Donald R. Sadoway

INTERVIEWER: Today is July 7, 2010. I am Karen Arenson. We are talking this afternoon with Donald R. Sadoway, the John F. Elliot professor of materials chemistry in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. His research focuses on the use of energy and resources and on questions like how to store energy in automobiles and in stationary objects and how to extract metal ores and recycle metals.

He is also one of the most popular and most heralded teachers in the Institute, and has won repeated awards for his teaching including the MacVicar Faculty Fellowship. He teaches 3.091 Solid State Chemistry, a course that can be used to fulfill the institute's chemistry requirement. More than half of the freshman class take 3.091, a course sometimes referred to as 309-fun. More students take this course then the chemistry department's own offerings.

Don, thanks for talking to us this afternoon. Students rhapsodize about that course. On the admissions blog, one student said it was the greatest class he had ever beheld, and that you fully deserved your five star ratings on YouTube. An alumni posting about you and your work carried the heading, Sadoway the Magnificent. And Bill Gates thanked MIT officials for putting your course online and told the Seattle newspaper that your classes were, "unbelievable." What's your magic?

SADOWAY: I think I begin from the perspective of trying to imagine myself as 17 or 18 years of age sitting in one of the seats in 10-250 hearing this material for the first time and proceed from there. I have recordings of the lectures, and when I prepare a lecture one of the first things I do is to view a recording of that lecture as it was last given. And I'll sit-- and it's probably been almost a year since the last time I thought about that material --and I'll watch that lecture, but trying to imagine myself as 18 and raised on MTV and Sesame Street and whatnot.

You know, when I was a youngster, there were times when my father would be watching television and there'd be some politician holding forth and all of a sudden I'd hear my father yelling at the TV as though the person could hear him. Well history has a way of repeating itself, so sometimes I'm watching the lecture and I start yelling at the TV, saying no, no, no, you can't go from that step to the next step. You left something out! And so I think part of that preparation is being able to look at what has gone forth in the past and try to tune it even further.

INTERVIEWER: Is it hard to put yourself into the shoes or the mind of a 17 year old? You probably weren't raised on MTV.

SADOWAY: I wasn't. I wasn't. I have three kids that were, but to the extent that I can imagine what it would be like to try to make the transition from home to college, and it's really a double jump because you're not going from high school to college. You're going from high school college, college to MIT. And as you know, MIT is a big jump. And so I try to imagine what these students are bringing with them in terms of preparation. Some of them have had several years of chemistry in high school, others took no chemistry. And so we've got a very wide range of abilities and preparation in the room.

The first month is difficult. It's hard to bring the first time learners along without boring to tears those that have seen the material in high school at sort of AP level. So it's almost like Sesame Street in there, that you've got the basic message, the most rudimentary lessons about electronic structure and bonding, and at the same time there's some deeper material. You know, when you're watching Sesame Street there's the double entendres that only the adults understand. But it can be done. You have to be able to teach to a heterogeneous mix when you're teaching a freshman class because of the wide range of abilities of the students that come in. They're all smart, but not everybody's had the same preparation.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever have any teachers who taught like this?

SADOWAY: Well, no. No, I did not.

INTERVIEWER: And what got you thinking that this was worth doing? That it was something that you wanted to do, or needed to do?

SADOWAY: I think that back when I was still in high school, something about teaching and-- I've always valued education. I'm the first generation to complete college in my family, and education was always viewed as the key to social mobility, economic prosperity. And I always valued education. I had respect for my teachers and I saw it as something that maybe I'd like to do that, too. Spread wisdom to the extent that I could.

And so when I was in high school, I thought maybe if I go to college I could come back and teach high school in Oshawa, Ontario. And then when I got to college I said, I like this. Maybe if I go to grad school I could be a college professor. And so somewhere along the way I got the urge to teach. And when I got to MIT I just felt that, over time that there was a need in the big freshman classes.

When you look at the hierarchy of people around here, people dote on their grad students because the grad students are the partners in the research enterprise. Everybody wants well educated grad students because well educated grad students will perform, presumably, high quality research. When you look at the undergraduate students who are in the major, well if I'm in the materials science department, materials science majors are going to go out into the world with our brand so obviously we want to make sure that they are the best materials scientists at the Bachelor's level that people can hire.

