John A. Ochsendorf

INTERVIEWER: First of all, this is the 150th anniversary celebration interview with John, it's --?

OCHSENDORF: Ochsendorf, like o- x- e- n.

INTERVIEWER: So tell me where you were born and where you grew up.

OCHSENDORF: I was born in Columbus, Ohio. My parents were both from Ohio. And when my parents were about 20- years- old they decided to live a simpler life. And they basically moved to rural West Virginia as a way of going back to the land. So I grew up in West Virginia from a young age of about five, and went through high school in Elkins, West Virginia, a small town in the middle of the state of about 7,000 people. It was an absolutely beautiful place. And we grew up in a way that wasn't very usual in the United States in the 1980s. We had no telephone and no television. You know my parents were really interested in living a simpler life, and reading books, and growing around food. And it was just a phenomenal way to grow up. And I grew up as one of six children. So I had five brothers and sisters. And I often said that my parents had children because they were a good source of labor for weeding in the garden, and chopping firewood, and everything. So it was an absolutely fantastic place to grow up in the small town in the country with really devoted teachers and a wonderful community.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the sort of non-technological upbringing has impacted your work in any way?

OCHSENDORF: It has. We of course had technology all around us. And we used technology in lots of ways. But it wasn't maybe technology that most late 20th century American households had. So once a year we would borrow a cider press from friends who would put it on our front porch. And we would make apple cider from apples. So it's a bit like growing up on a farm. So you're surrounded by technology, but maybe not the telephone and things that were so active in other Americans' lives in the 1980s. But I would say yes, it is kind of strange for someone to grow up in a house with not a lot of technology, to become a faculty member at MIT. But I became an engineer, in part, because I was good at math and I liked problem solving. But I think the childhood has influenced me in terms of how I bias technologies. That is, I give value to technologies that are maybe simpler or local. And I think that does come out in my research and my work.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a TV now?

OCHSENDORF: We do. It's a little bit of a funny story. And it's very recent because my wife's family offered us a television for Christmas this year, and I declined. I said, no thank you. We don't really need a television. And then a few days-- a few weeks-- later a delivery truck showed up and said, oh we have a television to deliver. So I was overruled. But the truth is I really like sports. I like to watch sports. I'm particularly interested in soccer. So I follow European soccer teams.

INTERVIEWER: My husband too.

OCHSENDORF: Oh very good. And when I started at MIT, I set my start date around the World Cup in 2002. I had just finished my PhD and I delayed my start so that I could have a full month of uninterrupted soccer watching with my good friends. So, yes. Soccer is very important to me.

INTERVIEWER: And you attended Elkins High School, which is a big deal. They're quite well-known.

OCHSENDORF: Well in the area. I mean it's a public high school. I mean, when I was there-- I graduated in 1992-- it didn't have AP classes, for example. And maybe half the kids go to college. Generally in West Virginia they're pretty high illiteracy rates. And I had friends who were very talented, very bright kids, who growing up never made it to college. In part because of their socioeconomic backgrounds, or their educational opportunities. But from Elkins High School I got a very good education. And I ended up going to Cornell University as an undergraduate. But in a certain way, as a fluke. A friend of mine had an application he hadn't filled out. It was due the next day. I said, could I fill it out? So it wasn't the hyper-intense world that, you know, my MIT undergraduates are in today where they're thinking about where they're going to apply from age eight. And, you know, in some ways that was nice not to have that pressure. But I also got lucky. I'm very aware that where I grew up, I could have ended up on a lot of other paths in life. And not all of them led to being on the MIT faculty. Which has been a great joy.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you pick Cornell?

OCHSENDORF: I was really choosing between Cornell and Ohio State, where my father had gone. And I knew it was a good school. I was accepted in the engineering school. I hadn't even visited by the time I accepted. My mother had gone to Cornell, to Ithaca, when she was young. And she'd gone to Cornell football games. So she had good memories of it. And I thought hey, sounds great. There was no web at the time. So I couldn't look at images online or read blogs about the place. But I did see some pictures, and it looked beautiful. And for me, growing up in a town of 7,000, Ithaca is a town of about 25,000. So it was a little bit of a step. But it wasn't like moving to Manhattan or moving to Columbus. And as it happened, Cornell was a perfect stepping- stone to the world. Because my friends were from all over the world. You know, my friend's from Manhattan thought Ithaca was a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. But coming from Elkins, I was in this metropolis. And then I could go to Manhattan on the weekends and slowly, basically changed from being pretty much a country boy into someone who felt comfortable in big cities of the world.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide you wanted to study structural engineering?

