That actually in retrospective was very good because I had lots of friends in Germany. I have other connections which if I stayed here, I wouldn't have, maybe. You never know what would have happened, but that’s how it happened.

CRAWFORD: In 1992, you earned your habilitation in physics from the Research Institute. That’s not really a step that exists in academia in the United States, so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that degree is.

JÁKLI: It existed only in Germany. We followed the German system, so you had three different levels to reach. Got a PhD. The habilitation is you have to write a dissertation, basically, and that’s when your job become permanent, so then it’s not like renewed every year, or for every three years or something, but when you become permanent job. In ’92, when I came back in this half a year, I used the time to write it, and then I got that one.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: Then when I came back from Germany in ’95, and then I was in Hungary for four years, I wrote my dissertation for Doctor of Science. So, we had the three different levels. In the U.S., you got a PhD and then you can get anywhere. Depends on what position you have. There, you had to write three dissertations, basically. They had to be separate, so you couldn't write about the same topic. Basically, I was writing my habilitation about what I did here with Saupe, then later what I did in Germany and back in Hungary, what I continued. I defended my Doctor of Science degree in ’99 before I came here, but I got the degree only in 2000, because there’s an administrative process or something. No, I’m wrong. I submitted my thesis, my dissertation, in ’99 before I came here, but it took a while until they sent it to opponents—they call it opponent—and they reviewed, and then I defended back in 2000 when I traveled back to Hungary in the summer. People said that, “Why do you need that?”

CRAWFORD: That was my next question! [laughs]

JÁKLI: I really didn’t need it! [laughs] But you never know; you might end up back in Hungary. I thought that if I already did it, then why not? Because when I was working on it, I didn’t know I will come here. I already did it, so then why not to defend? It doesn't matter here; you don’t write it or whatever.

CRAWFORD: You were able to earn these degrees from the Research Institute even though you hadn’t been there. You were doing the work elsewhere on postdocs and so forth.

JÁKLI: Yeah, but I still kept connections. We organized a conference in ’94. I was in Germany, but it was organized in Budapest, a big liquid crystal conference. I was part of the group because I knew Budapest, and I could help people, and so on. I think in science, you keep connections. You know who understands this one, who is expert there. And the more people you know, the more friends you have, the more opportunity to have to reach out and then to get something to go ahead. I think it’s a really good thing that I had the opportunity to meet lots of people.

CRAWFORD: You come back to the Liquid Crystal Institute in 1999 as a senior research fellow.

JÁKLI: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: Did you consider going anywhere else at that time, or was it really pretty much just the LCI?

JÁKLI: I was not really considering that. I got one offer to go to Sweden, a few years after I was here. I started thinking when I—I didn’t get the green card. I came with an H-IB visa when I came here, and that expired three years. Meanwhile, I applied for the green card, and then I was supposed to get a green card in September 2001. Then September 11th came. I remember that someone submitted his application almost the same day as I, and he got it on September 11. And I didn’t get it, and I knew that now it will be very difficult. Then they shut down everything and they started over. Meanwhile, 2002, my H-1 visa expired, but that one, it was easy to renew. That, I got renewed for another three years, but I decided if I don’t get the green card before that, then I’ll go back to Europe. I didn’t want to stay here as someone who is not really officially welcome to stay here for long. But I think I just got it a few months before it expired. I got it in two-thousand—I don’t know when I—yeah, green card I got like 2004 or something, and then I got my citizenship in 2008. So I have both Hungarian and American citizenship. Because Hungary is a small nation, they don’t care. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: They're just happy if you keep your [laughs]—but if you are from a bigger nation, you don’t have that option. It’s actually very good. Especially when the pandemic came, I still could travel back to Hungary. As an American, you couldn't travel back, but as a Hungarian, they had to let you go in. I also could come back here because I was an American. [laughs] So it’s very good—if you go to Europe, and then there’s a long line for non-Europeans, and then there’s a short line for Europeans—and then that time, you take your Hungarian passport [laughs] and then you go through. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

JÁKLI: The same way coming back. Both of my children have both American and Hungarian citizenship, even the one who was originally American. My younger daughter got the citizenship just with us, because she was still not an adult.

CRAWFORD: When you came back to the LCI in 1999, what was the focus of your research at that time? Did you shift to something different, or—?

