I had an opportunity to sit down with Curtis Frank, W. M. Keck, Sr. Professor in Engineering to discuss his career at Stanford and what he plans to accomplish as he begins his new chapter in retirement.
What brought you to Stanford?
I am a Midwesterner. I grew up in Minnesota and went to the University of Minnesota as an undergrad. At the time, Minnesota required undergrad applicants to declare a major before they even came to campus. Since I liked chemistry, I selected chemical engineering because I thought it was more practical. However, I had no clue as to what the profession entailed.
When I was a senior, I worked on an honors thesis in Lanny Schmidt’s surface science group. The head of that program was Skip Scriven, one of the faculty members, and he said, “Curt, you must go to grad school, and you must work for Harry Drickamer.” Since I have always been a person who follows directions, I took the advice and enrolled at the University of Illinois and selected Professor Drickamer as my advisor. Drickamer was a polyglot scientist with full appointments in Chemical Engineering, Physics and Chemistry.
My Ph.D. thesis involved high-pressure solid-state chemistry, with an emphasis on fundamentals. After graduation, I wanted to do basic research at a corporate or national lab because I was not then ready to accept the responsibility of guiding a new graduate student’s career. I considered many positions in oil and chemical companies and finally accepted a position at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I picked Sandia because I did not like Linden, NJ, and thought that the Southwest would be an interesting place. It certainly was. I loved it there. I learned how to cross-country ski and went on many camping ski trips. I was all set for a career at Sandia Labs and even spent four years there.
I picked Sandia Labs because I did not like Linden, NJ, the location of Exxon Mobil (then Esso), which was my other top option, and thought that the Southwest would be an interesting place. It certainly was. I loved it there. I learned how to cross-country ski and went on many camping ski trips. I was all set for a long career at Sandia Labs. However, after four years I got a phone call out of the blue from Michel Boudart. Michel was then chairman of the Stanford Chemical Engineering department, and he was a very smooth cosmopolitan scientist. He said that the department had an opening for a new faculty member and asked if I was interested in applying. I told him no.
Nevertheless, Michel was persistent and ultimately I thought it was worth a free trip to San Francisco with my wife, Sara. We had just gotten married, and this was supposed to be a little bit of a honeymoon. As soon as we got on campus, they separated us, and Sara went with one of the faculty wives, and then I did the interview. I was surprised when they eventually made me an offer, but ultimately it seemed like the challenge was too good to pass up.
How has the department changed during your time at Stanford?
In 1976, I joined Dave Mason, Andy Acrivos, Michel Boudart, Bob Madix, Bud Homsy and Channing Robertson as faculty member number seven. Today, we have 19 faculty members in the department, and we are still growing. When I started, it was a small department and there were no major pushes for growth.
We were initially very strongly linked to Chemistry and the general feeling that I got from the senior faculty was that they were perfectly happy to fly below the radar of the Dean of Engineering. That mentality began to change as the department grew. With the new hires, I think we became much more visible as contributors to the School of Engineering.
It was touch and go for a while as to whether Chemical Engineering was going to be included in the Shriram Center. Initially, it was intended for only Bioengineering. However, Jim Plummer, the Dean of Engineering at the time, wanted every department in the School of Engineering to have high quality facilities. The allocation of space in Shriram was our validation as a department in the School of Engineering.
What is your primary research and how has it changed during your career?
When I was a graduate student, I did not know anything about polymers. I worked with high-pressure chemistry, solid materials and iron compounds. I went to Sandia Labs into a newly formed polymer group and I had to teach myself polymer science. It was at Sandia Labs where I initially established the first phase of my career as a “polymer physicist”.
My initial research at Stanford was on the photophysics of polymer blends. Blends are material mixes of polymers, and the nature of their mix will influence their properties. I moved on from that into several projects on thin polymer films used in microelectronics, including interlayer dielectrics, photoresist materials and hard disk lubricants. This was at a time when I was establishing collaborations with scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose. About half the total papers from my group have been in areas of interface science. For example, work on thin polymer films led me to get very interested in the molecular organization of small phospholipid molecules in films that were around 50 angstroms thick. I then moved into polymer hydrogels. This was a collaboration with the School of Medicine, and the objective was to make an artificial cornea. After the hydrogels, we did a little bit of work on ion transport in fuel cell membranes.