OCHSENDORF: In my first semester at Cornell, I knew I wanted to be a civil and environmental engineer. At least I chose that, in part, because I wanted to save the earth. I knew we had environmental issues that were a concern. And I thought as an engineer I could work on those. And in the very first week, I grabbed a senior who spoke to us about civil engineering at Cornell. And I said, what should I do? What's a good thing for a freshman to do? He said, take a class with Mary Sansalone, that was a very special professor. And she taught an introductory structures class. And I took that class and it just changed the way I saw the world. When you study structures, you're studying the mechanics of everything from skyscrapers to trees-- why the branches of trees are shaped the way they are. So all of a sudden it was like, I often said I went to college to understand the world around me. And you can do that in a lot of different ways. You can study economics. You can study anthropology. In studying structural engineering, I really felt that I could look around me and I could see the world with a new eye, how things worked, and why they were shaped the way they did, and why they use the materials they did. And so that was absolutely thrilling. So that happened in my very first semester. And some of the teaching, let's say innovation that she developed at Cornell, I've been using in my classes here at MIT. Such as case studies: you know learning from case studies of exceptional structures or building models and comparing theory to experiments. And I'm very pleased that some of my students' videos of our testing have made it onto YouTube for example. So if you go to YouTube and type in MIT column testing or something, you can find a video of some of experiments we do in our classes, followed by pretty exciting applause. So there's a very much an engaged learning that I got from that first semester at Cornell. So I fell in love with structures and she mentored me throughout my undergraduate and PhD, and still does today. So it is really because of one person. That's the easy answer.

INTERVIEWER: As you went through Cornell, they sort of didn't know what to do with you. Did they?

OCHSENDORF: Well something happened in my sophomore year that was a vital, say crossroads, in my life. I was taking all these engineering classes and I was solving problems. At MIT, we called them problem sets-- p-sets. So I'm solving problems week after week after week. And pretty much all the problems had one answer. So I'd solve a problem. I put a box around it. And there, I'd gotten the answer. I could move on. Well after two years of this I started to get disillusioned because I knew the world wasn't really like that. And I was missing out on-- you know, I grew up reading books-- I was missing out on so many other aspects of the world, culture, and history, and in a good liberal arts education. You're taking surveys in other areas. And so I was taking a class that has, as an activity, an archaeological dig outside of Ithaca, looking for remains of a Native American settlement from 3,000 years earlier.

And so I spent a Saturday on an archaeological dig. And I dug in the mud, a test pit, all day long. I didn't find a single thing. I didn't find a bead of anything at all. And yet it was just the most thrilling day of my life. And I think the idea that I could have found, or could find an artifact that was a direct connection to a person who was on that spot thousands of years earlier was so thrilling. And so I went to my advisor's office the next day. And I said you know, I really appreciate your help, but I'm transferring to archaeology because I think that's really what I was meant to do. And she was an absolutely exceptional advisor. And she said that is a great idea. She said, do archaeology, but don't leave engineering. So she helped me design my own major that combined structural engineering-- the study of structures, and buildings, and bridges, and structural mechanics-- with archaeology-- the study of human history through physical artifacts. And so for the remainder of my time at Cornell, I was really combining those two fields. And you're right. I was a bit of an oddball. But it meant that I was living exactly, or bridging this area that the writer, C.P. Snow has called the two cultures, which are the sciences and the humanities.