JÁKLI: While I was in Germany, or after that—I came back from Germany; I was still working with Alfred in some way. In Germany, we worked on some bent-shaped discotic material, which is like a bowl. We also have liquid crystals which look like a disc. And so we were investigating if they are ferroelectric. Then at the same time, some people in Japan, they studied molecules which are like banana-shape, and they showed that it was ferroelectric. It turned out that it was so much easier to synthesize, and so I got—because of my German connections, I got some materials from Germany, actually from Berlin. I met people in Berlin when I was in Halle, and then when I was in Hungary I very often went back to Germany. I got a German grant; it was a Volkswagen grant. Which they give you as a gift, actually.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: So you cannot spend just to science, but if you leave any place, you can bring it with yourself. It doesn't belong to the Institute.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

JÁKLI: It was something good, because I started working on these bent-shaped liquid crystals, which were a big deal here. I think that was one of the factors they wanted me to be here, because I was the only one who was working on it.

CRAWFORD: What was the interest in those types of liquid crystals?

JÁKLI: Because they were also ferroelectric, but they were not chiral. The chiral is when you have a handedness. To make a chiral molecule it is about 10 times more expensive than to make a non-chiral.

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow, okay. [laughs]

JÁKLI: So we could make ferroelectric material very cheap, so this was a big excitement about that. Since I had been working on ferroelectrics all my life, I worked on that. I went back to Berlin, I worked with people, they synthesized the material. They also had younger people than me working with them. I already spoke some German so it was kind of a good thing. I had that Volkswagen grant, and then when I came from Hungary, I could bring instruments with me. I didn’t bring so much, because they asked me not to bring the microscope, because they didn’t have—they could use it, and so on. So I said, “Okay, I have a chance to buy microscopes here. I will be much better off.” But some special things I brought here, quite a few things. It is interesting how you got to know others. I learned this topic and then I became kind of an expert on this bent-core material. I’ve been working on it from ’96 or ’97 still back in Hungary, and here until maybe 2015, 2016. The big review article which we wrote in the Review of Modern Physics was on physics of bent-core liquid crystals. That’s basically when I was here, I’ve been working on that. The good thing is that I came here as an expert on that, and then others who got into that project, they collaborated with me, because I had already been working on it. That’s how I was working with Sam Sprunt in Physics, Jim Gleeson, and also Oleg Lavrentovich started working on that. So that was a good topic. And then others—Jonathan Selinger as a theorist has been working on it. I think that was a topic which was my topic. It didn’t connect to Alfred Saupe. So they said, “It’s not his”—I'm not his postdoc or something; this is my own topic. That’s how I established my identity, I guess.

CRAWFORD: What were you studying about these liquid crystals? I know you said you were studying the physics, but like what—?

JÁKLI: I studied electrooptical properties, ferroelectric properties. They also form filaments spontaneously, which I really found very interesting. It turned out that it’s very similar to the myelin sheath in neurons, and they have very similar properties. I was hoping that I can make artificial neurons using liquid crystals and so on. So, there’s lots of things. They could be used for flexoelectric generators and so on. So it was a very, very interesting topic, and I’ve been working on it for basically 20 years.

CRAWFORD: Could you give us an example of how you study these properties?

JÁKLI: I have a microscope. I apply electric field. I see how they are switching. The textures. We also went to Tallahassee to do—it’s a high magnetic lab—where they have the highest magnet in the whole world, the strongest magnet in the whole world. We studied them in magnetic field. These things came because I was collaborating with Jim Gleeson and he started these studies. Then we went to do x-ray studies in Brookhaven, later in Berkeley National Lab. I mainly did it with Sam Sprunt, who was an expert on x-rays, and others. So we were at the national labs, too.

CRAWFORD: I see. These are all different methods for characterizing the properties of these materials.

JÁKLI: Yeah. Basically we studied the different physical properties, phenomena. While I had been here, I had like 20-some patents on different properties. We had displays that behaved like a PDLC, become transparent and scattering, with some much better switching time and so on. Lots of things. So here, it was very fruitful. I got so many publications. Maybe I had like 40 when I came here, and now I have almost 300.

CRAWFORD: Wow!

JÁKLI: This is all because of the topic and then because I have been surrounded by people here who all work on liquid crystals.

CRAWFORD: So there’s a real value to being at a place like this where everyone is focused on the same—?

