Laura H. Greene

Editor's note: AIP thanks Dr. Greene for taking the time to review this transcript in December 2024, bring it up to date for the discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic, and add what emerged or changed in the four years after the interview.

Zierler:

This is David Zierler, oral historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is November 27, 2020. I’m so happy to be here with Professor Laura H. Greene. Laura, it’s so nice to meet you. Thank you for joining me today.

Greene:

Thank you for having me.

Zierler:

To start, would you please tell me your titles and institutional affiliations? And you’ll notice that I pluralized both, because I know that you have more than one affiliation and title.

Greene:

I am the chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory or the “MagLab,” and the Marie Krafft Professor of Physics at Florida State University. And I also have some emerita titles from the University of Illinois.

Zierler:

Is there a particular institutional connection between Florida and the MagLab?

Greene:

Yes! The National MagLab has three campuses. The main one is here at Florida State University in Tallahassee where we have four user facilities and two laboratories focused on design of new magnet materials, design of new magnets, and probe development. At the University of Florida in Gainesville we have two user facilities, and one user facility in Los Alamos. Our core grant is from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and presently, I’m in charge of the science drivers for our proposal to the NSF, which is for 5 years, and should go in for just under 300 million dollars. It is worth noting that every dollar invested by the NSF grant generates about $6 of economic activity in Florida.

Zierler:

Oh, wow.

Greene:

So, beyond the science it really does have a big effect on local commerce. I will also add that beyond the NSF, Florida State, University of Florida, and Los Alamos have also been extremely helpful supporting us.

Zierler:

When you came to Florida, was it a joint appointment from the beginning? Was that the package, as you set it up?

Greene:

Yes. I’m a chaired professor at FSU and my appointment at the MagLab comes from the NSF. I also have a 10 % appointment at UF. Before I came to Florida, I was a chaired professor at the University of Illinois, which is also awesome.

Zierler:

Yup.

Greene:

It’s [laughs] really a great place, and I had a wonderful time there. Really built up a great lab. But you know, it seems that it just had been time. There’s a lot of reasons why I wanted to move, and my kids were out of the house. I was lucky to have several choices for my next step in my career, and among all the choices, the MagLab and FSU really attracted me, for many reasons. I had been collaborating with several people there for years. I’ve known the director, Greg Boebinger, for a long time and have enormous respect for him. Those attributes coupled with the tremendous breadth of the science, and that it’s an NSF-supported facility, were real attractors: it’s great to work with the NSF. I would not have such a wide-ranging job anywhere else, where we seem to do everything. Our main themes are Materials, Energy, and Life so we have research on novel quantum materials, climate change and sustainability, and with MRI, research on cancer, plaque amyloids, and more. Illinois was fabulous, but the offer to be at the MagLab and FSU, was too good—how could I turn that down?

Zierler:

Do you have teaching expectations, or do you want to teach as part of this joint appointment?

Greene:

My MagLab administrative responsibilities were large enough that I was given the choice. I planned on doing some teaching—bringing some of the courses I developed in Illinois and develop new ones, but that has turned out to be impossible. First, I needed teaching release during my American Physical Society (APS) presidential years, then the last year of co-chairing the Decadal Survey on Materials Research for the National Academies, and then there was the MagLab renewal, and just as that was finished, I was appointed to PCAST (President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology)! I do love teaching, but for the first few years “I just can’t get there from here!” And I am thankful to the administration at FSU for giving me teaching release. This past semester (Fall of 2024), I did give a course entitled “Science Literacy: Mis vs. Dis– Information,” which was a lot of fun.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

I know it sounds crazy that I accepted to co-chair the Decadal Survey, especially since I agreed when still I was still in the APS presidential line, and of course I had my day job at the MagLab. But I just thought it was too important of a task not to take on. So I went to the administration in the physics department and the MagLab, and got their blessings. I thought I’d be teaching in 2019 but that is when the work for the MagLab renewal proposal really kicked in, and so starting mid-January of that year, that has been of my extremely full-time job. It was a huge amount of work—huge is not even the word for it—but was really fun and exciting! The people here are fantastic to work with, and they’re very understanding in helping me with the many things I don’t know, like in the areas of biology (MRI at 21 T), geology (mass spectrometry that can tell the mass difference of 1 electron mass in a complex fluid), and the combining of the different resonance techniques (nuclear magnetic resonance, ion cyclotron resonance, electron magnetic resonance, and MRI). I put off teaching again when, in 2022, President Joe Biden appointed me to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). But since I do enjoy teaching and developing courses, and man, I’ve done a lot of teaching in my life, including teaching thousand-person courses with 18 TAs and no other professors, but I decided to teach that Science Literacy course after all—the joke is that “I didn’t have enough to do, so I’m teaching.” Also, my interests have changed. I loved being a lab rat most of my life, but now I really enjoy science administration—and pursuing my other interests, including human rights and science diplomacy.

Zierler:

Are there opportunities to interact with undergraduate, graduate students, postdocs, within the MagLab environment?

Greene:

Yes, of course, and that is another attraction to the MagLab. There are many students and postdocs at all three MagLab campuses. Beyond our own, each year the MagLab entertains over 2000 users from all over the US and the world; most of whom are students and postdocs. I also have students and a post doc in my own lab. Now, I actually stopped turning knobs in the lab a few years ago, which I used to feel badly about. But one of my friends once stated, “We’ll know that Laura has become a successful professor when she stops feeling guilty about not being in the lab anymore.” I was going into the lab to hang out. But during the pandemic, with the social distancing, it was mostly by Zoom.

Zierler:

Yeah. So, I want to ask—it’s a very pre-pandemic question, but between the three sites of the laboratory and the physics department, physically, where would you be spending most of your time, and how much would you be shuttling around?

Greene:

To be honest, I did not spend enough time physically at the other MagLab campuses, and plan to spend more time at UF and Los Alamos. I love going to both of those places. I went to Los Alamos as a graduate student to do some experiments, and some of the equipment I used there is now being used in the Pulse Field User Facility. [laughs] So, it’s really kind of like going home. But I also have to confess that with all of the demands in my life, too much of my time was spent in airplanes, hotels, and between meetings. I put on something like 700,000 actual air miles in 2019, and I got all my work done: I like working at odd times, and odd places, although I tried to be less random during the pandemic.

Zierler:

Oh.

Greene:

I’m fond of saying that the pandemic both changed my life completely and not at all, because I was doing pretty much what I used to do on airplanes and hotels (and occasionally at meetings), but during the pandemic at home, so I’m good! Of course, I’m also quite fortunate that I can get the lion’s share of my work done remotely.

Zierler:

And in terms of the work that’s actually being done at the MagLab, during the pandemic, were people just social distancing, wearing masks, and everything keeps churning along?

Greene:

Yeah. It’s amazing how well we were functioning as a user facility through the pandemic. There are certain magnets that we did not use because they take a team working in close proximity, like the 45 Tesla hybrid—and safety first—but some of the facilities are close to, or at, 100 percent operations, as they have had mostly remote users all along. There are things that slow down operations, like parts that need to be shipped. But as a testament to our MagLab scientists and staff, it’s working better than I ever would have expected. Let me point out that since we were not allowing users on site, our MagLab staff were working extremely hard, not only as support staff, but also as actually doing the experiments that the users would do. I’m not afraid of hard work, but I look at these staff and faculty in awe and don’t know how they do it all! I was also on an advisory board for the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne, and I was happy to see that they were also working quite well as a user facility in those difficult times. What we were all missing in the pandemic was the direct teaching of the students and postdocs—our MagLab faculty are expert at running the experiments and working with the student remotely, but there is nothing like being there with your hands on the equipment

Zierler:

Laura, I want to ask. Between the connection to Los Alamos and the fact that the MagLab has the words “National Laboratory” in it, maybe this is an easy answer to give, or maybe it’s complex. But where does the MagLab fit within the overall constellation of the DOE National Laboratory framework, and where, on top of that, might the connection with Florida State be similar to the contractor connection between, say, the University of California and Los Alamos, and their dual relations with the DOE?

Greene:

These are just different systems. The many DOE labs are supported by DOE and the few NSF labs are supported by the NSF. We do not have the contractor model: we run ourselves under the excellent direction of Greg, with the core grant from the National Science Foundation and significant support from the State of Florida, Florida State University, University of Florida, and Los Alamos. Our faculty has also been successful at single investigator and other awards from a variety of funding agencies. As I understand it, the DOE labs are either federally funded or government owned and contractor operated. Another difference between the DOE and the NSF is that the DOE primarily supports national laboratories, and the NSF primarily supports single investigator grants. Note the DOE does support single investigator grants, and NSF does support facilities, besides the MagLab, including CHESS and LIGO, an amazing success story. Finally, there is more of a feeling of autonomy for the NSF-supported facilities, and maybe except for LIGO, the NSF laboratory budgets are much smaller than those for the DOE labs. The budget I mentioned sounds like a lot, but we have over 700 employees, and we are quite small compared to places like Argonne, Brookhaven, or Oak Ridge—but we are the best in the world in what we do, so that is all right.

