Gary Leal
University of Washington

"It seems to me that the major emphasis for the next twenty years (at least) is likely to be driven by the needs for new energy technologies, and much of this requires from chemical engineers a rededication to the classical core areas of the field. I think that this offers chemical engineers a major opportunity to be visibly involved in the solutions to problems that are widely recognized by the general population."
 - Gary Leal

Where were you born and raised? What brought you to the University of Washington (UW)?

I was born and grew up in Bellingham Washington. As a high school student, I had discovered that I really enjoyed chemistry and mathematics and when I mentioned this to my high school councilor, he looked into his councilor’s handbook and said that I should be a chemical engineer.  In those days, in the state of Washington, there was a “grade predictor” test that you were required to take as a prospective college student. Although this test predicted that I would be lucky to pass chemical engineering (2.0) and should really consider a subject in social science or the humanities, I decided to pursue my councilor’s recommendation anyway. I started at Western Washington for my freshman year, but with the intention of transferring to the UW after a year.  So, I entered in 1962, and graduated in 1965. 

Are there a few things that you can say characterized your time at UW?  Is there something specific about your time at UW that shaped your future career path?

My time at Washington was extremely satisfying, both from a professional and personal point of view. I was a member of a social fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi which contributed significantly to my development as a (relatively) mature and socially active person. I enjoyed everything about the UW, including Saturday afternoons at Husky stadium. My time in chemical engineering was also everything that I could have asked for in terms of stimulation and education, contributed in some strange way by the camaraderie engendered by our home in the basement of the chemistry building. I was influenced by some excellent professors, but especially by Prof. Sleicher, who was my advisor, and who also allowed me to carry out some experiments in his fluid mechanics laboratory. This really got me interested in fluid mechanics, and strongly influenced my decision to go to graduate school.

You received your MS and PhD degrees at Stanford University, where you worked with Professor Andreas Acrivos. What was that like?

Graduate school at Stanford was a wonderful experience. Although I discovered that there were a few holes in my undergraduate education, especially in terms of mathematics, it also reinforced what a good start I had gotten at the UW as well as reinforced my interest in fluid mechanics for research. I was lucky enough to work with Professor Acrivos. We had a very stimulating research group working on a variety of interesting problems. Professor Acrivos was a very involved research supervisor who talked to his students almost every day, and who exposed us to a variety of interesting (and from the perspective of the students) "famous" research visitors. Stanford was also a great place at that time for students in fluid mechanics since there were many outstanding professors in many departments across the campus. In graduate school, I really learned how to do research, what kinds of questions to ask, how to recognize interesting and important problems, and I came to value fundamentally oriented and intellectually challenging questions.

What drew you to a career in academia?

At the end of my PhD, I actually interviewed for positions in both academia and in industry. However, somewhere along this process, I realized that if I was going to be able to continue to do basic research, I would need to go to a university. What has kept me at the university is the fun and stimulation of working with students.  Although you keep getting older they never do, and so this keeps you young in a sense too. There is a lot of satisfaction in teaching and also working with graduate students on research. Every so often I get a correspondence back from a student who was in one of my classes which reflects their long-term interest in what they learned and that is also extremely gratifying.

After your two years as postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, you joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology and remained there from 1970 to 1989. What was the most rewarding aspect of your time there?

When I went to Caltech in 1970, we were a young department with only a couple of senior faculty, and not very highly ranked. We were therefore a rapidly evolving department, which kept getting better and better, hiring great young faculty and attracting many of the best graduate students in the country. . Our department had tremendous esprit de corps and it was a really fun place to be. The rapid development of a truly great department was rewarding to all of us.

My own work was greatly facilitated by many outstanding graduate students, and their subsequent evolution in their own professional careers has been extremely rewarding.

What brought you to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)?