JÁKLI: Absolutely, absolutely. If you don’t understand something—like we have defects, then I ask Oleg if he would understand that. Then, back and forth. The good thing that luckily I had my own topic, which was not existing here, and they saw that someone has to do. That’s how I did that.

CRAWFORD: How does it work doing research? You mentioned the high magnetic lab in Tallahassee and working at some of the national labs. How does that work?

JÁKLI: You have to write a proposal to say, “I would like to study this one, here, only this place I can get that info, and if I get that info, it will be useful for this and that.” You have to make your own case. They have a committee who decides. Tallahassee is NSF-funded, Brookhaven is Department of Energy, so then your stay is paid. You have to pay only your travel and your accommodation, but you don’t have to pay for the instrument. And they help you. They are very expensive things, and so—it’s a very good feeling to be in a national lab.

CRAWFORD: The high magnetic lab, that’s a national laboratory? That’s not associated with a university or anything?

JÁKLI: It’s at the University of Florida. It’s somewhat associated—they wrote the proposal, I believe, and they got it, but it’s a national lab.

CRAWFORD: When you're writing these—just wanted to check the time.

JÁKLI: Yeah, it’s already 11:30.

CRAWFORD: Oh, I'm sorry!

JÁKLI: Maybe we can finish in another half an hour?

CRAWFORD: Yeah, definitely.

JÁKLI: Or maybe we can do it on Teams, or—yeah.

CRAWFORD: Let me just ask one quick question just to wrap up with the national labs. When you apply, you're essentially applying for time, to use the machines?
JÁKLI: Yeah, time, and the instrument. And the given beamline and so on.

CRAWFORD: Is it difficult to get time?

JÁKLI: Yeah, I think the success rate is around 20%, 30%. Of course, if you're already in a project and you want to continue, and you got several papers published and you put the name of the national lab that it was done, here, then in the proposal they will value that.

CRAWFORD: It sounds similar to what I’ve heard about other—like particle accelerators, and like expensive equipment, that time is really the resource.

JÁKLI: Exactly.

CRAWFORD: Giving people access to it.

JÁKLI: And sometimes you go there and then it breaks down. Then you are there for three days, and then you couldn't do anything. You spent couple of thousand dollars to fly there, to stay there, and you cannot have. That’s a problem with the—it’s a beamline and then there is some power failure or—both are very power-hungry places.

CRAWFORD: You had mentioned earlier that at a certain point a few years after you had come back to the Liquid Crystal Institute in 1999, that you decided, or you asked, to transfer to become a faculty member. That was your decision. Because I know at a certain point all the researchers at the Institute were required to move into academic units.

JÁKLI: Yeah, this was my initiative. I saw that Peter, Oleg, and others, they all came here as a senior research fellow, but they started teaching in—at that time it was called Chemical Physics Interdisciplinary Program. So that said that I’ll do the same thing, so I should be able to do that. That was already an example that people did that. Later, we were asked to get tenured in Physics, or Chemistry, or—because we had been tenured in the Chemical Physics Program, but that was a graduate program only. And somehow, people said that we are privileged because we don’t have to teach undergraduates, we teach only graduates, and then it’s not nice, we can spend more time on research. So there was a dean who decided that we have to move our tenure. I and Oleg and Jonathan were the first to move our tenure to Physics. Because we knew that there is no other option. Some moved to Chemistry, some Biology, some Mathematics.

CRAWFORD: Did that change the LCI? You've talked about how you being able to interact with Oleg and Jonathan and these kinds of collaborations that you've done—has that organizational change affected that in any way?

JÁKLI: It somewhat changed. In a way it’s good, for me and for some of us, because I can get a student from Physics. Previously I could get a student only from the Chemical Physics Interdisciplinary Program, but because it’s a graduate program, we couldn't use them as a TA. They do TA in physics only the first two years. Before that, actually they did RA here. So, we have to have a grant to support them. If you don’t have a grant you cannot have a student. But in Physics, you can have a student. They are doing TA. It takes like 10 hours per week from their life, takes a little longer, but you don’t have to worry about paying. And then I got lots of students from Physics. In fact, I got too many students, and then people there who don’t have that many, they are not happy that I have too many. But it’s simply because students want to go to a professor who is approachable, and they know who is approachable, who is not.