Zierler:

Aha.

Greene:

Recently, our Pulse Field Facility at Los Alamos, which produces the highest non-destructive field in the world, 101 Tesla, had a problem with the generator. Due to the design of the generator coupled with the capacitor banks, the lifetime of this facility is longer than other pulsed field facilities, but nothing lasts forever. Los Alamos National Laboratory covered the cost of repair, which was significant.

Zierler:

But to be clear, you’re solely employed by Florida State, or you have— or are you also employed by the NSF directly as well?

Greene:

My primary employer is Florida State University, I have an appointment at University of Florida, and my MagLab appointment as chief scientist is from NSF.

Zierler:

I see. Okay. Great. It’s a complicated relationship, so I was glad we could sort all of that out. [laughs] That’s right. Well, Laura, at the end of our talk, we’ll get back more about some of the current projects that are happening at the MagLab. But for now, let’s go all the way back to the beginning. I want to start first with your parents. Tell me a little bit about them and where they’re from.

Greene:

My father was born in Warsaw. From what I understand, the family was a landed, wealthy, highly educated Jewish family. My grandfather and grandmother, when they first got married, immigrated to Canada, and then World War I broke out. My grandmother became pregnant, and she announced to her husband, “I want to go home.” He was very much in love with her, so he agreed, and they went back to Warsaw, where he was immediately inducted into the Polish Army and ended up in a German prison camp. This was World War I, so it wasn’t a concentration camp, but it was no picnic. After the war, when my father was 6 years old, they immigrated to United States. My dad had a tough life… It’s a longer story, but my grandparents split up, my grandfather became an ultra-religious Hassidic Jew, and my grandmother was just not there, so my dad was raised in foster homes and orphanages. He could not get a high-school diploma because he had to go to work early in his life. He worked most of his life as a salesman. And rather than being bitter—I’m going to get choked up now—he was the kindest, sweetest, most loving person I think I’ve ever met. He knew how to quell a fight and was just a wonderful guy. My two sisters and I always talk about how much we loved him. My mother was raised in Cleveland, and that’s where they met—the east side of Cleveland, which is an interesting place: You’ve got to be tough! She did graduate high school and always had a love for poetry, music, and education, and would occasionally take courses at a nearby college. Although my parents were not highly educated, they imparted a deep love of learning on us. My dad got his high school diploma and his associates degree after he retired. We had a lot of good memories as kids.

Zierler:

Was your mother from a Jewish background as well?

Greene:

Yes. Her parents were orthodox Jews. They left Russia/Ukraine (those borders kept moving) in 1905 and met in Cleveland. My sisters and I were raised Jewish, and the family did most of the holidays. My mother’s older brother got a degree in chemical engineering, but being Jewish, he couldn’t get a job, so he opened a beverage store—and my grandmother, Bubie, helped out there. Bubie started out pretty religious, but then she said, “If I’m working on Friday nights, we’re not doing Shabbat anymore.” [laughs] And so, we got together every Friday night, but low-key. I raised my sons Jewish, and I joke that I raised them to be Jewish atheists. We always had a Shabbat, light the shabbat candles, say the prayers, and then (another of my jokes) we’d have ham and cheese sandwiches; so, it wasn’t [laughs] very religious. But I like the framework of any religion, almost any religion, as a framework for ethics. And most religions have figured out how to get us through rights of passages: births, bar mitzvah, weddings, deaths, which I have always found comforting, as long as you stay away from the fanatics.

Zierler:

Laura, did you have a Bat Mitzvah?

Greene:

No, because they didn’t bat mitzvah girls that long ago in Cleveland. I thought about it when my two sons were bar mitzvah, but I thought again, “It’s too much work.” [laughs]

Zierler:

When did you start to get interested in science?

Greene:

I was born that way.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

I think that is pretty much how it was for women in my age group: I’m a little long in the tooth and when I started college at Ohio State, in the early 1970s, the Midwest hadn’t yet heard of anything like women’s lib or feminism.

Zierler:

Sure.

Greene:

It was discouraging all the way. I have some very close women friends that are approximately my age, and we’ve talked about how we didn’t come from a highly educated family, like your dad being a physicist, we had similar challenges. For me, it was like I was hardwired. I remember when I was so young, I had to reach over my head to feel the water in the bathroom sink, and when I did, I wondered why it didn’t feel hard and could it be made out of little pieces. I just was always curious. And my mother would take me outside to look for satellites—at that time Sputnik and Echo. I want to point out, that when we ask, “how do we get people interested in condensed matter physics?” through public engagement, outreach, or to encourage young people to be scientist? Well, I didn’t start out wanting to do superconductors and quantum materials. I started out looking at the stars!

Zierler:

[laughs] Sure.

Greene:

And that’s just fine.

Zierler:

Given the fact that your father came from a more traditional background in some ways, was he encouraging of your scientific interests? I understand structurally, later on, there is going to be discouragement. But even within the household, were you encouraged, even as a little girl, that science was an acceptable career path for you?

Greene:

Within the household, mostly yes. So, as a small kid, there was no problem. The first time I ran into a problem was between 4th and 5th grade when I signed up for summer school in science. My parents came to an open house, and they realized I was the only girl in the class, and they got a little worried. In elementary school, when I finished all the science books in the school library, they gave me Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, which I really enjoyed. It was just hard to get science books. When I got a little older, my parents encouraged me to go to the public libraries. So, you see, I got addicted to science really young. I think that for most women, and many people of my age group who are scientists—it’s like a calling. I just didn’t have a choice. I just had to do it.

Zierler:

It’s just who you were.

Greene:

Yeah, exactly. As I like to say, “being a physicist is not my job or my career, but an integral part of who I am.” I don’t know if I was hardwired at birth or bitten by the science bug at an early age, but it was just what I needed to do. I always felt lucky and honored to be a part of it and felt science was “seductive and consuming.” There have been challenges. [laughs] but scientists are usually passionate about doing it. I mean, you can’t get away from it, and you can’t get enough of it. [laughs] It's just really weird.

Zierler:

Laura, on that concept of being hardwired, it’s suggestive of maybe, you know, scientific interest and ability, perhaps, has a genetic component. So, maybe not from your parents, but was there anyone in your family that you could trace back to who had scientific chops?

Greene:

Well, it’s very hard to shake a Jewish family tree.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

But what I do know is that my father’s half-brother was a physicist who worked at NASA. I liked him, and I am still occasionally in contact with his two sons. Once when I was having trouble learning basic algebra, they were visiting and his son, my cousin, sat down and taught me algebra in an afternoon. So, I did have that. I actually have trouble believing there is anything genetic—my discussions about my science here are not about my abilities, but my desire to do science. I’ve done a lot of teaching, and I can see that there is a spectrum of abilities, but that does not have to mean that has to be limiting. I’m going to be hard-pressed to say whether it’s due to the way you’re raised, your background, what you eat, or genetic. And to be honest, [laughs] I’m not that brilliant—I just work hard; and I’ve been pretty successful. I like to tell my students, especially after I make an error, “hey, if I can do this, you can.”

Zierler:

Did you go to Cleveland Public Schools throughout?

Greene:

Yes. Taylor Elementary School, Wiley Junior High, and Cleveland Heights High School. And I’m still friends with a lot of people from high school, which is great.

Zierler:

How diverse was the school, both racially and socioeconomically?

Greene:

It was not very diverse at all, as Cleveland was pretty segregated. The east side of Cleveland was Jewish, Black, Italian, and Chinese with not much interaction between the groups. The west side of Cleveland was small neighborhoods representing the rest of the world—they called it the “melting pot that never melted.” I did a report on that in high school: about which blocks were Slovenian, Hungarian, Kazakhstani, etc., lived. My junior high school was 95 % Jewish with two black students, and I didn’t pick up on any racism in my neighborhood. But I am I am old enough to have seen overt racism south of Cleveland, which was horrifying, and I’m proud that my parents were real Civil Rights supporters [laughs]

Zierler:

Your later interest in human rights and diversity in STEM clearly came from your parents. They influenced you in that regard.

Greene:

They did. They made clear that there was no room for that. And in those old days, it was more of the idea that—let’s just not look at skin color at all. I’m glad we’ve grown out of that, so now we can relish, learn, and grow from diversity. I wrote an op-ed about that once, how even a very little bit of diversity goes such a long way in attacking scientific questions. The example that I used was that two of my mentors, David Pines and Charlie Slichter, in the ’50s, the height of the Cold War between U.S. and the U.S.S.R., with huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, they broke the rules set by the governments and started working with the Soviet physicists. That diversity beautifully changed the face of theoretical physics.