And so it was an exceptional undergraduate experience. And in particular-- just go into a little more detail-- I'd never traveled abroad. And I decided to study abroad. So I spent a semester in Australia. And while I was studying engineering at the University of Sydney, I was also studying archaeology. So I was taking classes in classical antiquities. I took a class in witchcraft and magic in classical antiquities. It was basically an ancient religions class. At the same time I was taking fluid dynamics. And my engineering classmates could not believe that I was studying what they called witchcraft, you know classical religions. But I was very happy. I was very happy exploring these. And when I came back to Cornell, midway through my junior year, my advisor helped me find a project which became a research project, a thesis, which was the study of the history and technology of Inca suspension bridges in South America. So that was a perfect way of combining my engineering knowledge-- granted at an undergraduate level-- with my love for archaeology and my interest in history. And it turned out that this topic, to me, that was immediately fascinating, it had scarcely been studied. So I would find books on the Inca technology or the Inca Empire, which thrived between about 1300 and 1530 in South America, centered in what is now Cuzco. And they wrote about the Inca bridges. Archaeologists wrote sentences like "the Inca built magnificent suspension bridges," period. And then wouldn't elaborate in any way. And it turned out that there was an area-- and as I'm going on in my career I found other similar areas-- where technologists, like engineers, typically haven't been very interested in our history. And archaeologists haven't particularly been interested in works of engineering, or haven't necessarily had the skills with the tools to ask the right questions about this work. So pretty much at the age of 19 or 20, with my advisor's help, I begin to create a discipline of the study of ancient structures as an engineer with an interest in archaeology. And that really was laying the foundation for the work I've done over the last 15 years.

INTERVIEWER: What was it about the Inca suspension bridges that most fascinated you?

OCHSENDORF: Well, one of the bridges still survives today in a remote area of Peru. And I think what I was so excited about, more than anything, was the notion of appropriate technology. They were deep, deep canyons, very wide with rushing rivers underneath. And building a bridge across these wide canyons was not an easy thing to do. And I quickly learned that when the Spanish arrived-- they conquered the Inca Empire in 1532-- for the next 300 years the Spanish tried to build bridges over these canyons with leading European technology at the time. And they failed. In order to build an arch across such a wide canyon, you need to first build a wooden form-work, or centering, to support the stones until the keystone is in place. So they spent the equivalent of millions of dollars and hundreds, or even thousands of lives trying to import European technology to this context. And the Inca had developed a solution that was very appropriate-- use local materials, span long distances. They were the longest bridges in the world at the time. And they survived for centuries after the fall of the Inca Empire. And so, in short, it kind of turned everything on its head that I'd been taught. I was taught that kind of European tradition of structural engineering, which of course, has tremendous accomplishments. But it was an amazing moment to see a technological encounter between Spain and the Inca Empire, in seeing that these bridges were exceptional works of engineering, and that they had survived for centuries. And that I could still go and walk over one of them today was quite thrilling.

INTERVIEWER: Good story about arrogance.

OCHSENDORF: I think so. And you know, you might expect that then the Spanish saw the Inca bridges, went back to Europe, told everybody about them, and then the suspension bridges were built in Europe. But it wasn't really like that. It was another several hundred years. The first major suspension bridges weren't built in Europe until the early 1800s. And therefore it was basically an independent invention. So the conquistadors and the chroniclers, who wrote about the Inca Empire, described these bridges in tremendous detail. And that was a great primary source material for me in studying the technology of the bridges. But nobody said, hey maybe we should try this here. So it's just fascinating.

INTERVIEWER: In your experience of putting together sort of your own it major by combining what people might think of as disparate interests, is there a lesson in there for students?

OCHSENDORF: There's absolutely a lesson. I try to say to incoming freshmen, as often as I can, give them some basic guidelines about how to succeed in college. And I really think inventing your own program is key. Because, let's say, for example, that you love physics and you love music. Why not try to combine those two? Why not try to create your own path in life? And I really do feel that there are certain areas-- both of research and of just general academic study-- that are so well trod that it's very difficult to make innovations in some areas.

Let me just hypothesize for a minute. There's a certain field that's plowing very deeply into its knowledge. And then there's another field over here that's plowing very deeply into its knowledge. Well there simply must be deep and interesting areas in between the two. And so I just think some of the most exciting work going on today is interdisciplinary, and people who have skills from two different fields, who combine them to solve problems in new ways. And I think for MIT, students who can harness this, or who can bring their skills from different fields, they're the ones who are going to create breakthroughs in the future. And so I think there are absolutely lessons in this. And I do think that MIT is a place where we don't really have boundaries between disciplines. And we generally do pursue good problems wherever they lead us. And I would say that I found that here, more than any other university I've studied at. It's not only possible but it's encouraged to combine different fields. So that's been something that I've really enjoyed. And it's been exciting about being at MIT.

