Mary’s thoughts on Caltech, as she expressed them when she was recognized as a Distinguished Alum in 2014.

The Distinguished Alumni Awards started in 1966, which is the year I arrived at Caltech. Starting as a graduate student, I have attended Alumni Seminar Day for most of the 48 years since and have seen nearly every award given.  I never thought I would be up here receiving one. Especially since I wondered whether I got admitted by mistake, after I arrived at Caltech, and realized the caliber of the other students.

From my first arrival, I felt a special environment. It was OK to be an engineer, to talk about work at a party, and to be excited about the work you were doing.  

Some people think there were no women at Caltech in 1966. In fact, there were seven women graduate students when I arrived.  I immediately had seven friends spread across the campus, each in a different department.

For example, Sue Kieffer was a geology graduate student, who later became a Distinguished Alumna, well known for her research on Mt. St. Helens.  We talked frequently.  When she wanted to understand the mechanics of rocks, I shared the advice I had gotten on the excellence of Jim Knowles as a teacher, and she took his theory of elasticity class with me.  

After my second year at Caltech, a house at the edge of campus was converted into a women’s graduate dorm.  Two of us moved in and welcomed five new women graduate students. Among the newcomers were Uma Chowdhry, who had just arrived from India and went on to become the head of research at DuPont, and Lily Jan, who had just arrived from China. Both of them have also become Caltech Distinguished Alumnae.  This graduate house was not only multi-disciplinary but also multi-cultural. The seven of us each invited our advisors to dinner and made food from our hometowns that covered the corners of the U.S. as well as India and China.

It is the small size of Caltech that enables and even necessitates interactions and collaboration across disciplines.  When prospective students ask me what is special about Caltech, I tell them that it is one community including not only all of the technical disciplines but also undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty studying, working, and playing together.

In my first year at Caltech I swam laps in the 50-mile swim program with Professor William Smythe, who was well known for teaching electromagnetism to a generation of physicists including 5 Nobel Prize winners.  I house-sat for Professor Horace Gilbert, whose mission was to be sure that Caltech engineers understood the business elements of the companies that they worked for.  After graduating, I visited him every Alumni Seminar Day as long as he lived.  He would be pleased to know that I ended up running a business.

My advisor, Harold Wayland, was a physicist, teaching mathematics to engineers, and working in bioengineering.   I studied for my oral exam in Firestone library where I often encountered Hirsh Cohen, a mathematician on sabbatical from being assistant director of IBM Research, the location of my first job after getting a Ph.D. from Caltech.

I also took classes with several undergraduates including Paul Dimotakis, who later became a Caltech professor.  Many of the graduate students I knew at the time moved into leadership positions, such as Charles Elachi who has led JPL through its very successful Mars exploration missions. 

Caltech is a place that has its priorities straight.  Science comes first, and sports are for fun. Everyone can play.

When I became one of the first women allowed to live in the regular graduate dorms, I walked up to Marks House where a group of students playing volleyball out front asked me to join them.  My first thought was that you really don’t want me to play because I‘m not very good.  Then I watched them play for a while and realized that maybe they did want me to play.  I was no worse than they were.  At Caltech sports are for everyone to enjoy.  It is science that you have to be good at.

Caltech taught me to be tough.  Classes and exams, both written and oral, were tough. When my advisor realized I did not like to give presentations, his response was to make me give lots of them.  While I was a Ph.D. student, I gave 17 seminars at his instigation. After Caltech when I faced the pressure of a critical design review or the stress of starting a new company, I often thought to myself: I survived Caltech, I can do this.  

I came for a Masters degree and stayed for a Ph.D. because I did not want to leave this special place. When I did leave the academic world, it was because I felt as an engineer I should work on things that get built and fly or otherwise get put into service.

ATA, the company I helped start, is my attempt to achieve a balance between the challenges of innovation at a university and the satisfaction of seeing one’s ideas be put into service.  ATA identifies and develops new engineering methods to address customer challenges for applications such as space missions or theme park rides.   A special thrill was the opportunity to test real hardware for JPL’s Mars Science Laboratory and then watch the Curiosity Rover make its way to Mars.  

I very much appreciate Caltech for all it taught me as well as my staff at ATA whose good work has impressed Caltech enough to give me this award.