Zierler:

Yes.

Greene:

There are many unsolved problems in correlated electron physics, and only a few are solved. They solved one of them by working together. They were in competition, of course. But these two groups of white men, one raised Soviet and one raised American, provided enough diversity to solve the fundamental mechanism of conventional superconductivity. I see the importance of diversity in my own lab. I had a Pakistani student that looked at some data he took on iron-based superconductors in a way that I would never have looked at it, and he was very successful. I want to point out that diversity is not important just in where people come from, gender, skin color, sexual orientation, but we also need diversity in subject matter. To solve our global problems of the 21^st century, we need to go beyond science and engineering, including humanities and fine arts. Remember, in the Ebola crisis, anthropologists saved so many lives.

Zierler:

Sure.

Greene:

And I remember hearing the Ministry of Science in Japan speak a couple years after the tsunami disaster about how important it was for the Japanese people to have art, to help them recover. You need the science and engineering start to get back on your feet, but humans need more than that. We need diversity in every single way, because otherwise you’re just going to keep attacking problems the same old way.

Zierler:

Laura, looking back in high school, did you get a strong math and science education?

Greene:

I didn’t take my high school education very seriously. [laughs] I was doing music almost all the time including several performances a week. We had a folk singing group that I really loved (I’m still friends with many in that group), I was in a couple of bands, and I sang in school, church, and synagogue choirs. My academic grades were not that great until I was a senior and took analytic geometry, and I thought that was such a thrill—and then I realized I just had to do math and science. There were a thousand students in my high school graduating class, and my ranking wasn’t very high. [laughs]

Zierler:

Did you give any consideration to other schools, or Ohio State just made the most sense for you?

Greene:

Ohio State made the most sense for me. My older sisters went there, and it just seemed like the right thing to do. My grades were not that good, but in those days, they accepted everyone who applied, expecting one-third of the incoming class would drop out or be flunked out.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

I didn’t want that to happen, and I really wanted to do science, but I didn’t know what that meant. Once I went to the college of engineering and asked, “What is engineering?” They said, “You don’t want to major in engineering. When you graduate and go looking for a job, they’ll just ask you if you can type.” In the early 70’s that was perfectly legal to say. My mother wanted me to be an elementary school teacher, and I said, “Well, maybe I’ll be a science teacher.” So, I signed up for the non-calculus-based physics, but I wanted more. I hadn’t had trigonometry, so I took this accelerated: it was a six-week trig course so I could get into calculus. I was really working hard, and I just loved it. I would hold my pencil, studying with friends, and one of my girlfriends would say, “Laura, four hours just went by.” [laughs] One day I was walking in the physics building, Smith Lab at Ohio State, and this is an absolutely true story—one of those things that you remember exactly what happened. There was a big poster on the wall that said, “Physics majors: fill out one of these cards.” I thought “You could major in physics?” So, I filled out one of the cards, brought it into the physics office, and the woman behind the desk said, “Come with me.” She walked me around into the Chair’s office, E. Leonard Jossem, who was someone I stayed in contact with for many years until he passed away. He was a wonderful man who did so much for physics education. Anyhow, he shook my hand and welcomed me aboard. It was a really positive experience. I called my mom that night to tell her I was a physics major she was not happy stating, “You’ll never find a job, and you’ll never find a husband.”

Zierler:

[laughs] But other than that, go for it.

Greene:

But then she realized how serious I was.

Zierler:

Laura, what does it mean, “You’ll never find a husband?” Like, somebody who’s worth marrying would be turned off by a woman scientist?

Greene:

Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s how I was raised. You know, we had a pool table in the basement, because my grandfather made his living playing pool and pinochle. My mother’s father.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

And Mom would tell me, “Let the boys win” and “Let them carry your books.”

Zierler:

Did you recognize, even at the time, that this was a quite antiquated world view?

Greene:

It wasn’t an antiquated world view at the time, and I didn’t question it.

Zierler:

No, but I mean, in terms of you envisioning your future. As that future progressed, did you see that it would be antiquated?

Greene:

That’s just how things were. One thing I’ve noticed was that women from earlier generations did not show anger about being excluded. History books tell us that Lise Meitner never showed anger about not getting the Nobel Prize.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

But then, when things started to change, and women started being allowed to be a part of the scientific society, people started noticing the disparity, and then getting angry.

Zierler:

[laughs] Laura, given that your beginning at Ohio State was one where you were sort of open-minded to science in general, how did you narrow it to physics? What was that process like?

Greene:

I used to have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell, so I couldn’t stand chemistry lab, and to get out of it, passed the chemistry proficiency exam. I kind of regret that—now I love chemistry—so important for a materials physicist like myself.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

I’m not sure how I chose physics—I’d read general books on curved space and gravity, and I was just drawn to it. In truth, I’m pretty happy doing almost any science problem.

Zierler:

To the extent that you were exposed or aware of the binary in physics between the theoretical side and the experimental side, over the course of your undergraduate education, did you sort of develop interest and talent in one versus the other?

Greene:

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve noticed that most students start out wanting to be theorists in high-energy physics or cosmology. But as you get exposed to the different areas, you realize that the fundamental work in condensed-matter physics is no less fundamental or exciting than any other area. I see it as different areas are different parts of the mosaic of our universe, and we are just trying to fill in the pieces. But when I started to understand what a theorist did and what an experimentalist did, I would say that maybe by the time I was a junior or senior, I absolutely wanted to be an experimentalist. I like building things, turning knobs, machining, soldering, and welding, and I found out I was really good with my hands; like putting 6 contacts on a 250-micron sample by hand (my record). And, if one part of the experiment isn’t going so well, you can always go build or fix something, or design new experiments.

Zierler:

What were some of the formative lab experiences in experimental physics that you had as an undergraduate?

Greene:

I didn’t actually do research as an undergraduate. I was pretty broke, so I got paying jobs in the physics department—first copying papers, then the electronics shop, and my senior year I was their first undergraduate TA, after I convinced Dr. Jossem that it was a good idea. When I graduated, I was afraid to go to graduate school—I didn’t have the confidence. So, I worked for a year at Hughes Aircraft (which we fondly called ‘Huge Air Crash’) in their electron dynamics division, and they gave me a problem which I pretty much solved that year. During that year I gained a great deal of knowledge in engineering and working in industry. But I also realized I missed physics so much that I had to go back to graduate school.

Zierler:

When you went back to graduate school, was getting the master’s degree at Ohio State sort of a soft landing? Did you know that you wanted to move on from Ohio State?

Greene:

I didn’t know what to do. When I went back to Ohio State, I was told by my advisors, Jim Garland and David Tanner, that I should transfer because it is better not to do your graduate work in the same place as you did your undergraduate work. One school I applied to was Cornell. They contacted me, and said, “You were rated very highly, but we decided not to accept transfer students this year.” So, I said, “I’m coming over.” So, I asked one of my classmates to drive with me, and in the middle of a snowstorm, we drove from Columbus to Ithaca. I went to see the admissions chair, John Reppy, and I said, “I want to work for Al Sievers, and this is the kind of work I want to do.” And I still remember John, (who is now 90 and still doing experiments) scratching and shaking his head. We then drove back and even had a spin-out in the snow! When I got back, John called me back, and said, “Okay, You’re in.”

Zierler:

Wow.

Greene:

Yeah. At the time I still was not sure transferring to Cornell was such a good idea because had I stayed working with David Tanner, I probably would have gotten my degree in two more years. But at Cornell, it took me six more years. In truth, the extra experience was worth every second.

Zierler:

Before we leave Ohio altogether, I want to ask, on the social side of things—you mentioned, you alluded earlier, in the Midwest, campuses were slower to come on to student protests at places like Berkeley or Columbia. But surely by the early 1970s, there were significant protests with regard to women’s rights, civil rights, anti-Vietnam sentiment. I’m curious how involved you were in any of those movements.

Greene:

I was involved since high school. My mother would not let me go to Washington, but by the time I got to college, she couldn’t stop me. We took buses to protests in DC, and then many years later, she even came with me to a protest in DC. [laughs] I learned that after I arrived at Ohio State, it was very intense there, and surprising that no students were shot, like the tragedies at Jackson State and Kent State. And all of those topics you mentioned were on the table—with gay rights also always included, among others.

Zierler:

When you got to Cornell, how many other women graduate students were there?

