Dr. Virkar's Self-Reflections on Research Career

Abstract

I have been helped by many mentors and mentees. My greatest mentor has been my father, who received PhD in organic chemistry in 1942, more than two years before I was born. That made both my brother (who has a PhD in mathematics) and myself pursue higher education. I have been immensely helped by many mentors. I will briefly talk about them.At Northwestern University, Prof. Morris E. Fine, who was not my advisor, but had a profound influence on me. His dedication to work is unparalleled. He retired at age 65 (as was the case then) but continued as Professor Emeritus until his death at the age of 97. It was amazing for me to see that he went to work at least 3 days a week well into his 90’s. One week, he did not come, so people from the MSE department at Northwestern went to his house, only to find that he had passed away in his sleep.I came to Utah in September 1973, as a post-doctoral fellow, working for Prof. Ronald S. Gordon, on sodium-sulfur batteries. I was hired to measure strength of Na-beta”-alumina ceramics. He had been my mentor for over 35 years, and passed away in 2008. He gave me many opportunities, and was instrumental in my getting a faculty position at Utah. He also founded Ceramatec, which provided jobs to hundreds over the years. He was one of the closest friends I have had in my life. During my early career, Prof. Richard H. Boyd, Chair of MSE, helped me enormously. He gave me various courses to teach; from the basic MSE course to statistical thermodynamics. I can say without hesitation that it helped me develop various areas of research; basically, my teaching drove my research, rather than the other way around, which is often the case.I have been extremely fortunate to have had excellent students working in my group over the years; they include Bill Rafaniello, L. Viswanathan, Tom Yuan, Gajavalli Srinivasan, Peter Kuo, Jong Chen, Jow-Lay Huang, Quing Tian, Cameron Tanner, Srikanth Gopalan, S-J.Hong, Pomin Su, Jan-Fong Jue, R. Ganeshananthan, Lei Zhang, Alex Szendrei, Kuan-Zong Fung, Seong J. Kim, Hyung D. Baek, Hyung-Tae Lim to name a few, and post-doctoral fellow Liangzhu Zhu, among others. The list is by no means complete.On the technical part, I will talk about what significant changes occur to yttria-stabilized zirconia during electrolysis and the need to conduct property measurements after electrolysis. I have worked on many research topics over the years. The most recent efforts have been on the application of Onsager equations to solid electrolytes.