CRAWFORD: Yes. [laughs]

JÁKLI: There are some who has only one student but never have the time for the student. And my door is always open. I can talk to them. But those who don’t have a student, they don’t want to accept that. They say that, “No, no, I don’t know what you do—” I never chase any student. I never advertise that, “Please come to my group.” It’s just simply one student tell the other one, “I got that many papers. I was treated well,” or, “This guy knows so many people, You can get a job. All his student got a job easily,” or something. That’s how it goes. So now the problem is I have more students want to work with me than I can take.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] It sounds like part of what you're saying is one of the advantages of being a faculty member in the Department of Physics is it opened up a larger pool of graduate students.

JÁKLI: Yeah. Disadvantage, I had to teach undergraduate. [laughs] I have to teach more. Which I actually don’t mind too much. Because some teaching, like we've been teaching—University Physics 2 is like electricity, magnetism, and optics. You learned that 40 years ago, and some parts you don’t use it, and it became kind of a passive knowledge. But if you have to teach, you have to—it comes back. And it’s a good feeling—“Oh, I remember that. I learned that.” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: I know you were working with graduate students through the Chemical Physics Program since—

JÁKLI: Yeah, which changed the name now. It’s called Materials Science Graduate Program.

CRAWFORD: Now you've been working with graduate students through the Physics Department. What’s your sense of how, say, graduate education in physics today is different than, say, when you got your PhD?
JÁKLI: It’s very different, because it’s U.S., and I got my PhD in Hungary. Also, because that was in eighty-something [laughs] and then it’s two-thousand… [laughs]. Yeah. I am surprised some of the graduate students know so little. We have so many students from different places, and it’s very difficult to know what they know. It’s the same in the Materials Science Program. I don’t think that any program is better than the other, concerning student. But they learn here. They learn here. But I’m surprised that what I thought it’s a basic undergraduate knowledge, or even high school knowledge—but of course, I have to remember that I went to a special high school where we just studied physics. So, it’s understandable. But they are smart people. They can learn. But it takes lots of effort to teach everything.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah. I’ll just ask a couple of broader questions so we can wrap up. There are many things on your resume that were interesting, so I could ask many questions, but one thing that kind of stood out to me—I know you've received a number of different grants over your career from different government agencies, also industry, and so forth. More recently you received a grant from the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme. Just this phrase “science for peace and security”—I know you didn’t design the program, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what this program is.

JÁKLI: This is initiated by Oleg Lavrentovich, who is from Ukraine. There’s a war in Ukraine. He traveled back, and he knows how hard it is for them to do research during the war. Their salaries were cut to 40% of their—for this reason, they’re required to work only two days a week. But some of course are still working full-time. He wanted to help. Then he started this grant. I got into this NATO project because I had a U.S. citizenship. The P.I. had to have a U.S. citizenship, and Oleg didn’t have—because he is from Ukraine, he cannot have two citizenships.

CRAWFORD: Oh, I see.

JÁKLI: I was also very happy to be part of it because I feel that they really deserve help. There are great scientists like Oleg and others, and we have to help. So, I was happy to say yes. But I have to say that the main credit is for Oleg. I have been—kind of later, when it was designed—I was a little bit part before we finished. And now I have to have communication, we have group meetings and so on, so I’m involved in that. I don’t want to take too much credit, but I’m really happy to be able to help. Especially because the Hungarian government policy is not really the one concerning the war than I like to see. So, I felt even it more important for me.

CRAWFORD: Speaking of getting recognition, I noticed that in 2020 you received the Alfred Saupe Prize from the German Liquid Crystal Society. A namesake prize of a former advisor and colleague of yours, and someone who is very well-known, of course, in the liquid crystal community. What was it like to receive that prize?

JÁKLI: That was a big, big honor. I mean, I know that I got it because I knew lots of people in Germany. The way how all prizes—someone has to nominate, and then others have to vote, and if you get support from more—I had been working with several people in Germany, been visiting them, so they knew me, so some of them obviously nominated me, and some others agreed with that. [laughs] I was supposed to go to Germany and get the prize there, but during the pandemic I couldn't go there, so the conference was virtual, so I had to give a talk, a speech, virtually. It’s really a big honor for me. I have it at home. I have it there—“This is the prize,” and so on. And again, this is how life—you know these people, and then how you get recognition—it doesn't mean that you deserve better than others. I think there are some things when I thought that I could get it, I didn’t get it. That’s life. It’s normal. No point to worry about. If you get it, you are happy; if you don’t get, you don’t get. I think that’s the best philosophy. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Two more questions and then we can wrap up. You've spent now decades working in liquid crystals and working on ferroelectric liquid crystals and so forth. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, over your career, either in terms of your own research or just more generally in the field, what do you see as some of the key developments, and where would you like to see the field go in the future?