Greene:

There were basically four of us: Ursi Gibson, Patty Sparks, Marilyn Schneider, and me. We had lunch together about once a week – we didn’t advertise this, but the density fluctuation was noticed. One day, Patty’s advisor asked her, “Patty, what is it you gals talk about?” And Patty just said, “We talk about physics.” And then she realized, this is probably a good thing to meet. So, we expanded to invite undergraduates, faculty wives, staff, materials scientists, and chemists. No one was disallowed—men were welcome, but basically it was only women who came. We would give practice giving talks. They could be about anything: a homework problem, gypsy moths, your research…. The point was practicing giving talks in a supportive environment with lots of constructive criticism. In 2017, Patty organized a reunion—I had had no idea that the Cornell Women in Physics Group had been going on for 40 years! There were over 100 attendees at that reunion workshop—Ursi came in from Trondheim, Marilyn from San Francisco, Patti from Clermont, and me from Tallahassee. We talked about how the group had changed through the years.

Zierler:

And perhaps you also talked about how women’s experience in science has changed over the past 40 years, and maybe even how it’s not changed so much in 40 years.

Greene:

Yes, but we mostly discussed how things have changed. For example, in graduate school I did not hear of, or understand, what microaggressions were. I would meet people who were outwardly very supportive but treated you as if there was zero chance of your success.

Zierler:

Even though intellectually, you were proving that you could?

Greene:

All the time. Those microaggressions, and old habits were strong. I got on mostly well with my thesis advisor, but we had our ups and downs; let’s just say we both had a lot to learn. I was the first woman graduate student he ever had. Here was one problem: Sometimes it would get back to him that professors would ask me out, often less than politely. Of course, I would never go there—I always said I was way too ambitions to put my career at risk with that nonsense—and somehow, I just learned to roll these things off my back, and to side-step them politely. It really bothered Al, and one time when he heard of an especially egregious pass, he left the lab for a few days and said he considered leaving physics—and this outstanding physicist loves physics. I only could assure him that such a thing would never happen. Of course, these things are handled differently today. The other problem was, at that time, he just didn’t trust that a female should be in physics—almost like it was a monastery, and women would detract the men from doing good physics. I want to repeat, we both learned a great deal when I was a graduate student, and Al and I remain in contact, and I have huge respect for him as a scientist and human being—we all grow and learn.

Zierler:

Laura, when you say that a woman couldn’t do this, does that mean that he thought the intellectual capacity wasn’t there, or perhaps the long-term commitment wasn’t there, because a woman would just get married and have kids, and turn away from the field?

Greene:

I think it was what I mentioned above—fundamentally, there were not many women in physics so why should there be now? Yes, old school, and I believe he left that attitude behind a long time ago. But those are all conjectures—as much as I love to study psychology, I am not a psychologist.

Zierler:

But perhaps you never took the opportunity to interrogate your supervisor about—well, what do you mean, that I can’t do this? What’s behind that sentiment?

Greene:

I think I was a crack in his bubble: I just wasn’t anything he’d seen before. It may be as simple as that.

Zierler:

Were there women on the faculty at that time?

Greene:

No.

Zierler:

Were there tenured women? There were no women on the faculty.

Greene:

There were no women on the faculty. After I left, they hired Barbara Cooper, who unfortunately passed away quite young. I think having women on the faculty was just not a concern at all – and at that time, that attitude just wasn’t questioned, even by me.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

In panels that I’m on and discussions that I have now, I rely on my younger women colleagues to educate me on best practices and how to handle different kinds of harassment. You see, I’ve learned to be ready to just “zip up my Kevlar helmet” and just roll with anything. I’ve had to do that so much. It never occurred to me to ask for advice or help. In grad school, Al was continually checking my notebooks—I believe looking for mistakes to support his viewpoint that I should not be there. And then at one point, he just told me he’s going to make sure I never get a job in physics. I was crestfallen. When I signed up for an interview at Cornell for a post doc at Bell Labs, he came into my office telling me he talked to the interviewers and said, “You’d better do pretty good on that interview tomorrow.” I was extremely upset and felt like I really lost.

But later that night, I decided I was not going to let this stop me. And I had this vision of my going to the mirror and sharpening my teeth. I had an 8:00 a.m. interview. I walked in, and I said, “I know you talked with Al last night. I only request that you look at the quality of my work, and talk with Joe Figuiera and Bud Bridges, and other outside collaborators.” And we went on with the interview. Gordon Thomas at Bell Labs wanted to hire me, but he said he could not even bring me to Bell for an interview because Al would not allow it. Then he said, “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to bring you in to give a talk. Okay?” So, I said, “Okay.” And Al said, “Whatever you do, you are not allowed to talk about your main thesis topic, because those guys are piranha—they’re going to scoop your work.” Well, I had done so many experiments that even Al was not involved in—I just liked doing things. So, I talked about something completely different, and it went really well. In one of the discussions, it came out that Al wouldn’t let me talk about my main experiment, and that actually turned out to help me and I got the offer. Marilyn warned me, “You realize from now until Al signs your thesis, your life is going to be hell.”

Zierler:

Yeah. Yeah.

Greene:

I said, “Yup.” And it was.

Zierler:

Laura, with the full disclaimer that you’re not a psychiatrist, given the fact that he said, “You’d better do a good job with the interview,” wouldn’t that indicate, in his very gruff or insensitive way, that he believed that you had the capacity to give a good interview?

Greene:

Good question—I don’t know. But, based on his earlier statements that he would keep me out of physics, I assumed he was not supportive of me when talking with them.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

But the bottom line was my interview went great. It didn’t hurt that I was completely up on all the literature because I spent all day every Sunday in the library to keep current.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

When I got to Bell, it was right before the breakup of General Telephone, I was given the option to work for John Rowell at Bellcore, or anyone at AT&T Bell Labs. My good friend who worked for him before, Gisela Hertel, stated, “If you have a chance to work with John Rowell, you just take it.” She was right. It was a marvelous experience, and we remain in contact. He’s really a statesman in the world of science. After my postdoc, I was hired as a member of technical staff at Bellcore by another great scientist, Jack Wernick. Before he could hire me, he told me that I needed to get other job offers—seems to be an unwritten law at the time. I didn’t much like that, so I Interviewed honestly and almost took another job. Al found out that I was interviewing, and he contacted me and said, “I want you to come to Cornell and give a talk about your work so I can support you as a reference. You’re doing well and it only makes all of us look good if I support you.” And we started getting along very well after that, which is great.

Zierler:

That’s certainly a 180 from the way he comported himself before the Bell interview.

Greene:

Well, it was a process, but he came around, and that is what mattered to me.

Zierler:

Yeah. Yeah.

Greene:

This all was an important learning experience. Me playing those tapes in my head and how I got through it all, has gotten me through a lot of things since then. It’s always important that when you run into a “bump in the road” to think back at something that you overcame. Nothing is a smooth path, and everyone runs into challenges.

Zierler:

Before we leave Cornell, I want to talk about your dissertation topic. How did you develop the topic? How did you go about conducting the research that went into your thesis?

Greene:

It seems so long ago now. Al put me on a bunch of different projects. But this main project was trying to understand how impurities in alkali halides behaved. That’s when I started working with Bud Bridges, at UC Santa Cruz, which developed into very interesting projects. I also had many other interests. I developed the first solid-state mode locker for CO₂ lasers and got Al into the quantum optics area. And then I got into another project involving measuring the effect of conservation of crystal momentum on the decay processes, which was my favorite chapter in my thesis. My grad student officemate, Zack Schlesinger, and I wrote it up several times, but Al never okayed it for publication. But it was fun.

Zierler:

As a graduate student, of course, you’re so focused on the research right in front of you, but looking back, in what ways was your research responsive to some of the larger questions in the field that were happening at that point?

Greene:

The development of the mode locker was for a sub-contract Al had with Los Alamos. They had started their inertial confinement fusion (ICF) project using CO₂ lasers which were much more efficient than the YAG lasers used in other ICF facilities, but also, CO₂ has 10 times longer wavelength. The idea was to develop a saturable absorber, a material that would allow high-intensity light to pass but absorb low-intensity light. This was needed because the retroreflection from the fusion target would pass through the gain tubes and destroy the amplifiers. So, I invented the saturable absorber and then turned it into a mode-locker that make the pulses from the CO₂ laser even narrower in time—limited by the Heisenberg uncertainly principle. The construction for the ICF project got as far as building a huge facility, including a truly massive generator. But then it was figured out that because the wavelength of the CO₂ laser was so long, the target would explode, and not implode, so ICF with CO₂ was a mistake from the get-go. But the good news is that the huge generator is now the heart of the Pulsed Field Facility of the MagLab in Los Alamos—producing 101 Tesla non-destructive pulses—the largest in the world. I also started learning about rare earths—and my love of that section of the periodic table remains.

I’d also like to talk about another couple of things I did. In particular I had a deviation from physics into parapsychology. So, one of my professors at Ohio State, Philip Jastram, a brilliant nuclear physicist and a great teacher, believed in it. So, I started reading about it and wrote a letter to J.B. Rhine and Louisa E. Rhine (who coined the term “parapsychology”) near Duke University. I spent a summer learning about it and doing experiments. When I took my job at Hughes Aircraft, I got involved with an exhibit at the Science Museum in LA called “Psi Search.” I would go there every Saturday morning and lecture. I even lectured at some universities. I remember lecturing at Caltech and discussing this with Dick Feynman. Then I met the great James Randi, who is a very famous magician and skeptic. I brought him to Ohio State to give a colloquium. He convinced me that the whole parapsychology area is rubbish.