But I certainly try to encourage it in my advisees. It's simply, it worked for me, right? So if I had plowed deeply into one area, I would have been one of 400 people with a PhD in a specific area. Whereas my strategy is a little extreme. And I often tell students that what I did was I intentionally chose subjects that could never ever lead to a job. No one is asking for an Inca suspension bridge specialist when you come out of undergraduate. But I just simply studied things that I was fascinated by and in love with. And I figured it would work out. And I was able to continue that through my graduate education, and now on the faculty. Well hey, it led to a job eventually. So I do think it's important that students should let's say, to put it a bit poetically the way Joseph Campbell says, to follow your bliss. Find what it is that you really love and pursue that path.

INTERVIEWER: So they call people like you silo breakers.

OCHSENDORF: I didn't know that, but okay.

INTERVIEWER: Because traditionally, in the academic model all the departments are separate.

OCHSENDORF: Yes. It doesn't come without risks. That is, if you bridge different disciplines, you need people in each discipline to say that you're important and you're doing significant research and significant work in your area. Or if you're going to try to create a new field, you need at least enough other people in that new field to say that what you're doing is important and interesting. Yes okay, if you break out of the silos then it's important that you're not alone in the field somewhere. You need to have someone who can recognize the value of your work. So, yeah. There is a certain risk to it.

INTERVIEWER: So what made you pick Princeton? And what made you pick civil and environmental engineering?

OCHSENDORF: Well your questions are fantastic. At the end of my undergraduate, I'd been working on the Inca bridges. I presented a research paper at Berkeley as a senior. And I got a great response. And the professor came up to me, who is an archaeologist specializing in the history and technology of materials. And her name was Heather Lechtman. She's a very distinguished professor at MIT. This is what we do at MIT. Come to MIT and do archaeology. And I looked carefully at graduate programs in archaeology. And I decided that I had made a contribution as an undergraduate because I was an engineer and I can bring technical skills to archaeology. And I could make a greater contribution if I stayed in engineering. And let me put another way. The archaeologists welcomed me with open arms to archaeology. The engineers wondered what in the world an archaeologist could possibly offer engineering. And so I basically felt like engineering needed me more than archaeology needed me. And so I decided to pursue graduate school in structural engineering and structural mechanics. And my philosophy about graduate school-- and again what I say to my students today is-- you should find someone who inspires you or someone who you really want to learn from. And so I think of it as kneeling at the feet of a master, and just trying to learn from someone who's at the top of their field. So I went to Princeton for one reason. And it was a tremendous professor name David Billington, who is a historian-- he's structural engineer-- but he's a historian who has really created the study of the history of our field and identified who the great designers were.

And so just as an example, imagine if you were to study literature or music without studying great works of literature or great works of music. Architecture is the same way. If you said to an architect, name your five favorite architects. They would struggle. And they would struggle because they would have 50 in mind and they'd have to narrow it down to five. If you said to a structural engineer, name your five favorite structural engineers. They would struggle. And they would struggle because they could not even name five, much less five favorite or argue you as to why. And yet, our field has a tremendous history of really remarkable people. Gustave Eiffel, who was a great bridge builder in France, who eventually built the Eiffel Tower which immortalized his name. John Roebling, the suspension bridge builder in the United States who built the Brooklyn Bridge, designed the Brooklyn Bridge. These are heroes and their works are worthy of academic study, rigorous study. Why is the Brooklyn Bridge a great bridge? And as engineers, we don't learn that history. So David Billington at Princeton, is really one of the only leading professors in the world who, in the structural engineering department, has made the study of history a central pillar of the academic program. And I think you get better engineers out of it. So I went to work with him for two years. I was his teaching assistant. And it was life changing.

INTERVIEWER: And after the Master's you decided to go abroad.

OCHSENDORF: Yes. I got a fellowship, a National Science Foundation Fellowship which gave me three years of funding to go anywhere in the world. And I often encourage my students to apply for this. Because it basically gives you complete freedom in your PhD and what a gift. I mean, what a gift from the US government, to endow these fellowships and to let young scientists and engineers pursue their passions in their topic. So that freedom is something that I'm really grateful for. And I decided to go abroad. I looked around and I decided to go to Cambridge University. And at Cambridge, again, following this model-- the Billington model-- I found a very special professor named Jacques Heyman, who was a structural engineer, who had been chief engineer of Westminster Abbey and a number of other major cathedrals around England. And basically he revolutionized our understanding of the mechanics of old stone buildings.

