
Material success: Engineering professor inspires UC Irvine with energy, creativity to spare
Martha Mecartney (PhD 1984 MSE) is just about the most popular and visible professor at UC Irvine. In fact, she is the current chair of the Academic Senate and last year was named the campus’ Professor of the Year for her superlative (and unorthodox) teaching approaches. Whether she is organizing a tolerance rally on campus or organizing students into a human crystal, she has seemingly limitless energy and shares it freely, enlivening the classroom, and the university at large. Perhaps the source of that energy comes from her research work, which includes investigating better materials for fuel cells and creating novel ceramics for more efficient manufacturing. Mecartney is a portrait of an engineer as not only a technologist, but also as a creative thinker and a leader.
	What is the philosophy behind your approach to teaching?
	My teaching philosophy, to sum it up, is to create an environment where there is an interaction between the student and the professor. If I can create an interaction where I get feedback from the students, where the students are involved, then that’s where the energy starts flowing. They are engaged, they are interested, they are asking questions, they are doing things. I’m then starting to learn things and their questions are prompting me to think of new things that I might want to put in, or might want to change, or might want to have them explore further. That is what makes it, I think, a very exciting process to teach and not just lecture. There is nothing more deadly than to have a 90-minute, one-way lecture from a professorial talking head in front of 200 students. I find it deadly myself. The challenge is to think how are we going to break up this class, how are we going to do different things to get the students involved, active, thinking about what’s going on and helping me get the energy level up in the classroom.
	What are some examples how you generate a rather kinetic energy in the classroom?
	One time in the beginning of this class I was teaching, Introduction to Materials Science and Engineering, I came in with this giant ladder and dropped a plastic ball and it bounced around to emphasize the properties of polymers. Then I dropped a metal can which went splat, emphasizing the properties of metals that deform. But then at the end I held up this light bulb and ceramic mug that I was going to drop and everybody in the classroom sat on the edge of their seats. It’s sort of dramatic. Another thing I love to do, which is slightly off the wall, is to do material dramas. We get a group of volunteers to come up and we have these students demonstrate properties of atoms, how atoms physically act in a crystalline solid. You have a regular arrangement of the atoms and you can have them show diffusion, what happens when atoms move around. Why do they need empty holes or vacancies for this? It's obvious when you watch. You can demonstrate deformation; you can show what happens when you stretch a series of atoms that are bonded together and you can show how the bonds stretch until finally they break. This is a way to break up the general lecture and the interesting thing about it is as you have the students do this, they start thinking of new ways and new material dramas that could illustrate other points. So the students are the atoms themselves. You can take something like salt, sodium chloride. You might use a male-female-male-female arrangement or you might want to use people wearing red or blue and the red people wanting to be next to the blue people. You can show how these molecular structures develop because of the arrangement of atoms. It’s very visual but they have to understand the concept before they can demonstrate it. They are learning as they are doing.
	It seems as though your penchant for creative, visual group activities was in evidence at a rally for tolerance that you organized on campus in May. Tell us about that.
	Some people on campus have been offended by free speech, particularly regarding Israeli-Palestinian issues. There's been a lot of dialogue about why offensive speech is allowed, but some people said we are being intolerant of different religions I wanted the faculty to stand up and say that amidst all this that we are tolerant and support religious diversity. I had written editorials for the local newspapers and our student newspaper and we had dialogues among the faculty and talked and did all these sorts of academic things that we always do, but one day I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we got all the people who could come together at lunch time on one day and hold hands in Aldrich Park so that we could show through the power of the visual and physical holding of hands that we tolerate each other, that we are willing to be connected to each other?” A visual demonstration, very complementary and different than all the talking and the article writing and all that. Releasing the doves at the end was first suggested as a joke by someone. I said that would be a great finale. Once we completed the circle, as large as it could get, while singing "All You Need is Love" we released the doves as a symbol of our continuing commitment, and it worked.
	What else has been going on in the senate while you’ve been chair?
	We’ve been looking at green buildings and a green campus, in terms of looking at total carbon dioxide emissions from start to finish and how we’re dealing with environmental issues at all levels on campus. There have been very exciting things happening with looking at both faculty housing that we’ve built as well as academic buildings and dormitories. Diversity is a big issue that we’ve moved forward on. We’ve been very active in looking at diversity among the faculty ranks and staff and students. But for the first time we’ve identified responsibilities for our major senate committees, looking at assessments of what progress we have made. We are a growing campus. When I arrived at UC Irvine we had 17,000 students back in the early 1990s and now we have 26,000 students and will continue to grow to about 30,000 students or so. As we add students we add faculty positions. That’s a real difference between Stanford and UCI. Stanford, as a mature campus, can grow some in certain areas but often then you must have attrition in other areas. If you have a growth campus you can constantly add new positions in new areas of research. It makes for a very dynamic place. The school of engineering has essentially doubled in size in the last 10 years, to over 100 faculty. To move into new areas of technology and to hire faculty who are really on the cutting edge is just a wonderful opportunity. It’s been a great year as chair of the senate but taken a huge amount of energy. It’s been a tremendous experience but I’m really looking forward to having more time for some of my research activities. I also miss being in the classroom.
	Please describe your research.
	Well my research is in several different areas. They all have to do with trying to understand microscopic aspects of materials, such as ceramics. One of the areas we are looking at is improved materials for fuel cell electrolytes. I’m interested in finding new materials or improvement of current materials by modifying their microstructure. We look at how we can change defect concentrations or the properties of grain boundaries in these materials. We also look at new chemical compositions. I’m working on some new electrolyte systems that have some very interesting properties, at lower temperatures than what’s commercially used. We’re trying to understand how defects in these types of ceramics might help or hinder properties such as the ionic [charge] conductivity. We make materials, then we characterize them in terms of their physical properties and electronic properties. And then we also look by electron microscopy to understand the structure of these materials. Transmission electron microscopy can really help you understand what’s going on with the atoms in a material. Another area that we work on, in which we have a big NSF project, is superplastic forming. We take a ceramic and we can heat it up and if we design the right microstructure we can actually deform it just like a piece of putty. We can shape it into any shape we like, cool it down and there you have the final part. It’s already formed. You don’t have to do any machining; you don’t have to do any difficult processing. So it’s an efficient way of forming complex ceramic parts, potentially saving energy. Think of how we make plastic parts. How do we make plastic containers? Why are they so cheap? Well first of all, plastic material is cheap. But you can extrude things, you can shape things easily. That’s why plastic is so great to work with. If you take a typical piece of ceramic, like your coffee mug, if you try to do that, it can only change its shape slightly at high temperatures and then it would fall apart. We are trying to find a way to make specialized parts and superplastic forming might be a very efficient way to proceed.
	How did Stanford prepare you to become a professor?
	I went to Stanford because I was very interested in transmission electron microscopy [TEM] and one of the best in the world was Bob Sinclair, who was at the time a young professor. When I arrived his first PhD student was just graduating. I was very interested in what one could do by looking at materials at the resolution of individual atoms. TEM to me was so fascinating as a new field, and I have carried that interest throughout all of my research. The other part was that I was very interested in applying TEM to problems in ceramic materials, particularly to understanding grain boundaries and interfaces. It was really at Stanford that I was given the opportunity to do this and I've continued this line of work all through my entire career.

June 2007

Last Modified: April 24 2008 12:53:54 PM