Zierler:

Wow.

Greene:

That helped lay the original foundations for a book I’m writing, still in my head, called “Psychopathic Science,” about scientific fraud. Irving Langmuir, a Nobel laureate in chemistry wrote some articles for Physics Today, on “Pathological Science.” That is about basically honest people making errors because they believed certain results and parked their scientific method outside the door. We all make mistakes. Psychopathic Science is not making errors but committing fraud. What I have learned is that there is not a clear distinction in some cases—a scientist can be so egregiously pathological, I believe it becomes psychopathic.

Zierler:

Awareness.

Greene:

Another thing I wanted to talk about before we leave Cornell, was that in 1978, Kurt Gottfried, who founded several important human rights organizations, notably the Union of Concerned Scientists, came to me, and he said, “There’s a person who has been in jail for two years in Argentina. Her name is Elena Sevilla, and we’ve got her out on the right of option.” That meant that an Argentine prisoner of conscience would be released if another country would take them in. “Would you take care of her and be her mentor?” I said, “Hell, yes!” So, he, his wife, and I went to the airport, and there was Elena. She didn’t speak English, was in jail for two years, and had a 2-year-old son. That changed my life. I learned more about Amnesty International. I have also gotten involved with other human rights organizations, including those associated with scientific societies (APS, AAAS, and NAS) that keep an eye on scientists who are prisoners of conscious.

Zierler:

And Gottfried clearly saw that in you, that you would be capable of rising to the challenge.

Greene:

I don’t know. There were few women, so I’m sure that had something to do with it.

Zierler:

Yeah. When you got to Bell Labs—I’m always curious about this, particularly in this time period, because there’s different opinions and understandings of when the breakup started, when there were concerns about moving away from this pure commitment to basic research. What was the environment like along that trendline, from your perception, when you got there?

Greene:

I got there in November of 1983, and the official breakup was January 1 of 1984, so I was there to see the impact.

Zierler:

Right.

Greene:

General Telephone was a monopoly, which was illegal, but just when the US was the world leader in Science and Technology, the preeminent research laboratory was broken up.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

That had a profoundly negative effect on the American economy and American innovation. When I got to Bell as a postdoc, as I mentioned before, I chose to work with John Rowell at Bellcore.

Zierler:

And what was John’s research? What was he working on at the time?

Greene:

Planar tunneling in superconductors, heterostructures, and novel materials, and I’m still doing that research. It involves mostly growing the thin films and heterostructures, doing the materials microanalysis, and then the tunneling measurement. This measurement gives the electronic structure or the “tunneling density of states” of the electrons in the material.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

I do get some flak from the community that this is not Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy (STS), which has exquisite spatial resolution—which planar tunneling does not. But planar tunneling has higher energy resolution and the junctions are robust to large temperature variation and high applied magnetic fields. The measurements are complimentary. At Bell we had a great coffee klatch: John, Bob Dynes, Art Hebard, Dave Bishop, and my technician, Bill Feldman. We had coffee twice a day and had lunch together—and talked physics about 99% of the time—it was all very exciting. When I moved to Illinois, Bill and his family moved out with me, which I called my “secret weapon” to get my lab going, while teaching, with small kids, and being put on way too many committees. Back to the science: John gave me the task of growing superconductor/rare-earth heterostructures and tunneling into them. I leaned to optimize the growth of Nb layered with several different rare earths which have fascinating spin structures, my favorite being erbium. We learned a great deal about proximity effects—how at the interface, the superconductor is weakened, and the normal metal picks up some superconductivity. The field of heavy-electron (or heavy fermion) physics just was getting started. These materials exhibit huge electronic masses due to electron-electron correlations. I was the first person to grow thin films of a heavy fermion, CeCo₆, which has an effective mass of one thousand times the free electron mass, and there were some very interesting proximity effects with niobium.

Zierler:

Was the quality of the instrumentation at Bell better than anything that you would have ever seen or experienced at Cornell?

Greene:

That’s a great question. In many cases, yes. I could walk down the hall and do Rutherford Backscattering which I have not had since. But at Cornell I could grow boules of alkali halides in our technical operations lab. Cornell also had a big student shop where we could do our own machining. But in general, Bell was way out, ahead of any place on the planet.

Zierler:

Especially at Bellcore, to the extent—was there a change in the commitment to basic science? Did you ever feel pressure that there was a corporate bottom line that you needed to be responsive to, or aware of?

Greene:

Yes, and at the time, I had no problem with that. I love industrial physics and I’m essentially an academic by default—leaving Hughes and losing my job at Bell. I did mostly fundamental research, but when given an applied problem, I always enjoyed it. Now, however, I am concerned at the fall in the support of fundamental research in our country—both federal and industrial.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

I was in Bell Labs at Murray Hill for two years, and then Bellcore moved to Red Bank, New Jersey. Then high-T_C hit, and John-Marie Tarascon, Ross McKinnon, George Hull, Bill Feldmann, and I really had a blast.

Zierler:

Laura, what was the relevance, perhaps, in some of the theoretical advances in the field at this point, to your work?

Greene:

First, I’m really glad I’m not a theorist. In the early days of high-T_C I believed every theory! Phil Anderson would give a talk about resonating valence bond theory, and Chandra Varma would argue why Phil’s theory could not be correct, why his had to be; and there were more disparities. The arguments were all convincing to me, but in those days, it was all so new, and the materials were not of the quality for the experiments to distinguish between theories. But there’s one thing that I became certain of, probably by 2006 when I was working on a study for the Department of Energy, “Basic Research Needs for Superconductivity” when I realized that there was a connection with almost all of the unconventional superconductors.

Let’s back up a bit about superconductivity. Superconductivity is the phenomenon that, below a critical temperature we call T_C, allows the transmission of electrical power with no loss—superconductors have zero resistance. This is a quantum mechanical phenomenon that has many other very interesting properties that make it distinct from a perfect conductor. Conventional superconductors were discovered in 1911 by Kamerlingh Onnes in Leiden and it was not until 1957 that Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer, the BCS theory, explained how they worked. That was the theory I mentioned earlier that benefitted from the American and Soviet scientists working together. Anyhow, conventional superconductors, above their T_C, are simple metals. Below their T_C their properties are well explained by the BCS theory. Unconventional superconductors are different. They almost all exhibit an interesting, quite similar phase diagram. I say almost because, especially in quantum mechanics, there are always exceptions. The phase diagram has temperature on the y-axis and another thermodynamic variable on the x-axis that is typically pressure or doping—where you change some element in the compound. On the left side, with no applied pressure or the undoped-pure compound you typically have an insulator or a poorly conducting metal. On the far-right side, under high pressure or highly doping, you have a conventional metal. In between, and lower temperatures, where these two sides begin to meet, a dome appears, and under the dome it is superconducting. Just above the dome there are some very, very strange phases—including that the electrons form clumps, line up, or get really heavy, and the origin of those strange phases (called “strange metals”) remains long-standing mysteries. Working with Philip Philips and Wei-Cheng Lee, we did figure out one of these phases, but I have to point out, there is little consensus in the field for solutions of any of these phases. I consider these to be the most unsolved problems in physics today.

One more point, I do not believe at all there will be a single, unified theory for the mechanisms of unconventional superconductivity, or for those strange phases. There are maybe 50 distinct families of unconventional superconductors. We already know that the theory of conventional superconductivity does not explain them all—so science-wise, if there is more than one theory, why shouldn’t be there be many. And besides, the properties of the strange metals are all so different between the families of unconventional superconductors. Even in my own research, I find significant differences between say the cuprate, iron-based, and heavy electron superconductors.

Zierler:

Laura, how well connected were you to the academic world during your Bellcore days? Were you writing papers? Were you presenting at conferences? Were you collaborating with academic colleagues?

Greene:

Yes, all the time. We wrote so many papers when I was at Bellcore. It was easier than academia because you did the experiments yourself and were not training students, teaching, or on so many committees. I remember once when Alex Kastalsky walked into my lab and said, “Let’s do this experiment,” and it opened up a whole new area of mesoscopic physics. Alex was an expert in semiconductors and wanted to explore the superconductor-semiconductor interface That success was possible because we were both exerts in our own areas and we could just go in, do the experiments, and have some early understanding.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

Anyhow, we were writing papers all the time, even before word processors. And, especially in the early days of high-T_C, it was just crazy. We had lots of publications, and so went to lots of conferences giving talks and keeping up with the field. I could work and travel that much because I didn’t have kids, and because of all of that, my boyfriend left me. So, I just said, “That’s the way it goes,” because I would rather be part of, and in the lead, of this fast-moving and exciting high-T_C field, which was marvelous. It was thrilling to be a very early speaker at the 1987 “Woodstock of Physics”, which was too much fun! I was pretty nervous with the huge audience, but my friend from graduate school, Marilyn, managed to work herself to the front and sat right in front of me—what a wonderful and supportive friend! There was a lot of competition, most of it being friendly with some exceptions—that I won’t go in to here.