But what about the freshman? They're unspecified. They haven't chosen a major. Who cares about them? Yet if you think about something like in an analogous situation, child rearing, the most important thing you can do to ensure a strong finish is to get them off to a good start. And yet what do we do in education? People play spin the bottle to figure out who's going to teach the big freshman classes. So I saw a need and I decided well let's get in there. And it's a challenge, but the ripple effect is huge. I guess it's been the right match of my urge and some institutional need.

INTERVIEWER: Were you always such a good teacher?

SADOWAY: I have no idea. I suspect things have gotten better over the years. I hope they haven't gotten worse over the years. I would say no. I would say that I've learned a lot over the years, partly from watching myself on video, but also by watching other people. I was fortunate that I was a recitation instructor in 3.091 when I first came to MIT and hired on to the faculty. And my predecessor Gus Witt was a fantastic mentor to me. Really I learned a lot from him. And it wasn't formal. I mean, he never sat me down and said, look this is what you need. It was just watching him.

He had this incredible ability to speak in 10-250 and I'd sit at the very back on occasion just to get a sense of auditorium and feel what the students must be feeling. And he spoke to people not as though he was holding forth in lecture mode. It was conversational. Gus was able to create the illusion of having a one to one conversation with 450 people. And I thought that's different. To an 18 year old who's used to being at the top of the totem pole, now to be at the bottom at MIT, quaking in their boots because their support network is gone, they're now miles from home and they're not sure they're going to make it here, to have somebody talk to them as though they're real people I think is an important piece of it.

INTERVIEWER: Do students who love a course necessarily learn more and retain more? Have you tried to measure that?

SADOWAY: I think that the answer is yes. Because these are bright students. In many instances I don't think I teach them anything, formally. I just tell them what's on the agenda. My number one role is to inspire them to learn. They can learn it themselves. When they come to MIT they're all good in math. Physics comes pretty natural, you know 801 is Newtonian mechanics and we all know the Newtonian world. Every one of us knows that if we throw a ball with a certain amount of force we anticipate what the outcome is going to be when that ball hits another ball of a similar mass. Biology is fascinating. It's the new science, and with the rapid advances over the past 25 years, people are fascinated to learn more about biology. And then there's chemistry. That's the subject everybody loves to hate. It's the one that was most poorly taught in high school.

So, that being the case, if my assumption is correct, my number one job in there is to get them to love the subject matter enough to crack the book. After that, they'll learn the material. So much of what I do in lecture is to engage them, to get them hooked on the subject matter so that-- my goal by the end of the semester is to have them reflect upon their first experiences at MIT and go home and say, you know what, I hated chemistry in high school but chemistry was my favorite class in my first semester at MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the skills to be a creative teacher are the same as the skills to be a creative researcher? That there's something that is similar in both cases? Or are they really different kinds of creativity?

SADOWAY: I think they're different kinds in many respects. The business of being inventive in the laboratory or at the desk, I think that's quite different from being creative in a classroom setting. And here I'm talking about big classes. We could divide the teaching enterprise into small classes, say classes of 30 or fewer, to the auditorium where you've got-- once it's more than about 100 it doesn't matter if it's 500 or 1,000, it's just a sea. So how to put that subject matter across, it's not about finding the person who has the deepest understanding of electronic structure and bonding. There are people that know far more chemistry than I'll ever know that you wouldn't set loose in a room with a bunch of 18 year olds, even 18 year olds at MIT. Because the communication piece is the most important piece of good teaching. It's not the same, it to my mind, same part of the brain as being inventive in a laboratory setting.

INTERVIEWER: I was wondering if one needed to have a theatrical gene to pull off classes the way you do. But it sounds like you're describing it partly as a communications issue more than a performance issue. Or is it the combination of the two?

SADOWAY: It's a combination. It's a combination. I'll tell you why-- the performance is important in so far as you've got, as I've mentioned, you've got a large number of students and beyond about the seventh or eighth row, the lecture is just a tiny visual piece of the entire panorama. So all you've got, really, is your voice. Maybe you've got some broad gestures, but you've got to work at engaging to hold their attention. Because ultimately it's just a man with a piece of chalk. I can't go in there with a rock and roll band, and all sorts of video playing in the background-- that will trivialize the class. It'll make it into a parody of itself. Because it has to be serious. The students, above all else, have to respect the instructor as a teacher. And how to engage them using legitimate theatrical tools, if you will, I think that's important. But I've always maintained that content trumps form. If what you're teaching isn't valuable, or isn't seen to be valuable, they will turn off.