And so he had retired years before. But it was a chance to go and work with him. And I ended up doing a PhD on the stability and collapse conditions for arches, and bolts, and buttresses-- so basically stone construction like in Gothic cathedrals. And again well, that could never possibly lead to a job. But it didn't matter. I was just fascinated by it. It combined what I wanted. It was mechanics and structures. It required some travel. I loved to travel. And it was intimately linked to history. And I'd always been fascinated by history and archaeology.

So to my great surprise, he had never had a PhD student in the field. He'd been working in it. He'd been pioneering the field for 40 years. But he felt like it was something to do in retirement, that it was not something you would corrupt young people with. Because it wouldn't lead to any worthwhile employment, you know. It wasn't the cutting edge of the field. Well it turns out, it is an exciting area of research. How do you assess existing buildings? How do you prove that they're safe if they have large cracks in them, if they're in an earthquake zone? So to my great surprise I found wonderful, wonderful technical problems that were unsolved. So I picked up problems that had been-- little theoretical problems-- that had been dropped in the 1820s by French engineers. In part because we stopped building in stone and in traditional masonry.

So to be in Cambridge, an 800- year- old university, studying with a master of engineering of traditional masonry structures, was a dream, an absolute dream. I mean I was three years in Cambridge. And then I got a Fulbright to spend one year in Spain. But I loved being outside. I loved climbing around on vaults. So I would climb up on the vaults of these cathedrals and study the cracks, and try to make sense of them. I'd give tours of these buildings. So it was like I'd found my calling as an engineer to really apply engineering understanding. And to my horror, what I discovered was that we, as structural engineers applying our tools, weren't able to answer fundamental questions about existing structures. And that is because our tools were developed for steel and concrete structures-- modern structures. And so to my horror, I realized, I came face to face with the idea that six years of excellent training as a structural engineer, if I was asked to assess a historic stone arch bridge or an old Gothic vault, I basically wouldn't know where to begin. And so that was very humbling and also very exciting, right? Because I found good problems to work on. So my PhD was just a joy. And Cambridge has a philosophy of throwing you into the deep end. That is, you're expected to go and do your work on your own, and come back every few months and talk to your advisors. So I brought some of that philosophy to my advising-- my graduate advising-- here at MIT. You know, a research student should flounder a little bit. And it should be their project. I'm not happy with situations where it's the advisor's project and you're telling the student what to do. I like to throw my students in off the deep end and say, go learn something and come back and teach it to me, you know. So I think that philosophy, I very much got from Cambridge.

INTERVIEWER: Your advisor at Cambridge must have been so thrilled when you walked in the door.

OCHSENDORF: Ha! Well that's funny. I wrote him a letter and I said meet with me. Any he met with me. And to use an MIT metaphor, I was drinking from a fire hose. I mean it was just a fountain of knowledge. And I realized that there were whole areas of my field that I knew nothing about. And here was a master. So I started meeting with him every week. And we would meet for a cup of tea at 10:30 every, say Thursday morning. And after three months of this I said, will you advise my PhD? He said John, my dear boy. He said, I retired for a reason. He said the short answer is no. He said, but I'm happy to meet every week. Well most advisors aren't able to keep up with weekly meetings. So I took it and ended up having another. The head of the department ended up also co-advising me and signing off on my PhD So he didn't formally accept responsibility for me. But he's still mentoring me today. And he's in his mid- 80s. So anyway, he wasn't exactly thrilled at the time because he'd retired. But I would say that we learned a lot from each other, and it's been a really enjoyable experience working with him.

INTERVIEWER: So you studied in Spain and you studied in Italy. And you wound up doing some work for Guy Nordenson and Associates. What were you doing there?

OCHSENDORF: So he's a structural engineer. He's on the faculty at Princeton in architecture. And he's a very creative guy. He was an MIT undergraduate. And I think he double majored in engineering and philosophy at MIT. So he's a very pensive engineer. And his firm did the basic structural engineering for Simmons Hall, a quite exciting new building on our campus, built in the late 90s. So he was just starting out as a practice. Now his practice is quite big and thriving. At the time it was me and one other person just doing some basic analysis. But it was working on projects as a structural engineer. So for example, designing a glass staircase where the entire structure was glass. So it was supported by a glass wall. So it was a taste of practice. You know, I was trying to make up my mind would I want to work in practice and that creative side, of engineering? Or would I like to do a PhD and become a professor.