Starting with Sandia Labs, my research was primarily curiosity-driven. My Sandia manager let me do anything I wanted for the first two years. However, as soon as I came to Stanford I realized I had to convince someone to pay for the research. My heart of hearts has always been focused on molecular structure and molecular organization. The applications are certainly there, but we have not pushed those directly in any research topic. It is in vogue today to talk about soft matter, so I now characterize my research as “soft matter physics and chemistry”.
What accomplishments are you most proud of?
There are two things that I was very closely associated with that I am very proud of. First, I was the co-founder and Director of a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) supported by the National Science Foundation from 1994 to 2010. It was the first MRSEC with a full partnership of academic (Stanford, UC Davis, UC Berkeley) and industrial (IBM Almaden Research Center) institutions.
Our MRSEC was called the Center on Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies. However, since no one could remember that name – even members of the center – it was simply called CPIMA. Our research program allowed many graduate students and postdocs to work on a wide variety of problems along with the IBM scientists, but all of them were linked in the interface science area.
CPIMA had a shared experimental facility for members of the center, but we allowed anyone on campus who wanted to use the instruments to do so. Once the program ended in 2010, ten instruments were remaining in our shared facility. I turned them over to the instrumentation center in Huang and we created something called the Soft and Hybrid Materials Facility. Subsequently, we got funding from the Dean of Engineering to expand it from the initial ten instruments to about two dozen. That shared facility is still run by Jeffrey Tok.
Secondly, I chaired the faculty committee that worked with the architects to define the necessary features of the Shriram Center. Working closely with Drew Endy from Bioengineering and other faculty from Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering over five years, we argued for and obtained several critical elements in the construction of Shriram. First, we wanted visibility so you would be able to see into labs, offices and conference rooms. There are downsides to that, but there is also the upside that you get to see people and see what they are doing. You can catch their eye and talk to them after they get out of their meeting. The long hallways that we have in the building were planned. They have long sightlines so you can see people at the end of the building. There are other buildings in the quad that have zigs and zags and you cannot see more than about 30 feet.
We also wanted to have ways for people to mix and talk with each other. One of them was Drew’s idea and he fought hard for it. This was the Tea Room. He wanted an informal, casual sort of space that would allow people to hang out and talk about science. In addition, all the images on various windows around the building were an effort that the committee was heavily involved in to get people thinking about science.
In one of our meetings with the architect, I mentioned that we would like a grand staircase that would promote interaction. You should never tell an architect "grand" anything. They came back in a few weeks with a drum line for this Guggenheim spiral that went from the sub-basement up to the top of the third floor. Unfortunately, the footprint was about 1/3 of the total building, so the space allocation balance was off. Nevertheless, the architects used our feedback to design the staircase that we've got right now. This mixing staircase is where you can see down two floors and up to two floors.
The last thing that was an innovation for Shriram was the teaching lab. There is no other place in the School of Engineering that has type of facility. It is 10,000 square feet and that is something that could have held four new faculty. It was a very clear conscious trade-off because we wanted to have the best possible teaching laboratory environment. I'm happy with how well the architects interpreted our requests and I find Shriram to be a wonderful place.
You still plan on teaching your Intersection of Art and Science Course. Can you tell us more about why this course is important to you?
The history of the course goes back to Channing Robertson, who has taught several Stanford Introductory Seminars to undergraduates. He would sort of badger me at faculty meetings, and he would say, "Hey Curt, you the materials guy, and Sara the artist should teach a class together." As soon as Sara heard that she was ready to start. She is a great teacher, and her students love her. Sara and I first offered the class as an Introductory Seminar back in 2007.
The course has maintained the same general format while transitioning from an Introsem course to a Sophomore College course. The part that the students love is the hands-on art projects that Sara leads. They work on drawing techniques and they learn how to mix paints from different binders. It could be an egg yolk or it could be linseed oil. They learn how to make paper. They have also done paper marbling.
Many of the students that take the class have told Sara that they have never held a paintbrush in their life. She works very closely with the students. I think that is one of the reasons why the course is so successful. The point is not the work product, it is the work process. You do not have to be a world-class artist or even a beginning artist. You just have to want to learn and get your hands dirty. Literally. You have to work with the tools and the materials.