INTERVIEWER: One thing that seems to catch students' attention though is that you bring history, and art, and music into the classes. When and why did you start doing that?

SADOWAY: Well there are different answers to different parts of that question. The history was always part of 3.091. I recently asked that question. I can't remember, I was preparing a lecture about 3.091 at some point in the not too distant past, and so I went to my colleague, Tom Eagar who was an undergraduate here and eventually became my department head for a five year period in the last decade, so he was here at the time John Wulff launched 3.091.

It turns out Wulff was quite a raconteur. He was originally from Germany, and came to the United States. And Wulff knew a lot of these people. He knew Friedrich and Knepping. So he could talk about X-rays and the Braggs and all of this stuff. He knew Heisenberg. And being a raconteur he wove these stories into the fabric of the class. And then there were a number of people that taught, and then Gus Witt took over. And Gus was also European. Gus was from Austria. And you would have thought someone from Austria would have been very stiff and formal, and yet he was warm and he was charming. And he had this delightful Austrian accent and it was 3.091, Niels Bohr , and so on and so forth. He also talked about going to a camp when he was a boy, and Schrodinger who was also Austrian, was at this camp and so on.

So it became natural to tell these stories. And I think for me that was an easy way to engage the students instead of a litany of facts. And then this equation, begat this equation, which begat this equation-- so what did people think about the atom? What was the state of affairs in the late 19th century? So there's J.J. Thompson , and then along comes some new data, and then Ernest Rutherford , and then Neils Bohr comes from Copenhagen to study with J.J. Thompson , and then with Rutherford and then their grad students go on to here and there-- pretty soon it becomes a narrative.

It's almost like it's a 14 week soap opera and you come back for the next episode. So that was natural, and I've expanded upon it because I realize that a lot of these students don't understand the place and the time. Why is it that there were all of these Nobel prizes coming out of the Cavendish lab in the UK? And then quantum mechanics comes from Central Europe? And then the Nazis come to power and you have Jews leaving Europe, and people who are disgusted with the treatment of Jews leaving Europe. And then you see the ascendancy of American science. It's a powerful story. And why not tell it to freshman? And they get it. It's terrific.

Now the music is something different. The music was when I was first invited to take over 3.091, Gus wanted to rotate out, and so we reversed roles. So in the fall of '95, he took recitations and I became the lecturer in charge. So I was thinking as I was preparing lectures that on the day that I teach hydrogen bonding I would maybe play Handel's Water Music. So I was thinking about that and then it occurred to me, well why only on that day would I play music?

And so on the opening day of the lectures in the fall of 1995 as the students were coming into the class, I had, I think it was a Bach Brandenburg concerto, I think it was number one. And it was playing. I thought it was very sort of-- you know, it was Baroque, and I thought it would sort of be Cambridge-y. And then I think there was something by Sheryl Crow at the end because I'd talked about cars and there was a Sheryl Crow song that's talking about people in a bar on a Tuesday at noon, and the good people of the world washing their cars and so forth. And so then it became a challenge for me to make the match between the subject matter and the music.

And then from there came film. When I taught polymers, introduced the clip from the Graduate. And then came the Michael Frayn play, Copenhagen. And then on, and on, and on. And pretty soon I was bringing in art work from Dali, and it all enriched the class. And the students loved it. So I think that's a long answer to your question.

INTERVIEWER: No, that's interesting. How many of the students are familiar with the works you present? Is this a pretty well educated group, or are most of these things new to them?

SADOWAY: You'd be surprised. When I teach five fold symmetry, I play something with 5/4 time. So I'll have something like Take Five by Dave Brubeck, and the students will come down after the lecture and-- different students respond to different stimuli, but whenever I play Take Five there'll be several students who come up to me after and they'll say, you know there's this one and it's got 5/4 time. Or you could play this one, or you could play that one. So they're getting it. And then sometimes I'll show something in film or what have you. They respond.

INTERVIEWER: So it's a way of actually opening communications with students in different paths. It's not just talking about chemistry, per se, but about music and art.

SADOWAY: Absolutely. And I think it's important for me to model that I value music, I value art. I respect history. So that they see that I'm not simply the chemistry guy. That I'm not a shallow, one-dimensional character. I have multiple dimensions. How shallow or deep I am, we can debate. I think it's important for them to see that.

