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Meet: Alice E. White
Research ScientistLucent Technologies Bell Laboratories
Alice White is a Research Scientist and Department Head at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories, in Murray Hill, NJ. In 1982, she joined the technical staff at Lucent as a postdoc and investigated electron localization effects in disordered metals with reduced dimensionality as well as the superconductor-insulator transition. In 1984, she was named to the permanent staff doing research in ion implantation at Murray Hill. Her primary effort was a study of the formation of buried single-crystal silicide layers in silicon using high dose ion implantation, a technique she invented and called "mesotaxy". In 1988, she was promoted to head of the Physics of Materials Research Department and, in 1995, she assumed additional responsibility for forward-looking work on planar waveguide devices, silicon optical bench piece parts, UV-induced gratings, nonlinear optics, new glasses and processes for waveguide fabrication, and interconnection.
White is an active member of the American Physical Society, the Materials Research a Society, and the Optical Society of America. In 1993, she served as a Councilor-at-Large for the American Physical Society and was a founding member of FIAP, the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics.
White has also co-authored 4 patents and over 100 refereed publications. In 1991, she was awarded the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award from the APS and, in 1994, she received an Achievement Award from the Middlebury College Alumni Association. She was elected to Fellow of the APS in 1995.
What did you want to be when you were 10 years old?
I was the oldest of three children. My two younger brothers were only one and two years apart, so my Mom was busy! Both of my parents had gone to college and majored in physics, which was pretty unusual back then, especially for my mother. They shared with us a love of nature, taught us to enjoy reading, and showed us that schoolwork is important. Some of my happiest memories are of hot summer days when my mother would take us to the library, which was air conditioned. When we returned home with our selections, we would all lie on her bed. She’d set the fan to blow on us and we’d spend the afternoon reading.
From as early as I can remember, I loved school and worked hard on my homework. Back in those days, I thought I would become a teacher when I grew up.
Who inspired you to pursue your current career?
Although I enjoyed all of my subjects in school, I had a particular love for math. Then, as a junior in high school, I had a fantastic chemistry teacher (Mr. Martino) and decided to major in chemistry in college. I picked Middlebury College in Vermont because it was small and in beautiful surroundings as well as having good academics. Of course, it helped that my mother had gone there! I was very lucky that that small liberal arts college had such wonderful science programs and it turned out to be a wonderfully supportive environment. During my second year there, I was taking organic chemistry (smells…!) and introductory physics, which involved a lot of math. Soon after, I switched my major to physics and never regretted it. During the summers, I had a chance to work at Bell Laboratories doing research in liquid crystals and liquid helium. That helped to solidify my ambition to be a research scientist.
What educational background do you have, and is it typical of your field?
At Bell Labs, I learned that I needed to go to graduate school and chose Harvard. Going to Harvard from Middlebury was like hitting a brick wall at 50 mph. However, I was lucky enough to have received a fellowship from Bell Labs for my graduate work. Having the fellowship made a big difference right from the start. My first choice for an advisor, Michael Tinkham, had never taken on a female student before, BUT, I was free. I heard secondhand from a reliable source that he had remarked that, if he could take a guy with a ponytail (my predecessor!), he guessed he could handle a woman. I had a lot of momentum from my very supportive undergraduate experience, but Harvard was a whole different story. There were only 3 female grad students out of 100 in the physics department. One of my classmates told me that he was sorry that all this "women’s lib" stuff was forcing me to go to graduate school instead of staying home where he was sure I would be happier! (He dropped out, by the way.) I completed my thesis in the area of low temperature physics, cooling down thin metal wires in liquid helium and studying how they conducted electricity. When I got discouraged, I visited my mentor at Bell Laboratories, Doug Osheroff. He encouraged me to keep going and shared his love of physics with me. I was very happy when, a couple of years ago, he and two colleagues won the Nobel Prize in physics. It took me 6 years to complete my PhD at Harvard and, although graduate school was not easy or fun, it was a very good investment.
After graduating, I came to work for Bell Labs as a "postdoc". This is a 2-year position that is sort of an apprenticeship. At the end of that time, I became a regular member of the technical staff and I am now a department head, managing about 20 people.
What kinds of things do you find most exciting about your work?
In the almost 17 years that I have been at Bell Labs, I have had the opportunity to work in many different fields of physics, including low temperature physics, ion implantation and solid state physics, semiconductor physics, optical fibers, and integrated optics. I think the most exciting thing about being a research scientist is discovering a new phenomena and designing experiments to try and understand it.
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