JÁKLI: The key development, that was certainly—these bent-cores were a big development. But it’s a kind of fading down, because you need a big application for that, and so far—I told you I had, I don’t know, more than 10 patent on that, or maybe 15, but none of them are really industrial. I know some of them might be later. But in 2017 other ferroelectric materials which are completely fluid, not just two-dimensional fluid and one-dimensional fluid like these things, but three-dimensional, were discovered. We started studying them since 2020, these are ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals. It was again obvious for me to get into this one because I had been working on ferroelectrics. Again, I do some work together with Oleg Lavrentovich. We got a grant with Sam Sprunt and Jim Gleeson. So, the same kind of collaborators, we've been working on it. I believe that might be another area where we will be—now there is a big excitement, and could be a bigger—big development or some application. We’re trying to find it. We also have some patent applications. I guess I will work on it maybe until I retire, but you never know. The other thing is the elastomers, which are the rubbers, which I am involved in that. It is also a very exciting field. We can make skins for robots, so kind of sensing and moving and so on. We started here some ionic liquid crystal elastomers, and we demonstrated actuation with one volt instead of a thousand volts which previously were required, and so on. These are two things which I’m involved in now. We just started, one student, we work on how to make batteries using liquid crystal elastomers which will not explode as a lithium-ion liquid batteries, or other flexible and stretchable, and some other things which you can use. There’s lots of interesting things. These are the two major things. In addition, I do some work for industry, some of them related to ferroelectric materials, some not.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like when you first started working on these bent-core, it was really about characterizing the physical properties. Are you now more shifted into trying to find applications?

JÁKLI: No, even at that time, we tried to find applications. Whenever I see any opportunity, I am interested. And actually, would be a really great thing if one of them would be really working in real life. I think it would be a bigger achievement than having I don’t know how many publications.

CRAWFORD: For you, alongside doing the quote-unquote “basic research” of characterizing the materials, you're also always thinking about potential applications, or on the lookout for that?

JÁKLI: Yeah. And that Alfred Saupe Prize—actually for this, they said, “This is prize for people doing basic research but also open for applications." I think that was part of when they gave me the prize, they said that for this kind of work.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, so that’s real recognition for that.

JÁKLI: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: You talked earlier, just a minute ago, about working with grad students, and your door is always open. Looking at your CV, you’ve mentored a number of students. You've worked with a number of undergraduate students through the NSF REU[6] program and the International Research Experience program through the NSF. I just wonder, as someone who mentors and works as a teacher, what advice would you give to an undergraduate or a graduate student just starting out in science?

JÁKLI: My advice is just, “Enjoy.” Play with the material. Play around. I always, when I have new students, I let them, if they have some idea, just try it. “Try it.” Then when they fail or something doesn't work, I say, “Okay, I have some other advice.” But I always enjoyed when Alfred Saupe told me, “If you show me that it works, you can work on it,” or something—“That’s your child,” or something. I think you just have to enjoy what you are doing and like what you do. I think that’s most important. If you don’t like it, if you feel it like you just have to do it, you will not get to anywhere. And you have to be very diligent. If you don’t work every day—I calculated typically I work like 65 hours a week. I typically work on a weekend and even in the evening. And it works because I just cannot not to think about it. And it’s the same with you, I’m pretty sure. If you are a scientist, it’s not like you go home—you work on a construction worker, you go home and then have a beer and then watch a football game, because that’s the amusement or so. For me, for us, it’s different. It’s the same for you. It doesn't matter social science or natural science.

CRAWFORD: Right. Great. I want to thank you again, Dr. Jákli, for your time and for sharing your story. I really appreciate it.

JÁKLI: Thank you. I was happy that I could remember these things! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Yes, yes. Great. Thank you so much.

JÁKLI: Thank you.

[End]

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[1] Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystals
[2] Liquid Crystal Institute
[3] Antal Jákli and Alfred Saupe, One- and Two-Dimensional Fluids: Properties of Smectic, Lamellar and Columnar Liquid Crystals (Boca Raton, LA: CRC Press, 2019).
[4] Department of Energy and Department of Defense
[5] Defense Advanced Research Project Agency
[6] National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates