Tuesday, July 21, 2009Volume 9, Issue 3
Staff Excellence Award 2009
Chris Jabco - Skill, Creativity and Friendly Attitude Keep Machine Shop Humming
“Every day I see how professors, staff, and students drop by to ask Chris for his help,” explains Maria DiCola, who shares an office with this year’s Staff Excellence Award winner Chris Jabco, about why she thought he deserved the award. “He doesn’t mind if he is on break or having lunch; he’ll stop what he is doing to help students.”
Ooman Varghese, a postdoc in Prof. Grimes group agrees. “He is highly skilled and always ready to take up any job irrespective of whether it is simple or very challenging,” Dr. Varghese writes in his letter of recommendation.
Reaction chamber fabricated for the Grimes
group turns CO2 into fuel via sunlight
One piece of equipment that Chris recently fabricated for the Grimes group has shown up in numerous scientific and popular publications. “A few months ago, I gave him the design for a double reaction chamber for carrying out solar photocatalytic conversion of moist carbon dioxide to hydrocarbon fuels. Discussions with Mr. Jabco helped me to improve the design further,” Varghese continues. “He fabricated the chambers with perfection, which enabled me to perform solar experiments with reliability and consistency and this work then appeared in Nano Letters, and has been well received by the scientific community all over the world.”
Chris Jabco has 25 years of experience in machining. He spent 18 years at Supelco before joining the Materials Research Lab in 1998. Chris and his wife have two children, a son, 22, and daughter, 20, both of whom work for his wife’s real estate company, Jabco Realty Management, in Bellefonte. Most weekends you will find him at his camp in Beech Creek. Yet he is often seen coming to work early and staying late to finish projects he’s taken on. “I like everybody I work with,” he explains. “That’s what makes it nice to work here.
Staff Excellence winner Chris Jabco
in the MRL machine shop
“If you walk around here, you will find a lot of stuff in the labs that I’ve built,” Chris says matter-of-factly. One piece is the precision machined dielectric measurement furnace in Jeff Long’s lab, which required 30 different holes, many of them needing to be aligned exactly with the corresponding holes in the door. Other pieces are so fine they require a magnifying glass to work with. Once, a student even asked him to find a way to carve an egg shell. “I have no idea what he did with it, but he told me the results were good.”
In times when money for new equipment can be tight, Chris keeps the equipment that is crucial for ongoing research up and running, such as the broken dicing saw that was rescued from salvage and refurbished for use in the polishing lab. Most importantly, Chris designs and builds the kinds of tools that allow faculty, staff, and students to perform innovative experiments that support MRI’s research mission.