Zierler:

It sounds also like—perhaps it’s a different time, certainly different institution—being a woman at this point certainly doesn’t seem like it’s much of a liability.

Greene:

Well, this was still the ’80s. I’m not sure I know the answer to that, but anybody that’s a minority is going to feel a little bit shut out. I do not want to go into detail, but there certainly were some major obstacles, so I’d reach for my trusty “Kevlar helmet” and move on. I was not much involved in diversity in those days—I was just too busy in the lab, research, and travel. It was when I got to the university, when I started to have women students, that I realized I needed to be much more involved with diversity issues—well beyond only gender diversity.

Zierler:

What were the push-and-pull factors leading from Bellcore to Illinois?

Greene:

I lost my job. [laughs]

Zierler:

Easy enough.

Greene:

After the 1984 divestiture of General Telephone into eight companies, AT&T kept a downsized Bell Labs and the seven regional operating Bells were allowed to do one thing together, to support their research labs, Bellcore. Bellcore did fundamental science and also a great deal of service for the regional Bells, but the philosophy changed. One of the mantras of the regulators of the 7 regional Bells was, “Cost to the cost causer.” Fundamental research is expensive, especially in industry, where you pay a high rental fee for every square foot of space—the Bellcore building was rented. I had a large lab and an office—and the labs were taller than a standard celling height. The cost of employing me was significantly higher than employing a programmer who can share an office with no lab. Following that mantra, the loaded salary of a programmer was about $125k a year and my loaded salary was $360k a year, even if we both made about $50k a year in our actual salaries. It doesn’t take much math to see that if you get rid of three experimental researchers, the company saves about a million bucks a year. We felt that industrial research only worked when you buried it in the general costs of doing business—but once our costs were exposed, the end was in sight.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

The downsizing was not handled well, ensuring the end of the company, in my opinion. The year before I lost my job, basically everyone over 55 years old, except my technician, was fired—they called it “surplused.” The next year, the rest of us lost our jobs. We all had been working together extremely well, and even in these stressful times, we all helped each other out, recommending each other for jobs and writing recommendation letters for each other, even for the same jobs we were going for. I was thankful for the very supportive environment of my colleagues. I had certain options when I left and chose the University of Illinois.

Zierler:

Was the writing on the wall clear enough, so that you were prepared for this? Were you already on the market before you lost your job?

Greene:

Yes, but I really wasn’t prepared to leave. I was just having too much fun, which is a problem I have. I never know when to quit. John Rowell recognized it early on and left to go to a startup high-T_C company, Conductus. He saw the writing on the wall when they started to re-organize the scientific staff. I started out in the solid-state chemistry department. I’m not a solid-state chemist, but that was part of the burying of the costs—a condensed matter experimentalist is much more expensive. In the reorganization, they put all of the condensed matter experimentalists into one group. Bam—exposed. That is when John left. Also, the person who hired me was no longer my boss. When you’re in a company and your new boss is not the person that hired you…you know how that goes.

Zierler:

Sure.

Greene:

I was doing some looking around and I mentioned the situation to friends at a Gordon conference. Donald Ginsburg and Nigel Goldenfeld from the University of Illinois recruited us.

Zierler:

And Illinois, your sense was that it was the place, if not one of the places, for you to go for this research, to continue what you were doing.

Greene:

Absolutely! At that time, it was one of the few places that had a materials research laboratory. Bellcore was designed pretty much after the University of Illinois.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

In the Materials research laboratory, you have a central area, with electron microscopes and other important materials microanalyses equipment, and you have people there who can help you use them. This is also great for the students. All my students got great jobs because they were well trained in all these techniques. And it’s so much fun! As a professor, I have less and less time to tinker in the lab, and I miss that, but I was lucky because I stayed at the bench full time until I went to the university, at about 40 years old—a longer stint in the lab than many academics, so that was good.

Zierler:

[laughs] Was it an easy transition, going from an industrial physics environment back to an academic environment?

Greene:

No. We were all in shock. We had no idea.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

I remember calling up my old advisor, Jim Garland, and said, “I don’t know what to do! I can’t do this job!” He just said, “You need a good calendar.” You see, I was using a “month at a glance” calendar, but at the university, your days are often split into 15-minute increments! Also, I had much more control of my time at Bellcore. I remember writing a long review article in just six weeks. I would just get in really early and write it and do my research later in the day. That simply is not possible when life is broken up into 15-minute segments.

Zierler:

Right.

Greene:

Between seeing students, committee work, teaching, writing papers, and the biggest time sink, writing proposals—with hit rates not that high. It’s very difficult.

Zierler:

And proposal writing must have been sort of a rude shock to you, coming from Bellcore, where this is not something that you have to worry about.

Greene:

True. At Bellcore, you would go and argue to your boss why you need a piece of equipment, and if you made a good enough argument, you got it. You may have to write something up, but it’s nothing like writing a full proposal.

Zierler:

And Laura, was the NSF sort of your go-to for the proposals during your time at Illinois?

Greene:

Yes, in the beginning, it was NSF. It was very interesting that my first proposal, the contract monitor—Hollis Wickman—called me up, and said, “One of your reviews wasn’t like I expected. I want you to rebut it.” When I read the negative review, I got angry, because it was a bunch of personal attacks. I wrote the rebuttal, and I got the funding. In those days, that was possible because there was money left over at NSF. Nowadays, if you rebut something, it won’t do any good because there are no leftover funds. I’ve lost proposals based on a criticism of a research direction that that wasn’t in my proposal, but once the decision is made, there’s nothing you can do about it. Another interesting thing was that in those days, this was 1992—the funding agents worked together, NSF, DOE, and DOD agencies. For my first NSF grant 20 % of that contract came from Navy. Now, the agencies rarely, if ever, work together, and I would love to see that change. Later, at Illinois, I started to also get DOE funding. And then, I combined the University of Illinois forces with those at Argonne and Brookhaven and we were together awarded an Energy Frontier Research Center, called the “Center for Emergent Superconductivity.” We had that grant for about nine years. So, I had both NSF and DOE funding and that caused me to have to do some juggling. You see you are required to keep the projects completely separate, so it is clear you are not using one agency’s funding to do the work funded by another agency. Since our students actually talk to each other and help each other out, you usually have to list more than one contract on a paper, and in the acknowledgement section you have to be explicit about who did what and under what contract. So, the acknowledgement section can be very long. As I mentioned earlier, I would love to see the funding agencies not worry so much about these details and work together more.

Zierler:

What were your favorite undergraduate courses to teach at Illinois?

Greene:

Oh, that’s an easy question, but there are three. One traditional, and two non-traditional. The traditional one was Thermal Physics. When I took my undergraduate courses, you would first have a semester of Thermodynamics, and then a semester of Statistical Physics. Both were fun, but I never really got a great fundamental understanding of Thermo—how did these early scientists come up with things like Entropy and the Thermodynamic Limit? It’s so very different than classical mechanics. But Kittel and Kroemer wrote the book Thermal Physics, where you start with statistical physics and basically, by rolling dice, you derive all the thermodynamic equations. I just love that. The other one was “How Things Work, which was basically a “Kitchen Cabinets” course, only open to non-science majors. My three favorite lectures: how does a wood stove work, how does a lightbulb work, and how does an air conditioner work. Those lectures got across thermodynamics, and each lecture had about 10-15 demos, so it was really fun! And the students liked it—when I took the class over there were about 60 students, and in a few years, it grew to 630 students. The other non-traditional course was a two-semester sequence on preparing students for graduate school. This was developed by Celia Elliot and Lance Cooper, and then I got on board. The first semester was teaching the students to write scientifically and give talks, with all kinds of other lectures, like scientific ethics. Then we would place them in research over the summer. The second semester was writing up their senior thesis and giving a talk on their research. We met for a few hours every Friday afternoon, so you really got to know each student – really nice.

Zierler:

Who were some of your most successful graduate students at Illinois?

Greene:

Oh, gosh. How can I choose between kids? OK, probably my first student, Mark Covington, who went on to do a post doc with John Martinez, then worked at Seagate until they stopped doing research, so he went on to General Atomics. Two of my students, Patrick Hentges and Hamood Arham were also outstanding, and both are now at Intel. Another couple of truly exceptional students were Elvira Stanescu and Cassi Hunt.

Zierler:

You’ve had a lot of students.