I'll tell you a cute story. When I teach X-rays, one of the lectures, there's three lectures on X-rays. There's generation, their characterization, and how they're used in examining materials, X-ray diffraction analysis. So on the second lecture I play the opera, Aria, La Mamma Morta from Andrea Chenier, and I use the version that's one of the recordings of Maria Callas, So she finishes and then I ask, so what were we listening to? And of course they say, opera. And I say, well which opera? What are we listening to? And then I tell them about the verismo style.

Why do we play this? Because Giordano wrote Andrea Chenier in the fall of 1895 and it was premiered in the spring of 1896 at La Scala at precisely the same time that X-rays were taking the world by storm. Because X-rays were first discovered by Roentgen on November 8, 1895, and so these are two parallel times. OK, fine. And I tell them for those of you who hate opera, or think you hate opera, go and listen to this. This is opera for those of you.

So anyways, after the final exam one year this young lady comes to me and asks if she can claim her final exam. I give them back their finals if they want them. So we go down the hall to this room where I had the exams in a file cabinet and I'm standing there flipping through them, and she says to me, you know I've been listening to Andrea Chenier. And I said, that's great. So you love opera? She says, before you played what you did I had never heard opera. So here's a young lady who was obviously good at math and science in high school and somehow ends up at MIT, and somehow ends up in my class. What's the most important thing I taught her that fall? She has a latent interest of opera. And she'll have that for the rest of her life. Now that's worth the cost of an MIT education I would say.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever think about pursuing a career in the humanities rather than science and engineering?

SADOWAY: Yes. When I was in high school I loved language. I grew up in Canada, so of course we learned French, but I also studied Latin. I loved Latin. I distinctly remember studying the University of Toronto course-- what they call calendar here --the course bulletin and looking at classics. And I also seriously contemplated music. But then I decided applied science. I didn't like engineering. The word engineering didn't sit well with me. Mercifully at the University of Toronto what we have here as the School of Engineering there is called the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. I said, I want to be at the cusp of science and engineering. Applied science. I thought that was good.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have a music minor or anything like that?

SADOWAY: No, no. I took piano lessons as a youngster and so on.

INTERVIEWER: If you find exactly the right piece of art and music for the course do you then keep using it, or do you keep turning them over? It sounds like part of fun is to find new matches.

SADOWAY: Yes, it is. There is some change, but in some instances if you have a really nice match I just leave it in place.

INTERVIEWER: It's sometimes said that being known for spectacular teaching is the kiss of death in a research institution, but you've won tenure and you've made it to full professor with a named chair. Do you think there are real trade offs?

SADOWAY: Oh sure, sure. I mean there's only so much time in the day. But a career spans decades. So the way I've handled things was I dedicated myself to my teaching even at the beginning. I was teaching core graduate class materials science, and had about 40 students every year. In the spring and the fall I'd take recitation of 3.091. That still allowed me enough time to develop a research program that was strong enough to cross the divide and make tenure. But after I got tenure, actually I really took a big step back and re-oriented my research and re-oriented my teaching.

In other words saying, OK so now that they've agreed to keep me, now I'm going to parlay the security that tenure offers into wholesale remaking of what I'm doing both in teaching and research in such a way as to take greater risks. So even if I fail, it's not going to be, well this person isn't worth keeping here. But rather we've already established that he's made the cut but let's really reach for something that's greater.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have advice for young professors about how to think about the balance between teaching and research? Or advice on teaching, generally?

SADOWAY: Sure, I would say that you have to make sure that the research products are strong enough that you will be able to advance your career. And those are words that are carefully chosen. It's not that Caesar's wife must be virtuous, she must be seen to be virtuous. So whether that means you've got to publish your results, or you've got to get out into the world and be seen at conferences so that your reputation will grow. Then as far as teaching, be attentive to your teaching. Do a good enough job that you can get-- you see, the nice thing about teaching is that you can get almost instant recognition because the semester ends, course evaluations are available within typically a month.

And so I tell junior faculty to do a decent job when they first set out. Because you'll get a quick feedback and you can be instantly recognized as, well at least she can teach. That's good. Now how's the research coming? But then don't go overboard. Don't be obsessive and say, gee maybe I could fix this-- it's a balancing act.

INTERVIEWER: Going back to the 3.091 structure. You introduced a contest into the class at some point?

SADOWAY: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Tell us about that.

