QUESTION: What memories do you have of your first weeks of employment?
ANSWER: A big fight over the granting of tenure for a full professor.
Q: What best piece of advice did you get early on from a veteran faculty member?
A: Keep track on your calendar all the stuff you do, so at end of year you can fill out your Faculty Information Sheets.
Q: Can you give us some examples of how the university has changed during your years as a faculty member?
A: First of all, it is now a university in all aspects of the name. In 1971, it was just a name, and actually it was a small college with little research. It was also in the times of a depression in employment for physicists, because President Nixon had just cancelled the Moon landings.
Q: How has your teaching and/or research changed during your years as a faculty member?
A: I have been in two departments and taught and done research in three
departments. Research has changed from very applied to much more abstract. The kinds of research topics and research areas have changed much over the years. That shows the power of a good background in physics. You can work effectively in many areas.
Q: Can you compare students you taught during your early faculty years with students of today at ODU?
A: Good students are good students. This has not changed much since the early 1970s. Generally the number of good students has increased over the decades. Also the number of poor students has increased greatly. The typical undergraduate student who is a poor student is so because of several general deficiencies: they cannot read, their math skills are poor and they are working full-time while attempting to be a full-time student.
Q: Of your accomplishments at ODU, which one makes you the proudest?
A: Assisting in the creation of the Ph.D. program in physics.
Q: Can you tell us about graduate students you've turned out who are now well-established scientists themselves.
A: I have been lucky with my doctoral students. I have been research advisor for four Ph.D. students in physics, dozens of master's students, and been on over 80 research committees in many departments. Let me tell you about two of my own doctoral students:
Dorin Todor came to us from Romania with an excellent back-ground in medical physics. While that is not my area, he convinced me that we could do his dissertation research here and with the help of Eastern Virginia Medical School and one of our adjunct professors who worked at Virginia Beach General Hospital. Dorin studied the response of several kinds of tissue to selected irradiation by examining the electrical conductance of the tissue. This idea is still in its infancy in the United States, but is in a more advanced state in the European Union. After his Ph.D. here, he had a very successful post-doctoral term with the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. He is now a professor in Richmond at the Medical College of Virginia. His wife, Luminita, also received her doctorate in physics from our department and is now a patent attorney.
Phillip Stancil, the other graduate student, grew up in Virginia Beach and took dual baccalaureate degrees in mechanical engineering and physics. He selected physics as his graduate field. Phillip did his course work here and started research here. He is quite talented. We got him a pre-doctoral position with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. There he worked with Professor Alex Dalgarno, one of the best-known astrophysicists of our age. After Harvard and his Ph.D. from Old Dominion, Phillip had two post-doctoral positions, the latter of which was as a Wigner Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is now an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Georgia.