Greene:

Compared to many of my colleagues, not that many. About 20 graduate students and almost 20 postdocs and visiting scientists. I really had a lot of undergrads in my lab—by last count, it was about 160. I love having undergrads in my lab for a variety of reasons. One is that we have to explain complex principles when they do not have the education in quantum mechanics or condensed matter physics yet—a fun challenge, and another is that they bring in diversity. I have kept up with many, and they have good jobs, mostly in industry.

Zierler:

That sounds like there’s a trend there, where many of your graduate students go on to work in industry and not academia.

Greene:

Yes, that’s right. The idea that non-academic positions are non-traditional left physics decades ago. Seventy percent of physicists work in the private sector—industry, wall street, start-up companies, and more. Academia is really the nontraditional job.

Zierler:

Right.

Greene:

There are many other choices, including national laboratories, and it is up to each person to figure out what’s best for them.

Zierler:

Laura, who were some of your principal collaborators, both within and beyond Illinois, during your Illinois years? We can start within Illinois—colleagues at Illinois who were really important for your research.

Greene:

Certainly, it was the older generation at Illinois who were so helpful, including Donald Ginsburg, Charlie Slichter, and Miles Klein. Later, I had some wonderful collaborations with Jim Eckstein and Jian-Min Zuo. Peter Abbamonte, whom I refer to as a “Wunderkind” was brilliant to work with. As far as theorists go, Tony Leggett, David Pines, and Gordon Baym were always helpful and supportive. and I wrote several papers with Philip Phillips and his then post doc, Wei-Cheng Lee. But most of my collaborators were outside of Illinois.

Zierler:

Was Tony there when you got there?

Greene:

Yeah. I love talking with him. One of the things that I discovered, my big hit, was something called broken time-reversal symmetry in high-temperature superconductors. As I mentioned earlier, when you lower the temperature of a high-temperature superconductor below its critical temperature, it superconducts, and if you lower the temperature even more, it actually generates a magnetic field. Mark Covington was the one who did the experiments. Some outside theorists suggested we try a very, very difficult experiment, and Mark pulled it off! Tony Leggett was key to me in the understanding of the data and the ramifications of the experiments. The community did not believe the results at first—the experiments were so difficult, but then they were all reproduced.

I also collaborated a great deal with the Cambridge, UK group on the iron-based superconductors, and for heavy electron materials, groups at Los Alamos, UCSD, and the MagLab, even before I got here.

Zierler:

Laura, you mentioned before that when you got to Illinois, it dawned on you that it was important to serve as a role model to female students. So, I wonder: besides just being present and being supportive, specifically how would you go about doing that?

Greene:

For one, my door would always be open for women and minorities. I have had people say they were afraid to come see me because I am so busy—but for help in diversity or working out some possible harassment issues, I always have time. Not only do I want to help, but I have had so many experiences that I think I can be helpful. Also, there were times I should have done more, and didn’t, which I feel badly about. When I was a grad student, the tech in charge of the grad lab course was a groper. I dealt with it by only working at night. Later, a younger, braver, woman grad student reported it to the department chair. The chair talked to the tech and it all stopped. Had I gone to the chair earlier, I may have saved other women from such events. But times were different then.

I also would also have lunches and coffee gatherings. When we brought in a women speaker, I’d have a pizza lunch with the women—of course anyone was invited—and the speaker. Funny story about that: I asked the department head to pay for the pizza and he agreed. Then one of the women came to me and said, “I’m not doing this anymore.” I said, “Why?” “Well, one of the guys said why should we get the pizza, and not them?” And my answer was, “Why didn’t they ask?” So, then Lance Cooper started having pizza lunches funded by the department when we had speakers that weren’t in academia. Thanks, Lance!

Zierler:

Laura, was your sense that given the world-class status of condensed matter specifically at Illinois, were the condensed matter physicists, to the extent that there was a pecking order or a hierarchy within the department—was your sense that that was at the top of the heap in the department?

Greene:

You mean within the department?

Zierler:

Right.

Greene:

Unfortunately, factions did grow. The older statesmen that I mentioned earlier were always fair and supportive. The factions grew among people around my age group and a little older. I understood later that when you are a new, upcoming minority, the faculty wants to help you out, but later, after some successes, you are part of the competition. A phenomenon I did not understand until many years after it started happening to me.

Zierler:

Yeah. And Illinois were your family-raising years. That’s where you had your boys.

Greene:

One was born in New Jersey, and the other one was born in Urbana, Illinois.

Zierler:

Between Bellcore and Illinois, where did you get more support for family time, maternity leave, that kind of stuff?

Greene:

There wasn’t any then.

Zierler:

[laughs] Equally unsupportive.

Greene:

At Bellcore, I found some great babysitters. I did save up some sick days to take some time off when my first son was born, but he was colicky, so I went back to work right away. [laughs] When I moved to Illinois, I found a nanny that would live with me, but she wouldn’t work in the evenings or weekends. It was challenging. Although we have a long way to go, things are better now, and one can get maternity or paternity leave—sometimes. It makes economic sense. If you give someone six months, or even a year for goodness’ sakes, that is a small part of a 40-year career. Let them come back happy, and you have gained a great deal of loyalty. It’s economically and scientifically good for everyone. Betsy Ancker Johnson once told me they should not grant maternity leave unless Maternity and Paternity leaves were required for everyone. Interesting—that would help with the equality.

Zierler:

What were some of the major technological advances in spectroscopy and superconductivity during your Illinois years? What was the most exciting technology that helped push the field forward?

Greene:

Wow. There’s several of them. I’d have to break it into three different classes. First Theory. The level of computation has increased dramatically and our ability to model and predict properties of correlated electron and other quantum materials has really advanced. Second, Materials Growth. Our ability to grow higher and higher quality materials even over the past few years is astounding to me. Many of the experiments we do are only possible because of the amazing strides forward in crystal growth. Third, Experiment. Whole new classes of measurement techniques have been developed over recent years, and the quality and resolution of existing techniques has exploded—I’m astounded at what can be accomplished.

I give this public lecture or colloquium, “the dark energy of quantum materials” where I point this out with some examples, like high-field Quantum Oscillations that we do in the MagLab. I argue that this new suite of theoretical, growth, and measurement techniques, together, will solve the many questions in quantum materials—like all of those “strange metal” phases above the superconducting dome in unconventional superconductors. There is no moon shot, no clear Occam’s Razor in quantum materials! When that upsets people who want a “theory of everything.” I compare it to cancer research: there is no one cancer—for example, there are many kinds of breast and thyroid cancer, and in many cases, each has to be targeted in its own way.

Zierler:

Laura, what results from this research have yielded possible commercial, or patents, or industrial applications, and have you ever pursued any of that?

Greene:

I have only one patent that was about passivating the surface of a high-T_C superconductor. There were other things that I think were patentable, but never came about for various reasons.

Zierler:

On the administrative side, what were some of the principal benefits of being associated with the Center for Emergent Superconductivity and having those institutional collaborations with Brookhaven and Argonne?

Greene:

All the scientists involved have known each other and had some collaborations for years. But this Center helped us to continue and grow the collaborations to a level we never could have reached without it. We could use resources from all three locations and that helped enormously with furthering the science. And it was really fun.

Zierler:

Laura, before we move from Illinois to Florida, I’m curious about your work as a visiting professor in Korea, and specifically to go back to an earlier comment you made about the value of diversity being good for science, because different world views actually can positively influence experiments and findings. So, I wonder, perhaps, what were some of the big takeaways of your significant time in Korea over three years? What were some of the things that you learned about, perhaps, an East Asian perspective, or a Korean perspective, on science?

Greene:

There really is some difference in attacking problems. I’m not sure I can explicitly identify differences, but once you learn to talk each other’s scientific language, widely different perspectives are communicated – which makes for marvelous discussions and collaborations.

Zierler:

How did that connection come about? How did that start for you?

Greene:

I have many Korean friends and one in particular, Tae-Won Noh, who is the director of their Institute for Basic Research on Quantum Materials. He offered me the position. I would go a few times a year, lecture, and share some lab experiences. I also work with Tae-Won on other committees, and in IUPAP (International Union of Pure and Applied Physicists), I am the leaving Chair of C10 (the Commission on the Structure and Dynamics of Condensed Matter Physics) and he is the new Chair. Let me add that I love going to Korea.

Zierler:

How much, when you were considering the move to MagLab—how well acquainted were you with both the challenges that you would be faced with, and your opportunities to build on what the lab had built up to that point?

Greene:

I was pretty nervous about it, because although the job intrigued me, I was certainly not an expert on high magnetic fields. I’m good at convening, so I felt I could do it by relying on the MagLab scientists to help me to understand all the details and capabilities. Everyone here is amazingly collaborative and helpful.

Zierler:

How much of this was new science for you, in terms of what the MagLab was doing, that might have been in a different sphere of science than what you were working on?

