Rice University

Interview with Neal Lane, University Professor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, with an additional affiliation at the Baker Institute for Public Policy. Lane recounts his childhood in Oklahoma and his education at the University of Oklahoma, where Chun Lin became his thesis advisor for his research on the excitation of a sodium atom from its ground state. He discusses his postdoctoral appointment at Queen’s University of Belfast to work with Alex Dalgarno before taking a position at JILA in Boulder. Lane describes his work with Sydney Geltman and the opportunity to take a faculty position at Rice, and he discusses his role as NSF physics division director. He narrates his decision to become chancellor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, before returning to Rice to serve as provost. Lane describes how the Clinton administration invited him to lead the NSF. He explains the importance of direct communication with OMB, his relationship with Al Gore, and the key guidance offered by National Academy reports. Lane describes the LIGO effort from his vantage point at the NSF, and he explains his time as director of OSTP and Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Lane discusses his work for PCAST and in the creation of the NNSA, and he describes returning to Rice after Gore lost the presidency, where the Baker Institute allowed him an environment to continue working in science and policy. At the end of the interview, Lane emphasizes the power of human connections as the foundation of all good science and policy endeavors.

Interview with Anjelica Gonzalez, associate professor of biomedical engineering, and Faculty Director of the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. Gonzalez explains the origins of the Center and the challenges of getting it started during the pandemic. She recounts her family’s diverse background and her childhood in Las Vegas. Gonzalez describes her early interests in science and her undergraduate experience at Utah State, where she focused on biomedical engineering. She discusses the opportunities that led to her graduate studies at Rice, where she conducted thesis research on neutrophil engagement with soft tissue mimetics and her interest in applying therapies for sepsis. Gonzalez describes her research assistantship at Yale to work with Mark Saltzman and Jordan Pober, and she explains the collaborative nature of immunobiology research. She describes her faculty appointment and the positive changes that Yale has embraced in advancing diversity and inclusion, and she explains why biomimetic development is at the heart of her research and how this work could be useful for Covid research and therapies. At the end of the interview, Gonzalez reflects on the ways science benefits when it embraces diversity, and she conveys optimism for the positive health impacts that her future research can yield.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Nadya Mason, Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mason recounts her family background and her childhood growing up in New York City, then Washington DC, and then Houston. She discusses her dedication to gymnastics between ages 8-16 and her rise to national stature in that field. Mason describes her developing interests in math and science, including a formative internships at Rice University and the Exxon Production Research Center where she discovered her love for lab work. She describes her undergraduate experience at Harvard, the supportive mentor she found in Howard Georgi, and her work in the condensed matter physics lab at Bell Labs where she developed her interest in liquid crystals. Mason explains her focus on condensed matter physics for graduate school, and she describes her graduate work at Stanford, where her initial intent was to work with Doug Osheroff before she became interested in working with Aharon Kapitulnik on superconductivity. She explains some of the main questions that drove her dissertation research, including the behaviors that are possible in a low-dimensional superconductor. Mason discusses her postdoctoral work back at Harvard where she pursued research on carbon nanotubes quantum dots. She describes her decision to join the faculty at Illinois and what it was like to set up a major lab and the strong support she enjoyed from the university. Mason describes her research agenda over the course of her career, she discusses her current interests in mesoscopic low dimensional materials with correlated materials, and she describes the opportunities and challenges teaching at a large public university. She shares her thoughts on where physics can go as a community to enhance diversity and inclusivity in the field, and she emphasizes the importance of individual responsibility as a means to achieve those goals. At the end of the interview, Mason describes some of the exciting avenues of research in the future, including work on combining topological and magnetic materials, and she considers the importance of machine learning for the future of condensed matter physics. 

In this interview, Conner discusses his childhood and early education in rural Texas, and his developing interest in science.  He moves on to discuss his undergraduate and graduate experience at Rice Institute; his enrollment in the U.S. Navy; the rise in war-time and post-war academic interest in nuclear physics; his work at Los Alamos National Laboratory; his impressions of Tom Bonner at Rice Institute and Los Alamos; and his work with Cockcroft-Walton accelerators.  Additional topics discussed include:  nuclear physics, x-ray spectroscopy, the Vela Program, and federally funded artificial satellite programs in general.