And I you know, I tell my students that we should all maybe have five or six different opportunities, or possibilities, or applications, or paths. And then you choose the one that's most exciting. So it was a path that was open. I could've continued as a design engineer. It could've been quite exciting. And I'm still in close contact with him and his firm. And we collaborate on things. But ultimately I decided I was really interested in pursuing knowledge, and getting a PhD, and becoming a faculty member. But I do think it's good for faculty members to have a foot on the ground in the real world and occasionally consult on real projects just to know the state of affairs. Because otherwise we're really living in the clouds with our journal papers and our computer simulations. And so it's good to come back down to the ground sometimes.

INTERVIEWER: I totally agree with you. What's the story of how you got to MIT?

OCHSENDORF: In my second year of my PhD at Cambridge, I'd given a few seminars. And I guess things were going pretty well. And one of the faculty members invited me to apply for a faculty position in Cambridge in engineering. And he called me into his office and he said, there's an opening. You should apply. And I said oh no, you know, I'm just getting started on my PhD I couldn't possibly apply. And I walked out of his office. Well I got to the end of the hall and I said, well if he thinks I'm competitive for a faculty position, I must be. So I turned around. I went back in his office and I said forget what I just said. I'd be delighted to apply. Of course I'd like to apply. So that got me started about applying to academic positions maybe far earlier than the typical PhD student.

And so then I looked around on the web and I found the opening at MIT. It was in a building technology program. Which was pretty much an interdisciplinary research group based in architecture-- between architecture, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering. And there was a position open for a structures faculty member. And it looked good. And so I had just done the Cambridge application for faculty positions. So I reworked it a little bit and applied to MIT. And I was just about to leave to Spain. And I remember my first week in Spain I got a note from MIT saying, we like your application. Could you come and give a seminar? So that meant I was on the short list.

Well I didn't bring interview clothes I didn't have my slides. I was using trays of slides at that point. This was 2000. So I had to go back to Cambridge to get those things. I flew to MIT for a weekend and gave a talk in November of 2000. It went well and I was offered the job. And you know, I'd never gone to MIT. I'd never applied to MIT. I had this idea that MIT was a fairly narrow technical place. And I thought I'd have a chance of staying at Cambridge. So even when I was offered the job you know, I looked at it critically. And ultimately I decided it'd be a great place to develop for an academic starting out. There were a lot of resources. There were exciting people. And so I accepted the position I think, in my third year of my PhD and they waited for me a year and a half. Which I'm very grateful for. But again, as a result of that experience, I encourage my graduate students to apply for jobs starting early. So that hopefully they can have jobs waiting for them when they finish their PhDs but there was a lot of luck involved. But it worked out well. But if that professor hadn't invited me to apply to that Cambridge job, I might have missed the boat and never gotten the position at MIT. So I feel pretty fortunate. So I moved from Cambridge to Cambridge in 2002.

INTERVIEWER: Can you talk a little bit more about what the appeal of MIT was-- what it was you saw when you came here?

OCHSENDORF: Yes. I have to be careful here. But one of the things is that in my field of structural design and structural engineering, there were tremendous opportunities. That is, there were a few faculty members, but there wasn't a whole lot going on in relation to architecture, and design, and certainly history. So I saw it, in a sense, as a blank slate. And that's a good thing for a young faculty member, because you want to build up a group. You want to build up a lab and a field. And so that was ideal. The resources were fantastic. I mean for me almost immediately as a faculty member, I was advising graduate students from three different departments. That is very unusual. You know, I went to five universities in four different countries. I studied in Australia, in Spain, in England, and the states. And I always wanted a university where there were no barriers between departments. You could find a cool problem-- whether it was Inca suspension bridges or little carbon buildings or whatever the problem was-- and you could pursue that problem regardless of the confines of a discipline, or silos as you put it. And almost immediately I found that at MIT because I was advising graduate students from the technology and public policy program who were interested in policy issues. I was advising students from civil engineering, my own background, and from architecture who were more design-oriented. And that was absolutely thrilling almost from the beginning.