Greene:

Quite a bit was completely different. I was familiar with a lot of what was going on in quantum materials in the DC, High B-over-T, and Pulsed Field Facilities, but moving to the medical applications of high-field MRI, and the energy and sustainability applications of Ion Cyclotron Resonance were among the areas that were new to me. The MagLab does it all!

Zierler:

On the administrative side of things, were there any challenges that you inherited, either with funding, with personnel, with organization, that really required your attention immediately?

Greene:

[laughs] Of course! But the director, Greg Boebinger, the deputy director, Eric Palm, and the DC Facility director are all experts at dealing with such challenges, and they are always there to help me out. I have learned a lot from them and now I do most of the administration aspects on my own.

Zierler:

[laughs] Something to look forward to. I’m curious. In the way that, for example, NIST always hosts industrial researchers who come there for access to neutron measurements and things like that—is there a real partnership between industry, that have interest in magnets, and hosting them at MagLab?

Greene:

Yeah. We do host industrial scientists in most of our user facilities, the most being in our Ion Cyclotron Resonance User Facility. If the work is not publishable, users have to pay for the magnet time. Magnet time is free to other users—you just have to write a small proposal—you can find what magnets and experiments are possible, and find the form, online, and MagLab scientists are ready to advise.

Zierler:

In what ways—you know, you said earlier, you stopped turning a knob, whatever it was, a year ago or something like that. But when you first got there, in what ways was the instrumentation and the new research environment useful for your own research agenda?

Greene:

I have a really fantastic lab here in Tallahassee. It is a lab I have been building since the 1980s and I enhanced it with a great startup when I arrived. I brought a colleague with me from Illinois that ran the day-to-day lab functions and also did a lot of publishing himself.

Zierler:

So, you took this, knowing that this was primarily going to be leadership in an administrative capacity?

Greene:

Yeah, but science administration.

Zierler:

Of course.

Greene:

I don’t want to be the director of the laboratory. [laughs] I never wanted to be a dean or a provost. But overlooking the science like this is really what I want to do these days. I have had other job opportunities to pursue my own research at national labs or universities, and 10 years ago, that would have been my first choice, but now, I love what I am doing.

Zierler:

I want to ask about your leadership work with APS. Was one of your motivations on the sociological side of things? Being in the presidential line of succession, and then becoming president of APS? Did you see that really as an opportunity to help foster change, inclusivity, diversity? Was that one of your primary motivations for doing this work?

Greene:

Absolutely. I mentioned earlier that my focus was Human Rights and Science Diplomacy on a national and international scale. Fostering improvements in diversity and inclusivity was an important aspect of all of that. And for both human rights and science diplomacy, you have to remain staunchly non-partisan/non-political. In advocating for science and technology funding, you have to talk to people on both sides of the aisle—this is just good for our country. The year I was APS president, the NSF got an 11 % bump in funding—I worked with Francis Slakey at APS and Roger Falcone who was the APS president elect, and both were essential for that accomplishment. And in human rights, you cannot be political – if you have a prisoner of conscious, you write letters hoping they are being treated well, not attacking that government. In both those areas, you have to keep your goal in mind and deviation into a political or partisan direction is damaging.

Zierler:

Given that your presidential line of succession, that tenure, was from 2015 to 2018, obviously it traversed the Obama to Trump administrations. I wonder, from your vantage point, if you could detect that difference…

Greene:

Oh my, yes.

Zierler:

…in tone, in funding, in budgeting, any of those things—would you be able, from your vantage point, to see those differences?

Greene:

Absolutely. OSTP in the Obama administration was buzzing and exciting with important things being accomplished. OSTP in 2017 was quiet, and pretty much empty.

Zierler:

It makes a difference whether you’re talking to people like John Holdren and Ernie Moniz, or their successors?

Greene:

Absolutely.

Zierler:

Given the immediacy and the pain that this country has experienced this year in terms of a national racial reckoning, and the way that the physics community specifically has responded to some of that—obviously, I’m not privy to what’s happening at the leadership level of APS discussions now, but is your sense that this was very much on the radar of people in the leadership of APS? In other words, I guess the question is: does 2017 seem like a long time away? Or is your sense the kinds of things that you were talking about, and you were pushing helped to ensure that APS perhaps was not caught so flat-footed this year?

Greene:

I’m not completely sure what you are asking. APS has always worked for diversity, and APS and AAAS have been active in the areas you just described and have made some strong statements—even closing down for the Black Lives Matter Day. But our country does have major problems with systemic prejudices—so many I can’t start to list them. I am not sure how to fight those. Whether it is prejudices, climate change, or vaccines, simply giving facts does not work. We have to find a way to combat confirmation bias—which is when you don’t let the facts get in the way of your theory. Hmmm… that is kind of like the pathological science I mentioned earlier—and in fact, pathological science is like misinformation, and psychopathic science is like disinformation. How do we combat either? I do not know but we need to work together, with sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, and more, to figure this out. I have been thinking about confirmation bias for decades and have only seen it get stronger. I think that is one of the biggest problems in our society today.

Zierler:

[laughs] Sure. Laura, for the last part of our talk, I want to ask two sort of broadly retrospective questions about your career, and then since we’ve already talked about what you’re doing now I’ll ask, for my last question, sort of looking forward. But for the first two questions, first on the science side, if you just look back over the course of your career: is there one experiment or collaboration or scientific finding that it’s nearest and dearest to you, you’re most proud of, that may or may not correlate with an award you received or recognition? What’s the thing that you’ve done that you’re most proud of as a scientist?

Greene:

I think that would be my work on time-reversal symmetry breaking. Working with the students, the theorists, having to learn a huge amount of theory I did not understand before, and having to defend the controversy was really fun and exciting. Also, the work I did with Alex Kastalsky that I mentioned earlier—discovering a new transmission channel across a superconductor-semiconductor interface. In the past few years, studying the electronic structure of heavy electron superconductors has been fruitful – between working out the superconducting symmetry and more recently, seems we have identified the fundamental mechanism of superconductivity that is different than that for conventional or high-T_C superconductors. We have also done some really fun work on a topological insulator that is highly correlated in its bulk—fascinating.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

Thinking back a long time, I remember being awed by so many things. One was substituting gadolinium into a high T_C cuprate. We found that at low temperature, gadolinium magnetically ordered within the superconducting state. The coexistence of magnetic and superconducting phases has always fascinated me—almost like there are different flavors of electrons in the same material. Obviously, that is not true, but one needs analogies to think about quantum mechanics.

Zierler:

To the extent—maybe looking back to Bellcore, of course, nobody can look to the future, but to the extent that you ever imagined how the field would progress over the course of your career—now looking back retrospectively, is there anything particularly surprising to you about how your field has progressed over the last 25, 30 years?

Greene:

Yeah, it is completely surprising. The complexity has grown—the better the materials, measurements, and theory are, the more questions arise—the old onion skin analogy. And the field has also driven the techniques—quite symbiotic.

Zierler:

Yeah.

Greene:

But I know we are getting closer to working out the fundamental mechanisms of these highly correlated-electron quantum materials. There is not one moon shot, one Higgs boson, or one gravity wave. I have to add here that those experiments I just mentioned have given us oh so much more! For example, with the gravity wave detection and the invention of LIGO, for the first time ever, we can look at the universe with something other than mass or light—with gravity waves! Who knows what we will find?

Zierler:

Yeah. On that note, Laura, for my last question looking forward: both as a scientist and as an administrator, what are you most optimistic about, in terms of where the field is headed and what some of the contributions the MagLab might make toward the future?

Greene:

Oh. Tons of these things. First, as we learn to understand these quantum materials, we will learn to predictively design them, both for fundamental physics and applications for energy, communication, and other instrumentation—even improving MRI. There are also thermoelectrics. At the MagLab, I see higher and higher DC and pulsed fields opening new areas of fundamental research we have not even thought of yet. This past year, Nick Butch and JP Paglione discovered a material that superconducts, and under high field, the superconductivity is destroyed, but at ultra-high fields, the superconductivity turns back on—no one ever predicted such a thing and it is a very hot topic of study now In our Ion cyclotron resonance facility, we can quantify the kinds of long-chain carbon molecules in our built planet and determine which are worst for the environment, the effect of climate change in the artic, and even proteomics—and only the MagLab can do those things. You may have heard about the hydrogen-based super high-Tc materials that require gargantuan pressures to make them superconduct—well, they needed the high fields at the MagLab to give more proof they were actually bulk superconductors. There is so much, but I’d better stop here.

Zierler:

Sure. Laura, I want to thank you so much for spending this time with me today. It’s been really fun hearing about all of your perspectives over the years, and in terms of those top-line interests that you have that will be of benefit to everybody, good luck, and I hope it happens quickly.

Greene:

Thank you for having me—this was fun!

[END]