SADOWAY: At one point, rather early in the semester, I require them to memorize the periodic table. When I first announced this, some of my colleagues called me up and said, are you mad? I thought rote learning went out with the Victorians? And I said, I think every educated person needs to know that cesium lies under rubidium. So I'm not going to ask them to learn the lanthanides and the actinides, but the S, P, and, D block elements, yes. I'm going to give them a blank periodic table and they're going to have to write the one or two letter abbreviations of those elements.

So there was some grumbling, but we put it into play and the students had 10 minutes to do this and they were all done in about three. As fast as their hands could write they filled out all these things. And then there was a sense of pride associated with it. And in then the subsequent years they would tyrannize the new freshmen. Sadoway is going to make you learn the periodic table, and we learned it so you can learn it, too.

So then not to dismiss the lanthanides and actinides I just said well we'll have a contest for mnemonics so that you could name the lanthanide series or the actinide series. And so they'd give me things like Lazy College Professors Never Cease To Produce. So, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, and so on. And every once in awhile you get a surprise.

Some time in the last 10 years a youngster turned in an Elizabethan sonnet. An Elizabethan sonnet contains 14 lines. There are 14 F electrons, there are 14 lanthanides and there are 14 actinide elements. And this was a piece that had three verses, four lines each, and a rhyming couplet at the end. And the first word of each line had the two letters, either adjacent or sometimes with a vowel in between. I just remember for samarium he had smelting. And he knew I was a metallurgist. I showed this to Janet Sonenberg who's on the literature faculty, and she got back to me a day or two later and said this is actually quite good. And by the way, it was written in homage to the Shakespearean sonnet number 57 because lanthanum, was element 57. I mean everything was just neatly done.

I've had some videos come in. This past year a gal did a karaoke to The Sound of Music doe, a deer, a female deer-- she does the entire periodic table. They really get into it. During the Friday of the parents weekend, when the parents are in town I present the awards to the students and it's great fun. And it just humanizes the class, and it's not all work and problem sets and so on. I don't think it diminishes from the learning, and it doesn't bring lack of respect for me that I've just turned it into a circus of games and stand up comedy for me. I think there's a lot of learning there.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea what your poet is doing now?

SADOWAY: I don't know. I don't know. INTERVIEWER: One other touch in the class that people point to is that you come dressed in a tuxedo for one of your classes.

SADOWAY: Yes. This is the last lecture. At the very last lecture, as you know when the semester is drawing to a close, there are rules at MIT about homework assignments and so on. If there's a final exam there can be no homework assigned during the last week. And that stretch from Thanksgiving to the end of the first semester is really difficult for the students. They really should take some exams and then go home for Thanksgiving and don't come back until New Years or something.

But anyway, so here they are, and so the subject matter, the very last major topic is phase diagrams. I have a lecture on unary phase diagrams and I bring in some liquid nitrogen and we have some fun with that. The second lecture involves binary phase diagrams and so we play with ouzo and water and so on. And then the last lecture I call my champagne lecture, because I teach them how champagne is made. And it relies upon the knowledge of two phase diagrams. One is ethanol-water for the champagne, and then for cooling the neck of the champagne bottle you have to know sodium chloride and water. So I show them both of these phase diagrams and then we design the process by which champagne is made. And so I wear a tuxedo for that lecture and I finish the formal part of the lesson. And then I talk about the final exam and I make some parting observations about semester. Towards the end of that reflective part I open the champagne having taught them how to chill the champagne properly.

So every 3.091 student knows that there are six turns of the wire basket in order to take the cap off the champagne bottle. I open the champagne and I drink a toast to the class. I even bring a bouquet of roses and everything is very elegant. And they remember. I've had students come up and ask me about champagne. And is that so bad?

INTERVIEWER: Sounds like you're getting into charm school before IAP.

SADOWAY: There's an element of that, I suppose. I'm not going to push back from that.

INTERVIEWER: You seem to like to surprise your students, too, to keep them off balance. One Alum on some kind of blog was recalling a class that he took with you in chemical metallurgy, which wasn't 3.091, in which you ask, what was the most important variable in steel making? And apparently the students gave you all sorts of technical answers and tried to outdo each other, and you shook your head and said?

SADOWAY: I turned to the chalk board and I drew a dollar sign.

INTERVIEWER: Why don't you explain.

