Robert Newnham: A Legacy of Discovery
An Interview with Robert Newnham, the Alcoa Professor (Emeritus) of Solid State Science at Penn State
Even if you have never heard his name, you have seen the results of Bob Newnham’s discoveries when you look at the beating heart of an unborn child through an ultrasound image. His basic discoveries in ferroelectric materials have helped propel the growth of electronic devices such as cell phones, while his work for the U.S. Navy on sonar arrays helped the Navy keep a watchful eye on Soviet submarines during the Cold War. One of his 20 patents, pertaining to off-shore oil explorations, has generated more than a million dollars in licensing fees for the University. Currently, a low frequency transducer, the Cymbal, developed in his lab, is being tested by Nadine Smith, an associate professor of bioengineering and acoustics at Penn State, to push insulin in controlled dosages through the skin of animals, with results that show the device could easily be used to control diabetes in humans.
For his invention of multiphase piezoelectric transducers and his research into their properties, and for his contributions to the field of acoustic imaging, Dr. Newnham was awarded the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering, an honor that places him among the company of some of the great scientists of the past two centuries, names like Thomas Edison, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Pierre and Marie Curie.
| "I’d like every professor to have the feeling that Eric and I have, that they’ve done something really helpful for humanity." |
Now wrapping up a fifty-year career that combined teaching and research, Newnham still makes the trip to his office most days, where boxes of notebooks strewn across the floor represent the chapters of the new book he is working on. His most recent book, Properties of Materials, was published by Oxford University Press in 2005.
"Penn State is well known for its work in ferroelectrics. This is a class of materials that has inbuilt polarization that can be reoriented by voltage or an electric field. Over the years, we’ve developed the best materials in this area, the best ferroelectric materials, and gone after some of the major applications," he says with evident satisfaction.
Turning research into applications has been a hallmark of his career, as has the remarkable success of the Center for Dielectric Studies, which he started with his colleague Eric Cross, Evan Pugh Professor of Electrical Engineering, in 1983. "It’s the longest running National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center in existence, which I think is a measure of our success. Jim Biggers and then Joe Daugherty were the Center’s first directors, and contributed greatly to our success. We still have 20 companies sponsoring research at the Center. Clive Randall is the current director, and Mike Lanagan is Associate Director. Both are doing outstanding research on capacitors for cell phones using new electrode metals. Our colleagues Amar Bhalla, Ruyan Guo, Qiming Zhang, Tom Shrout and Wenwu Cao are providing new materials, new ideas, and new theoretical insights that carry us forward. Kenji Uchino is doing research with microactuators and transducers that looks very hopeful in creating miniature devices like little roto rooters for cleaning arteries. A former student of mine, Susan Trolier-McKinstry (Penn State professor of ceramic science and engineering) is making thin film transducers and pushing them up into the megahertz range, making it possible to make ultrasound pictures of the human cell.
"We are still very popular with industry, because of our way of doing research. Professors in the Center propose ideas for research, and the industrial partners look over the ideas and decide which ones they want to fund. It represents a model for university centers that need to develop an industry connection. Professors are good at publishing papers, I've published over 500 myself, but we haven't seen the industries developed yet based on new research. I think the University would be pleased if we were more tied in with the real world, and so would the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania."
Last December, Professors Cross and Newnham were invited to a meeting of the American Heart Association to view recent developments from their years of collaboration on ultrasound transducers. The four major companies in biomedical ultrasound - Philips, General Electric, Hitachi, and Siemens - all make use of the 1-3 and 2-2 piezocomposite designs developed at Penn State. The latest echocardiograph systems show live 3D images of the heart, in full color, in real time. With these phased arrays, heart surgeons are able to study a patient’s heart as it pumps and then plan their surgery before lifting a scalpel. "I’d like every professor to have the feeling that Eric and I have, that they’ve done something really helpful for humanity," Newnham says.
A Long Collaboration
"Bob is very creative," says Professor Cross. "He can look at the structure of a crystal and tell you where the 3-folds and the 4-folds will be." Cross and Newnham have collaborated since 1966, when Prof. Newnham returned to Penn State after receiving a second Ph.D., at Cambridge, followed by several years as a research scientist at MIT, working with Arthur von Hippel on the molecular structure of materials. "But we’ve known each other since he was in England in the fifties," says Cross. "We have reinforced each other all the way through. All that time we’ve been synergistic, not competitive. We both had the same tutors: George Brindley here at Penn State, and Helen Megaw at Cambridge. Later on we had the opportunity to become well known in ferroelectric materials, with a core group of Brindley, Rustum Roy, Della Roy, Bill White, Newnham and myself. Penn State has by far the largest number of highly cited materials researchers in the country, double the University of Texas, which is second. It’s a wonderful lead that today’s materials researchers at Penn State have been handed, and it was supplied in large part by that original group."
The Hubble Connection
When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 1990, a problem was discovered with how the mirror had been polished, leading to an optical resolution far less than had been expected. Three years later, astronauts installed optical actuators to push the mirrors and realign the system to obtain the sharp focus originally predicted. That has resulted in the remarkable photographs of colliding galaxies and stars forming in dusty nebulas that have revolutionized our view of the cosmos. These electrostrictive actuators were similar to those that Penn State developed for the Itek Corporation for satellite reconnaissance during the Cold War. "Actuators can easily control motion to a wavelength of light, between .4 to .7 microns," says Newnham, a precision that helps engineers on the ground maintain the Hubble Telescope’s sharp focus.
The Ben Franklin Medal
Although he considers himself shy, Prof. Newnham has always enjoyed his role as a teacher. Former student, now professor, Susan Trolier-McKinstry, director of the Keck Smart Materials Lab in the Materials Research Institute, said that "Throughout his career, Prof. Newnham has played an outstanding role as an educator. He has won numerous teaching awards and has had many of his former graduate students go on to become professors in their own right. He has a well-developed ability to convey complex phenomena in a straightforward manner without diluting the fundamental physics responsible."
The Ben Franklin Medal, which is often said to be only a step below the Nobel Prize, is the capstone to a remarkable career. In his office on the second floor of the Materials Research Laboratory, surrounded by large scale models of the molecular structures of the materials he has worked with for a lifetime, Prof. Newnham continues through his more than 500 papers, his lectures around the world, and his books to exert a large influence in the fields of ultrasound technology and smart materials.