I had had various offers to consider other institutions, but had no specific motivation to leave Caltech or Southern California, other than the vague notion that one should think twice about spending a complete professional life at a single institution. However, at some point in 1988, I went to UCSB to give a seminar, and was surprised to discover what an interesting place it was. We had always loved Santa Barbara, and it was clear from talking to faculty and to the Dean of Engineering at the time, Robert Mehrabian, that UCSB was an institution that was poised to move up in prestige and interest, especially in the sciences and engineering. Thus, though I had no anticipation of even thinking of moving to UCSB when I went to give a seminar, when the opportunity to consider this came up a bit later, I took it seriously. Part of the attraction to me was that it was clear that there was going to be an opportunity to really make a change in the department. I actually did not know the faculty very well, and so I decided that if I went there, I would want to go as the department chair where I could play a strong role in this transition. The other things that attracted me to UCSB were the opportunity to interact with the Materials programs, the transition from an elite private and small school to a significantly larger state university, and the fact that UCSB was in Santa Barbara, one of the few places that seemed to offer an improvement of lifestyle.

You twice served as chair of UCSB’s Department of Chemical Engineering. What opportunities did this leadership role provide?

I have been chair of the department at UCSB twice, once from 1989 to 1998 and again from 2004-2008 (I stepped down for the second time on July 1 of this year). The most interesting aspect of being a department chair is the opportunity to be intimately involved in the recruitment and evolution of outstanding faculty. I should emphasize, however, that the UC system involves a true faculty democracy. The department chair is in a real sense still mainly a faculty member, and all of the functions of the department are carried out by the faculty as a whole, not by the particular faculty member who happens to be chair, and this includes faculty recruiting. The only other thing that a UC chair can do is to try to maintain a balance and an environment of collegiality that is the sign of a really good department.

What is the current focus of your research?

My primary research interests still fall largely in the field of fluid mechanics. However, over the years, I have gradually evolved more and more into problems where the motivation comes mainly from the area of materials research.  Broadly, we are interested in complex fluid behavior and the dynamics of problems involving a fluid interface, such as coalescence and the blending of immiscible fluids. We work on a range of specific problems ranging from fundamental experimental investigations to problems involving large scale numerical simulations.

You have supervised 54 PhD students. If there is one thing you have learned in a mentorship role, what might it be?

I think the key is to try to work with each student in a way that allows them to realize their full potential as researchers and to have the freedom to pursue their own ideas within the broad framework of my research interests. Clearly, this “philosophy” needs to be modified to suit the needs of each student, but I have always felt that if I am hovering too closely, a student will never do anything that I might not have done myself. Many of the major changes of direction in my research, and most of the great ideas that have come from my group, have come from student’s inquisitiveness and ingenuity.  So I guess that the main thing is not to suppress the student’s natural abilities.

The study of chemical engineering has evolved significantly since your time as a student at UW. Why is now an exciting time for the field? What opportunities are on the horizon for students of chemical engineering?

In some ways the field has come full circle with the current and clearly future focus on energy related research. At the time I was a BS student, there was already a transition underway from a very applied and often empirical field toward what is now called the engineering science model. However, this transition was mainly in a greater emphasis on fundamentals and a view of the macroscopic world from a somewhat smaller scale view, but without change in the fundamental subject matter that formed the core of the subject: thermodynamics, reaction engineering and kinetics and transport phenomena. During the past twenty or so years, there has been a transition of a different kind, to a much more molecular view of the world, to an interest in products and particularly advanced materials, and to the incorporation of biological sciences into both teaching and research. The latter has, in particular, driven major changes in the field and, in my view, to some de-emphasis in the fundamental core subject matter as well as the parts of the subject that involve mathematical, physical and chemical sciences, and to fundamental changes in the nature (and often the name as well) of many chemical engineering departments.  Recent years have also seen the evolution of nanoscience, though this has sometimes been more a redefinition of existing work in materials and other areas involving small scale systems. Now, however, it seems to me that the major emphasis for the next twenty years (at least) is likely to be driven by the needs for new energy technologies, and much of this requires from chemical engineers a rededication to the classical core areas of the field. I think that this offers chemical engineers a major opportunity to be visibly involved in the solutions to problems that are widely recognized by the general population.