SADOWAY: I can't really remember. Well I don't know, perhaps you've got some more information on it. I'm drawing a blank on the exact timing.

INTERVIEWER: You said that if US Steel stopped making money when they made steel, they were going to stop making steel. And this was a bit of economics being meshed with the metallurgy. So we had the arts, and now we have the social sciences.

SADOWAY: Well I think that, I guess the way I look at teaching is that when I look at 3.091, it's not a chemistry class, it's a chemistry centered class. So 3.03, which was the course number of this particular subject, was chemical metallurgy, but the students need to know something about the economics of metal production. I thought it was perfectly legitimate to introduce this into the class. And they were fascinated by it. Evidently it stuck with this one fellow who managed to blog about it.

INTERVIEWER: I think it was one of the alumni association websites or something like that. But he was obviously struck by it and he remembered it. It was some years ago. I don't know how long, exactly, but there he was talking about yet another one of your classes.

Let's go back to talk about your path prior to MIT. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? What were you like as a kid?

SADOWAY: I was born in Toronto and my parents moved to Oshawa when I was three years old.

INTERVIEWER: To where?

SADOWAY: Oshawa. I guess today it's about 160,000 people. In those days it was probably 40,000-50,000 people. It's the home of General Motors of Canada. So it's an auto town. Blue collar town. All of the feeder industries, glass, you name it. Everything you need to build a car is in that area.

And my parents owned a motel. Small motel. When I was first born, my father was a co owner of a hotel in Toronto, but it was it basically a tavern. And then he and his partner decided to sell and move out of Toronto. One of them went to Windsor and my father went to Oshawa. The other interesting thing was that I didn't speak English until I was three years old.

My parents were both of Ukrainian descent. My father was born in Canada, my mother came from Ukraine when she was probably two years old. So they lived with my mother's parents at the time, so I spoke only Ukrainian. And when we moved to Oshawa I learned English over the summer of 1953. It probably took me a couple of months to learn English and then by the time I got to kindergarten I was fine. You can tell I still retain some thick Slavic accent. Probably not. The interesting thing is that I was in Ukraine in 1990 as a guest of the Academy of Sciences in Kiev, and there were some social settings in which people might walk in and not know who I was. And they would hear me speaking and they would identify me with the region of Ukraine from which my grandparents came. So even though my vocabulary might shrink because I don't use the language, after a week I could give a lecture on spectroscopy and molten salts. But the accent is pristine late 19th century Galatian dialect, which is what my grandparents spoke.

I grew up in Oshawa and not being of Anglo-Saxon extraction, growing up in a blue-collar auto town, it had its challenges. I mean, when boys found out that I took piano lessons I got the tar beaten out of me and stuff like that. I played hockey but quickly came to the realization that my goal tending skills weren't good enough to get me to the Boston Bruins. Bobby Orr and I are the same age and Bobby Orr was in high school and in Oshawa at the same time I was in high school.

So I decided if I were ever going to leave Oshawa, and boy I wanted to leave Oshawa, I was going to have to study my way out. And so maybe that accounts for my love of education because it really was the escalator. The social escalator.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever work during the summers for General Motors?

SADOWAY: Yes. I worked one summer in the purchasing department. But I did other odd jobs. I worked one summer installing swimming pools. That was hard labor. And then I applied to the University of Toronto and went in to the program called engineering science, which was based on MIT. It was established right after World War 2 by some people who had studied at MIT. So I felt as though I got an MIT education at a Toronto price. And I was well served by it.

INTERVIEWER: But it sounds like the interest in science and math was partly interest and partly practical?

SADOWAY: Yes, I think that's fair to say. I think I was influenced by teachers. I think if I sit here long enough I'll recall some pivotal moment in high school where I said, science is really cool, that's what I want to do. But as we talked earlier, I could have gone into classics, I could have gone into music. So I think there may be a practical element. I think maybe my father would have had something to say if I'd told him, dad I'm going to go off to college and I'm going to study the classics.

INTERVIEWER: You've never tried to make a better hockey stick, though.

SADOWAY: I used to repair hockey sticks, though. I used to repair them.

INTERVIEWER: Was the University of Toronto where the best students went?

SADOWAY: Yes. In Canada I would say, some people think McGill is good, there are a lot of them around here, but I disagree. I think Toronto was the was a place to go when I was in school. As I say, the engineering science program there was really top notch and I think I got off to a good start.