But it was tough. My first semester I remember I was teaching. I was lecturing four mornings a week. And I've since combined those courses to reduce the amount of lecturing. I was teaching way too much. And I'll never forget my very first lecture at MIT. It was a 90- minute lecture. And I looked up at the clock and I had only five minutes to go. And I still had, I don't know, 30 or 40 slides and a lot of ideas to get through. So I raced through the last five minutes. And finished, you know, and said, okay see you next time. And I released the class. And then, taking a closer look at my watch, I realized I'd let the class out 30 minutes early. So I since decided that the key to getting high student evaluations is to occasionally let them out early. But it was an accident. That was my very first class here.

But almost from the beginning, I found good students. And that is again, a comparison to other universities. When you're here, year after year and I'm about to do it next week, the applications role in. And they're fascinating, talented people who you want to work with. And that is a luxury that we have here. That we just get tremendous talent applying from all over the world. And then we get to take the best of the crop to choose from. And so I think I could only appreciate that if I were at another university. But here year after year, I've had amazing students who just come out of the woodwork and apply. And what you realize is-- and this is again part of the great joy-- as I have an idea or I may have a problem I want to work on, if I worked on it on my own, if I sat in the field and I worked on this problem out by myself isolated, you know I could only get so far. But what happens here is I mention a problem or a couple of ideas to a student and they take it and they run with it to places that I could never go myself. And then they come back and we talk about it. And then they go a bit further and again they take it places I could never go. So this is the ideal situation right? When a research student is leading you. They're running and you're kind of struggling to keep up.

But by the time at the end of their PhD they should absolutely be the expert in the world. Even at the undergraduate level because of my experience at Cornell, I readily believe that if you find the right topic and if you really are self-motivated and directed you can make original contributions. Our undergraduates do it all the time, and become an expert on something by the time you graduate as an undergraduate. So that has been absolutely thrilling. To see how students take my ideas and go places that I couldn't go myself. And so what happens is that, by virtue being at MIT-- having students like this, having the resources-- any affect that you could have as a lone researcher are basically multiplied many times over. So that's just been an absolute thrill. I've been on the faculty now for, this is my eighth year. And it seems like every year it gets better.

INTERVIEWER: And these same students I would imagine, contribute to your research as well.

OCHSENDORF: Oh there's no doubt. The students are, it's their project. They're the first author on our papers. But we're a team and there are problems that I pose to them. So absolutely they contribute. But you know most of all, I'm here because I want to learn. And so every semester students are teaching me things. And they are contributing to my research. And now some of them are going off and becoming professors too. One of my students is now a professor at Cambridge in my old department where I did my PhD, which is exciting. And now they actually have two students on the faculty at Cambridge. Another student, one in architecture, one in civil engineering. Another student is now a professor at the ETH in Zurich. Which is another place I considered for my PhD, but I was scared of the German. So anyway that's, you know again, the multiplying impact that your students can have as they go out in the world. It is very exciting.

INTERVIEWER: So one of the things that you're interested in is sort of the structural safety of historical construction. Can you talk a little bit about what it is that interests you about that?

OCHSENDORF: Sure. Probably the greatest building of all time is the Pantheon in Rome. I don't know if you've ever been there-- magnificent dome in the middle of Rome, which is about 2,000 years old. It's made of concrete. It's a marvelous, marvelous work of technology. What most people don't realize is that the dome, within the dome radially, going up towards the crown there's an oculus at the middle. But in the sides of the concrete dome, there are cracks. And the cracks are about this wide. Now they're not exposed to the public. There's some cosmetic kind of, lath and plaster that covers them up on an interior finish so you don't see them. But if you could let's say, strip off that outer plaster layer, you would see the basic structure of the Pantheon as a mass concrete dome, some brick and stone lower. But then a poured concrete dome with significant radial cracks and a big opening in the middle in a seismic zone. And it's been standing for 2,000 years. I believe it can stand for 2,000 more years.

