University of Florida

In this interview organized through the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), former ASA president David Green reflects on his career in psychoacoustics. Green discusses his early education at a small high school with limited course offerings. He then describes his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago where he earned a liberal arts degree. Green recalls his time at the University of Michigan for graduate school, where Spike Tanner and John Swets were influential to him. He discusses his PhD thesis involving heterodyne signals and then recounts his first teaching position at MIT. Green goes on to summarize his subsequent positions at the University of Pennsylvania, UC San Diego, Harvard, and the University of Florida. He also talks about the two books he wrote during those years. The interview concludes with Green’s reflections on his grad students over the years and their many accomplishments, as well as other peers who have influenced him. 

Interview with Pierre Sikivie, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida. Sikivie explains how the social isolation imposed by the pandemic has been beneficial for his research, and he recounts his childhood in Belgium and his family’s experiences during World War II. He discusses his undergraduate work and his natural inclination toward theoretical physics, and the opportunities that led to his graduate work at Yale under the mentorship of Feza Gürsey. Sikivie explains that his initial interests were in elementary particle physics which was the topic of his research on Grand Unification and the E6 group. He describes his postdoctoral research at the University of Maryland where he worked on CP violation, and he explains his decision to pursue his next postdoctoral position at SLAC to work on non-Abelian classical theories. Sikivie explains that his interests in cosmology and astrophysics only developed during his subsequent work at CERN, and the circumstances that led to axion research becoming his academic focal point. He describes his appointment to the faculty at the University of Florida and when he became sure that axions would prove to be a career-long pursuit. He narrates his invention of the axion haloscope and how this research evolved into the ADMX collaboration. Sikivie explains why he was, and remains, optimistic about the centrality of axion research to the discovery of dark matter, and he discusses the import of QCD on axion physics over the past thirty years. At the end, Sikivie surveys some of the challenges working in a field whose promise remains in some way hypothetical but which nonetheless holds promise for fundamental discovery.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean L. Jones, Assistant Director for the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. Jones recounts his father’s scientific career at IBM and his own childhood in South Carolina, and the opportunities he had to pursue his interests in math and science. He discusses his undergraduate work in ceramic engineering at Clemson and the opportunities for him to become a McKnight Fellow at the University of Florida for graduate school, where he worked on increasing the luminescence of thin film phosphorous. He describes his postgraduate work at Bell Labs and how the internet bubble affected him at the turn of the century. Jones discusses his subsequent work as a professor of optical engineering at Norfolk State University and the enjoyment he derived in teaching at an HBCU. He explains why meeting Bruce Kramer at NSF was so formative and why he chose to join NSF as a program director after working at Applied Plasmonics. Jones describes the flatness of the NSF’s organizational structure and how the Obama administration’s commitment to science and technology research resonated for his program. He discusses his work at the OSTP in the Executive Branch and his tenure as Executive Secretary of the National Science Board. Jones discusses his increasing responsibilities at NSF and the overall improvement of the budgetary environment since he started. He talks about the current opportunities to expand diversity in STEM and his current work in managing research support as costs continually rise. At the end of the interview, Jones explains why the appetite for taking risk must be central to the future of good scientific policy at the national level.

Interview with Pierre Ramond, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida. Ramond recounts childhood in Paris, he describes his family’s experiences during World War II, and he explains that opportunities that led to his education in electrical engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He discusses his graduate degree in physics at Syracuse University to focus on general relativity and his first exposure to the earliest iterations of string theory. Ramond describes his work at Fermilab on Veneziano modelling, his postdoctoral research at Yale, and his subsequent work at Los Alamos. He describes Gell-Mann’s interest in grand unified theories and the influence of Ken Wilson. Ramond explains the excitement regarding the muon anomaly experiment at Fermilab, and he narrates his decision to join the faculty at the University of Florida. He explains how the department’s stature has risen over the past forty years, and he reflects on his involvement with the superstring revolution in 1984. Ramond describes the difference between effective and fundamental theories in particle physics and he conveys the productive intellectual ferment at the annual Aspen conferences. He describes his service work on the faculty senate and he describes his leadership position at the APS during the discovery of the Higgs. Ramond explains why he thinks supersymmetry would have been detected at a completed SSC and he reflects on receiving the Dirac medal in 2020. At the end of the interview, he discusses Einstein’s misgivings on quantum mechanics, he imagines how string theory might be testable, and he explains why he remains interested in CP violation.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Cliff Will, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida. He recounts his childhood in Ontario, Canada, and explains his decision to enroll at McMaster University, which was both nearby and offered an excellent physics program. He describes his studies with Bertram Brockhouse and how he developed his skills and interests in theory. Will explains his early impressions of Caltech, and how different California felt in the late 1960s. He describes his graduate research in general relativity under the direction of Kip Thorne, and he explains the significance of his calculation of the n-body equations of motion, which was the first post-Newtonian approximation of general relativity. Will explains the import of recent experimental advances in general relativity and how this advanced theoretical work. He describes his postdoctoral research at the Fermi Institute and his attraction at the concept of working with Chandrasekhar. He explains his decision to join the faculty at Stanford, and the state of the field in general relativity and gravitational radiation in the early 1970s. Will describes the circumstances leading to his work at Washington University and the research he did at the McDonnell Center for Space Sciences. He discusses his service work for the National Research Council and his advisory position on the Stanford-NASA space mission called Gravity Probe-B. Will describes his interest in conveying scientific concepts to the broader public, and the excitement he felt in joining the LIGO collaboration. He discusses his recent research interests at the University of Florida and his ongoing collaborations in France. At the end of the interview, Will reflects on what has been confirmed and improved in the field of general relativity since the time of Einstein.

In this interview, William Hartmann of the Acoustical Society of American interviews William Yost, Research Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Arizona State University. Yost discusses his graduate work on signal detection at Indiana University, the development of his Fundamentals of Hearing textbook, co-authored with Donald Nielson, and his early research into noise control at the University of Florida. Yost describes his activities with the Acoustical Society of America, his efforts to promote hearing science at NIH and NSF, and the ASA’s relationship with the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. The interview concludes with a discussion of Yost’s research into modulation detection interference and his move to his current position at Arizona State University.