University of Toronto

In this interview, Jon Phillips, oral historian at AIP, interviews David Rose, Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Waterloo. In this interview, Dr. Rose discusses his education in physics and biology as an undergrad at Penn. He then discusses his graduate studies under David Phillips at Oxford University, and his introduction to crystallography while there. He describes his post-doctoral work with Gregory Petsko at MIT, and the growth of crystallography in the US at that time. He recounts his transition to the Canadian National Research Council in Ottowa, where he worked on protein crystallography and glycobiology. He goes on to discuss his move to the University of Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital, where he spent the majority of his career. Finally, Rose discusses his time at the University of Waterloo, teaching and research during the COVID-19 pandemic, and his tenure as President of the American Crystallographic Association.

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Interview with Scott Tremaine, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Tremaine discusses his current affiliation with the University of Toronto, and he provides a historical overview of the boundaries between astronomy and astrophysics. He recounts his childhood in a town north of Toronto, and he explains his early interests in science. Tremaine describes his undergraduate experience at McMaster, the opportunities that led to his graduate admission to Princeton, and the exciting developments that compelled him to focus his thesis research on astrophysics. He describes his dissertation on the dynamics of galaxies done under the direction of Jerry Ostriker, who at the time was focused on the earliest research on dark matter. Tremaine discusses his postdoctoral term at Caltech where he worked with Jim Gunn and Peter Goldreich, and he explains his decision to take a second postdoctoral position at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge. He describes his appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study, his decision to join the faculty at MIT, and he explains his ongoing research collaboration with Goldreich on studying Saturn's rings. Tremaine describes the intellectual origins of his book, co-authored with James Binney, Galactic Dynamics, and he explains his decision to join the University of Toronto to become the director of CITA. He describes his interests in the origins of comets, his contributions to black hole research, and his appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study. Tremaine discusses his work on exoplanets, and at the end of the interview, he surveys the importance of increasing computational power over the course of his career, the exciting advances that have been made in understanding galaxy development, and why the "three-legged" stool upon which cosmology rests - namely, on inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, is problematic.

Interview with Wendy Freedman, John & Marion Sullivan University Professor and senior member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. She recounts her childhood in Canada, her early interests in science, and her decision to attend the University of Toronto, where she developed an interest in astronomy. She cites the Canada France Hawaii Telescope as the reason she stayed at Toronto for graduate school to work under the direction of Barry Madore. Freedman describes her postdoctoral appointment at Carnegie Observatories to work on the Cepheid distance scale, and she explains her decision to accept a position on the permanent staff at Carnegie. She narrates the origins of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project, and she explains the resistance among theorists regarding the existence of the Hubble constant. Freedman discusses the importance of CCDs to measure the Hubble constant, and she marvels at Hubble’s long and productive life. She explains the inspiration for starting the Giant Magellan Telescope as an international collaboration, and she explains the opportunities that led to her becoming director of Carnegie. Freedman surveys the cooperative nature between the GMT and LSST projects and she projects optimism that GMT will propel fundamental advances in black hole research and for the search for exoplanets and possible for life beyond earth. She explains her decision to join the faculty at Chicago and she expresses pleasure at being able to work with students as a professor. At the end of the interview, Freedman reflects on the increasing complexity and expense of large-scale astronomy research and why it is important that the astronomy community relates its work and discoveries to the broader public.

In this interview, Jed Buchwald, Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History of Caltech, discusses his life and career. He recounts: his upbringing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; undergraduate experience at Princeton, where his initial plan was to study physics, until he met Thomas Kuhn whose influence compelled him to switch to history of science; involvement in student protests at Princeton in the late 1960s; decision to move to Harvard for graduate school where he worked with Erwin Hiebert on the history of electrodynamics in the late 19th century; his first academic appointment at the Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, and the different standards applied to the tenure process then compared to now; how the field of history of physics started to trend away from a technical to a more cultural and social perspective in the mid-1980s; his work as director of the Institute; his contribution to the Einstein Papers project during his time at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he served as inaugural director of the Dibner Institute; his opposition to the rise of postmodernism as a scholarly approach to history of science, and the absence of evidentiary and logical reasoning that permeates postmodern jargon; his scholarship on Heinrich Hertz; the writing process and inspiration for Newton and the Origin of Civilization, Histories of the Electron, and Zodiac of Paris; the personal and professional considerations that led to his faculty appointment at Caltech; his longtime collaboration with Allan Franklin. At the end of the interview Buchwald reflects on the common themes that connect his body of scholarship, and in particular, his interest in focusing on historical subjects who were themselves deeply invested in their work.