As time has gone on, we have gotten more and more students with strong art backgrounds as well as with strong chemistry backgrounds. This last class that we had this year was the best experience we have had in terms of class participation and questions. The individual out-of-class projects turned out well all while we were in pandemic mode with social distance and full masking. Even with all the constraints, the class turned out just great this year.
My contributions to the class are the lectures I give about the materials used in creating objects of cultural heritage. For example, we discuss the historical pigments that were used in paintings and how skilled the artists were who created all sorts of wonderful things with a limited palette. In many cases, the early pigments contained heavy metal poisons arsenic, lead and mercury and were highly toxic. More recent pigments have been found to be carcinogenic. These sobering facts slowly prompted changes to safe materials today.
I talk about color theory, and I talk about polymers. I talk about how paint requires a macromolecular binder that holds the pigment particles together. Paintings are excellent vehicles for teaching materials science. Everything is made of something. If I can get students to look at a painting from a materials perspective, they may have a better appreciation of the importance of materials to technology and life.
Deep down, my mission is to try to teach some material science in a form that you would not expect. Sometimes you can sneak in some potentially important information when students are not looking and that is my objective. I love this class. That is why we are continuing to teach it.
What are you looking forward to most now that you are retired?
In 2014, when I was the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the School of Engineering, I was awarded a month-long residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in the coastal hills above Redwood City. They had developed a new program called Scientific Delirium Madness. The idea was to bring in artists as well as STEM types and give them time and space to interact. This first cohort included a composer, two writers, a dancer and two visual artists. The STEM group included a computer scientist, two electrical engineers, a mechanical engineer, a physicist and myself. That experience got me thinking about the art science interaction that was the foundation for the class that we had already been teaching for 7 years. It was at that time that I thought, "OK, I'm going to write a book on this."
In 2015, Sara and I took a sabbatical in Florence, Italy. Initially, we wanted to teach at the Stanford Center in Florence, but my application was rejected. This was very disappointing, but Sara and I decided we were going to go there anyway. I discovered that Professor Piero Baglioni, whose name I knew from a book that I had picked up at a conference, led a chemistry lab at the University of Florence. A quarter of his research was on developing nanoscience techniques for restoration of paintings. I first started working on the book during this sabbatical in the Baglioni lab. Since then I have done extensive literature searches and have probably made eight or nine outlines for this book. I have come up with many different ways of trying to position the many topics I want to include but have not been satisfied.
I have yet another outline for the book that I feel better about. However, I now have something that I never had before. I now have time. I have no excuse if I do not make progress now. This book is the reason why I retired. When I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, I could never get my life organized well enough to get the blocks of time that I needed. Now the rubber is going to have to meet the road. That is what I'm going to do, I am going to work on the book.
What advice would you give to students as they begin their careers?
A career is something that lasts a long time. You will probably be more fulfilled if you find something you are interested in that can capture your imagination. It should motivate you and it should excite you.
In addition, you should push back on constraints. Stretch boundaries, extend them, or go around them if they are posing some sort of barrier. When you are taking risks, you are going to fail sometimes, and you must be prepared for that. Recognize that you should learn something from it and then you must get back at it.
Maybe one of the most important things, and I think it is the most general, is that I think you should take every opportunity to practice and improve your written and oral communication skills. Things get accomplished by individuals to be sure, but it's much more common that they are accomplished by teams. Working in a team, even if you have great ideas, if you cannot communicate them, they will not contribute to the final work product.
Finally, you must find a mentor. If you find the right mentor, then you can take advantage of what has worked and what has not worked for that individual. It could be very different for that person but the decision-making process is the key. Getting a mentor and paying attention to that mentor is important.
Do you have any parting wisdom for students who want to be a professor?
Being a professor is hard work. You need to feel deeply committed to becoming a professor. Know that you will never have enough time. Good productive people know how to multitask. However, it is very discouraging when you are doing your best job at multitasking to realize that you could excel at one or two of these items but you have three or four other things you must also do. That is the problem. That is what it is like to be a professor. I am not saying that other professions do not have that same challenge. Being an academic certainly does.
When someone is considering being a professor, you should choose the biggest problem you can imagine as a target for your research. You will solve the little problems along the way. The big problem may take decades to solve, and you may never get there. However, having a big goal will allow you to solve the little problems along the way. If you do not set your goal high, the little problems will be all that you will be able to do. Set the goal as high as possible.
Finally, the most important thing that you should do is to schedule time with your family. Period.