INTERVIEWER: What excited you about materials science and engineering rather than other types of science?

SADOWAY: In high school I'd already started to take a shine to chemistry. Maybe because it's less precise. The math has got to be right. And the physics could be mathematically modeled quite nicely. Especially once you knew calculus you could do all of Newtonian mechanics. But chemistry, no. Chemistry required some visceral sense, some intuition. And I liked that. When I went off to college I thought I was going to major in chemical engineering. In Toronto, still into the late 60s, it was the old MIT model. It was two years general and then major in the third year. So we all had to take several semesters of chemistry and one was organic chemistry. And I disliked organic chemistry.

Chemical engineering, in those days, was largely petrochemistry. So where to find an expression for applied chemistry but not the chemistry of carbon? Extractive metallurgy. How to take ore and turn it into metal. And so that's how I found myself in what was, in those days, metallurgy. Material science was just in its formative stages. It was all metallurgy with some parenthetical remarks about ceramics. But I knew nothing about polymers until I came to MIT. And semi conductors for that matter. My knowledge was basically metallurgy.

INTERVIEWER: That's a good base.

SADOWAY: It's a good start.

INTERVIEWER: How much has the field changed since you entered it? Do you think it has changed more than most fields, or are most technological disciplines changing rapidly.

SADOWAY: I think materials science-- perhaps biology is the only one that I could imagine that's changed as much. And interestingly enough, what's the difference between biology when I was a kid and biology today? Today it's called molecular biology. Well what is molecular? Molecular is chemistry. So it's now gone to its chemical routes. I mean all the stuff about information and so on-- absolutely fascinating. But what is the mechanism of coding that information? It is chemical bonds along the back bone. It is all chemistry.

You know Rutherford was very outspoken, a colorful character. He was one of 10 children and grew up on a sheep farm in New Zealand. They once asked him, well when you model the atom, you've got the electron and you've got the nucleus, and you've talked about the movement of the electrons. You don't talk about the movement of the nucleus in your model. And he says, "when an elephant has fleas, it's the fleas that do the jumping." Well I lost my train of thought, so you have to bring me back to where I was. I knew there was some connection with Rutherford, but--

INTERVIEWER: We were talking about the change in the different fields--

SADOWAY: Change. What I would do if I were to pay homage to Rutherford I'd say parenthetically with reference to the comment I made about molecular biology-- Rutherford said, "all of science can be divided into two categories-- physics and stamp collecting." And so I would say he was close. I think it's chemistry and stamp collecting.

So materials science has changed a lot. It started with metals and metallurgy. The extraction and then, once you've got the virgin metal, how to combine it with other models and alloys to get alloys with different properties. Higher strength, higher toughness, what have you. But to make the metal the high temperature you needed to know something about containment. So that meant bricks, which meant ceramics. So there was always an element of ceramics that went with metallurgy.

And then in the 50s when along came silicon as the lead material in what ultimately became integrated circuits-- in the 50s it was still transistors, discreet transistors --how to extract silicon. Well silicon, even though it's a semi conductor, as a liquid it's metal. And the production of silicon is metallurgy. And so there was this natural growth from metallurgy to the production of silicon and so on, that then was sensible for the field.

And then the analogy to alloy development, where you take aluminum and you add some magnesium, and the next thing you know you've got a metal that you can make beverage containers out of. Well you start with a piece of silicon and you dope it with phosphorus, and you dope it with boron, well that's alloy development. And so the analogy there brought semi conductors under the tent, or into the tent. So now we've got metals, ceramics, and semi conductors. And then at MIT came the first successful attempt to bring in polymers. Polymers, up until that time, had been largely handled by chemistry or chemical engineering departments. And that was about the synthesis of the polymers. But what materials science had come to, really become the primary expositor of, is this notion that if you change the atomic arrangements you'll change the properties.

And so, well, let's do the same to polymers. So we can take high density polyethylene and low density polyethylene. Chemical composition identical. But by changing the nature of the backbone, without changing the chemical composition, we get radically different properties. From the hard milk jug you have the stretchable food seal. Same material. So it was here at MIT under Walter Owen, who actually was the department head who hired me, that the decision was made that we're going to integrate polymers.

I'm told at the time there were some old school metallurgists who bristled at the idea. That it was too different and it wouldn't work. And of course they would make it their mission to see that it didn't work. And Walter made it his mission to see that it did work, and it did.