In this interview, David Zierler interviews Robert Birgeneau, Silverman Professor of Physics, Materials Science and Engineering, and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Birgeneau recounts his working class childhood in Toronto and the unlikely circumstances leading to his enrollment at the University of Toronto. He explains his interest in physics from a mathematical perspective as an undergraduate, and he describes his graduate work at Yale, where he studied electron spin resonance spectroscopy. Birgeneau describes his involvement in the civil rights movement, and his postdoctoral work at Oxford and at Bell Labs, which sent him to conduct research at Brookhaven. He explains his move to MIT, and his work as both department chair and Dean of Science. Birgeneau describes his tenure as president of the University of Toronto, and the recruitment process leading to his tenure as chancellor at Berkeley. At the end of the interview, Birgeneau explains how important it was to retain a physics research agenda even while running major universities, and he describes the pleasures of returning to teaching physics after spending much of his career in academic administration.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Josef Eisinger, professor emeritus at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Eisinger recounts his childhood in Vienna and his experiences in England as a refugee from the Nazis during World War II. He talks about his transfer to Canada as an “enemy alien,” his experience transitioning to civilian life, and his matriculation at the University of Toronto, where he completed his undergraduate and Masters work in physics before transferring to MIT for his Ph.D. Eisinger discusses his work with Jerrold Zacharias and Viki Weisskopf. Eisinger discusses his tenure at Bell Labs, where he pursued a variety of interests in spectroscopy and electron-nuclear double resonance. He explains his developing interest in molecular biology and the Guggenheim Fellowships that allowed him to advance in this new field. He discusses his work on lead poisoning and his transition to Mount Sinai. Toward the end of the interview, Eisinger discusses his involvement with translating the letters of Brahms.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Carson Chow, Senior Investigator in the Laboratory of Biological Modeling in NIDDK, which is the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Chow recounts his family background and childhood in Toronto, his undergraduate education at the University of Toronto and his graduate work at MIT, where he completed his doctoral research in Spatiotemporal Chaos in the Three Wave Interaction. Chow discusses his broader interests in nonlinear dynamics and describes his postdoctoral work at the University of Colorado where he worked with John Cary on particle accelerator physics, and the events leading up to his work with Jim Collins of Boston University, who hired Chow to integrate nonlinear dynamics work into biomedical engineering. Chow explains how this work ultimately led to his decision to join the NIH, where he works on biological modeling and supercomputing in collaborative projects throughout the Institutes.

Born in Toronto, Canada in 1924; University-based high school offered an excellent education in math. Attended University of Toronto for an undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics in 1945 and completed a Master’s thesis on servomechanisms in 1948. Employed as an Instructor for the Canadian Version of the GI Bill, came to MIT in 1948. Worked with L. Beranek in Acoustics lab and completed doctorate in 1952 with a dissertation about the perception of sounds shaped by resonant circuits. A research staff member of MIT from 1952-1954, he accepted a faculty position at MIT in 1955. Promoted to Associate Professor in 1957. Worked with G. Fant while on sabbatical in Sweden in 1962 and brought back x-ray films that formed the basis for early work with J. Perkell. Promoted to professor in 1963. Collaborated with D. Klatt on pioneering speech synthesis project, Klattalk, that formed the basis for DECtalk and many of speech synthesizers in use today. Traveled to England as visiting professor at University College, London 1969-1970. Served as President of the Acoustical Society of America 1976-1977. Awarded Clarence J. LeBel professorship in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 1977. Received Gold medal from the Acoustical Society of America in 1995. Published an acclaimed book, Acoustic Phonetics, in 1998 that uses techniques of circuit analysis and signal processing to elucidate how a discrete linguistic representation is translated into articulatory movements so that their acoustic effects produce speech communication.

In this interview, Mark Wise, John A. McCone Professor of High-Energy Physics at the California Institute of Technology, is interviewed by David Zierler. Wise recounts his childhood in Toronto, his early difficulties in school, and his interests in physics, which he studied as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto and was mentored by Nathan Isgur.  He describes the circumstances leading to his graduate admission at Stanford and how he became Fred Gilman’s student at SLAC where he worked on weak radiative hyperon decays and QCD corrections for effective Hamiltonian CP violating processes. Wise describes his postdoctoral work as a Harvard fellow and his excitement about SU(5) grand unification, his close collaboration with Joe Polchinski and how he developed an interest in cosmology. He explains his decision to join the faculty at Caltech, where he started to work with David Politzer, and his involvement in heavy quark effective theory and weak radiative B meson decays. Wise discusses the durability of the Standard Model and what advances might push physics, and in particular, astrophysics and cosmology, beyond the Standard Model. He discusses his hobby pursuit of finance and investing and he muses on the similarities in model-building in physics and financial economics. At the end of the interview, Wise reflects on his contributions and why particle physics allows the possibility for repetitious experiments in a way that astrophysics and cosmology do not, he describes his current interests in conformal Fermi coordinates, and he describes the moral obligation he feels to his graduate students to be the best mentor he can be.