Proving that that dome is safe is not easy. And for we, as engineers, the way we would approach an old structure with a crack in it, you might imagine that the first thing you would do-- let's say you stripped off the plaster. You were an engineer inspecting the Pantheon and you would say, have you seen the size of those cracks? Close the building. Nobody else is allowed inside. But then cooler heads would prevail and say wait a minute, it's been here a long time. But you could imagine that our first response might be, we've got to repair these cracks. So let's drill into the dome and let's fill it with steel. And if we did that, we would be taking a fairly short view of things. And the steel that we put in would corrode within 50 or 100 years and would cause greater damage. So, one of the things that appeals to me about trying to assess the old building-- so the difficult thing is to prove that it's safe in its existing condition. The easy thing to do is to come in and strengthen it using modern technology. But the really tough thing is to say, I've seen your building. It's in great condition. You don't have to touch it. Even if it has a cracks in it, that is, it's perfectly safe. And that's honestly a really challenging engineering problem. Particularly in seismic areas. So that's one of the things that gets me out of bed in the morning. And those are the kinds of problems that we're working on.

But there's another aspect to it. And that is that when you approach a building that's been around for awhile-- whether it's 50 years or 2,000 years-- you have to bring a certain amount of humility to the buildings. You have to say, you know the people who built this knew something. And I think that's where my background as an archaeologist, or interest in history, helps inform my engineering. Because you realize that we are not at a point in history where we are absolutely at the pinnacle of all time. And everyone who came before us knew less than we did. So the builders of the Pantheon didn't know anything about nonlinear dynamics, or soil liquefaction, or all the things that we know about now. But they built a building this has stood for 2,000 years, which is very impressive. And yet the science of understanding why this stood and what it would take to bring it down still isn't complete. So those are the kinds of live research questions that mean we get to go out in the field. We look at buildings. We take laser scans of buildings to find their exact geometry. And we're creating tools to try to be able to prove the building is safe. Someday in my life, I believe an engineer will claim that the Pantheon is unsafe. And they will say it needs to be wrapped in carbon fiber or some other modern material. and so we're kind of sharpening our tools to be able to say, well it stood for 2,000 years and here we can actually prove that it's safe with the simulation. So those are the kinds of problems we're working on.

INTERVIEWER: Will you be the one that figures out how the pyramids were built?

OCHSENDORF: Not necessarily. Some people at MIT have studied the problem a little bit. I really haven't. I think the pyramids, almost more than any other project, boggle the mind in terms of what people were capable of, historically, with fairly limited means. But I like to point out that the people who build the pyramids and the Pantheon in Rome are biologically identical to us. They have the same brain that you and I have. So I try to impress upon my students that when you study something like the pyramids or Inca suspension bridges, you're not talking about a primitive human who was, you know, far less intelligent than you were. So picture yourself, you and I physically there, trying to figure out how to build something.

So there is a field that I'm contributing to which is the history of construction. Which is a new field that basically looks at the technology of how things were built in the past. And this is a discipline between engineering, architecture, history of technology, and basically focuses on questions like how were the pyramids built? How did the Romans do foundation? So it's between many different disciplines but they're questions that we're fascinated by. So we've been organizing international congresses for the last seven years on this topic, the history of construction, so how things were built. And this is where an engineer who can do some calculations and can help figure out different methodology can make real contribution. So I'd like to see in basic engineering education, a strong historical component where we learn more about the history of engineering. Because I think we'll make better engineers as a result. Because when you study history you learn some of the methods. But you also scratch your head and say yeah, how where the pyramids built?

INTERVIEWER: Have you been there yet?

OCHSENDORF: I have not. And I'm dying to go to Egypt. My dream-- it's an interesting example because my dream when I was an undergraduate and was creating this major of archaeology and engineering-- my dream was to be the guy who would get the call one day when someone said, you know, we have a cracked lentil or a cracked stone beam in this tomb. And we're not sure how it happened or if it's safe. Could you come? And so I wanted to be the guy who got that call. I haven't gotten a call yet from Eygpt, but I hope one day I will.

INTERVIEWER: Okay well here's my offer right here on the spot. After a lifetime of wanting to go there, I did go, in December. I think you would be fascinated there.

OCHSENDORF: I have to go. There's no doubt.

INTERVIEWER: So when you're ready to make your trip, I can hook you up with a fabulous guy.

OCHSENDORF: Yeah that would be great. Yeah I mean, it would just be great. And I'm sure you've experienced what I was saying about just the achievements, and scale of it is just unbelievable.

INTERVIEWER: When you're inside, you really understand how did they do this as you look around. Because you just can't imagine how it was done. You might be able to imagine. I was not able to imagine.