INTERVIEWER: So you mentioned earlier that somewhere during college maybe, you began to think about teaching college and remaining an academe. How did you begin to plan out your career, or what you needed to do next?

SADOWAY: I've never been very good at long range planning. I think my career has been a series of near term adjustments. So at some point I decided, well if you really want to teach college you're going to need a PhD, so I continued in Toronto. I pursued graduate study because I was taken by one of my faculty in the undergraduate program there. And I ended up staying and doing a PhD with him. And then I realized that I couldn't go directly from a PhD to a faculty position, I needed to round out my education with a postdoc.

I won a NATO fellowship which allowed me to go anywhere in the NATO alliance and decided to come to MIT to work for the late Julian Szekely who was really avant garde in that he was bringing notions of how you model transport phenomena that were common to chemical engineers but unknown to metallurgists. He'd only recently come to MIT. He'd been at SUNY Buffalo and then, I think around '75 had come to MIT as a full professor. So I chose to come here to postdoc with him and the plan was to spend a year or two postdoc-ing with Julian, fatten up my resume, and then try to find a teaching position back in Canada. And while I was here postdoc-ing a vacancy came up on this faculty. They were actually looking for a physical metallurgist. Someone that would be involved in alloy design and so on. Julian came to me and said, I think you ought to apply for this position. I said, this is MIT. He said, I think you have some fine qualities, so go ahead. You're being too Canadian. So I applied for the position and was offered the job. So that's how I ended up here on the faculty.

INTERVIEWER: What did you do your dissertation on?

SADOWAY: My dissertation was in the chemistry of the separation of niobium and tantalum. These are two elements that lie below vanadium. They're found together in nature thanks to the lanthanide contraction. They are chemically almost twins even though they have rather different atomic masses. There are certain nuclear applications where even though niobium and tantalum are chemically very similar, in a nuclear setting they are poles apart. One of them has a very high neutron capture cross section, and the other one as a very low neutron capture cross section. And so if you're going to use these as alloying elements for parts of a nuclear reactor, you want them to be either opaque or transparent but not a mix of both. And so I worked on a process to separate the two by forming compounds where the difference in the two compounds, the difference in the vapor pressures of the two compounds, was enough that by fractional distillation you could get some reasonable separation efficiencies. So the thesis involved preparing the compounds, measuring their physical properties, X-ray diffraction, et cetera, et cetera, and then modeling the process.

INTERVIEWER: How did you choose the topic?

SADOWAY: There had been some work in the lab that I was working in on zirconium and hafnium which are both group four elements. And same thing-- zirconium is transparent to thermal neutrons, hafnium is almost a complete block to thermal neutrons. I thought, well, you make zirconium-niobium alloys, and so tantalum contamination in niobium would ruin the alloy. So why not try the niobium-tantalum chemistry. Plus I figured there's a wealth of information on the vapor pressure behavior of the chlorides of zirconium and hafnium. That ought to get me off to a roaring start. It terms out the chemistries of niobium and tantalum are very different from the chemistries of zirconium and hafnium so it was a struggle but I learned a lot.

INTERVIEWER: Did you continue on that work when you got to MIT or did you switch gears?

SADOWAY: I switched gears. I think there was one small piece of follow on work. It's normal for people, when they're starting out, if there's some loose ends to still tie up after the PhD. There might be a little bit of follow on work. Well maybe I shouldn't say that. There may be some people that continue to use their PhD as a platform for a long time. I don't mean that in a disparaging way. It depends on the topic.

But I figured I'd said what needed to be said about the niobium and tantalum, and then started to move into electrochemistry because I wanted to develop this whole area of the electrochemical extraction of metals. This is how aluminum is made, by an electrolytic process. Magnesium is made by an electrolytic process. And I want to look at maybe extracting tantalum, titanium, and going farther. In the late 70s and early 80s there was still interest in the domestic aluminum industry and the fundamental electric chemistry behind the process. That was also a motivation to study the basic electrochemistry there.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember your first impressions of MIT?

SADOWAY: Oh yes. I remember when I first arrived and I walked up the steps from that cross walk at 77 and looked up at those pillars and thought, well you've really done it now. This is high stakes. No more big fish in a small pond. This is the real deal. And the early days were very heady. I mean, to be surrounded with super bright people. I was postdoc-ing with Julian and the kinds of people that would come to visit him was just a different world from the University of Toronto.