When I need to find information quickly, for my job at Physics Today or elsewhere in life, I really appreciate the power of the present and past tenses. If you want to know whether a TV show is still on the air, a major experiment is still running, or a famous person is still alive, you need look no further than the third or fourth word of their Wikipedia page to see whether it’s is or was.
So it was with some emotion that I noticed several months ago that the web page of the lab I worked in as a grad student is now written in past tense: My PhD adviser, Laurie Butler, had retired from academia for a second career working in—of all things—veterinary medicine.
Miller’s Diary
Physics Today editor Johanna Miller reflects on the latest Search & Discovery section of the magazine, the editorial process, and life in general.
I have many fond memories from that lab. Some of them are of doing research. Others (let’s be honest: most of them) are of making general mischief with my lab mates. Laurie’s group was on the small side, with only around four grad students at any time, plus the occasional postdoc, undergrad, or visitor. We each had our own project—our specialty was using molecular beams to explore systems in which the Born–Oppenheimer approximation breaks down—and for the most part, we all got along well. Some of my old lab mates are still among my best friends.
And Laurie was a fantastic adviser. At a symposium last month in her honor, where I got to reconnect with some of my academic siblings and meet many more for the first time, it seemed like everyone had a version of the same story: She gave us a lot of room to manage our time and solve problems on our own, but she was always there to nudge us in the right direction when she saw us veering way off track. (Some of those nudges could perhaps have been better timed, like when she made me redo most of my presentation slides the day before I left for a conference because she’d noticed that part of my data analysis was wrong. I should have been less annoyed by and more grateful for that intervention.) She made sure we were all able to graduate in less than six years and that we had good opportunities waiting for us. For those who stayed in the research world, she continued to serve as a career mentor. When she retired, much of her lab equipment ended up in the labs of former students.
For a long time, I thought it was by pure blind luck that I had stumbled into a group of such good people. When I was choosing a group, I had only a vague idea of how important a decision I was making—not just for my scientific future but also for my personal quality of life—and I had very little sense of how badly it could all go wrong. As the years passed and I saw other students’ careers thrown off the rails by advisers who abused or forgot about them or by lab mates who were abusive and advisers who didn’t care, I thought about how easily that could have been me.
But something one of my lab mates said at the symposium got me thinking that maybe I’d made a more informed choice than I’d realized. He recounted how, when he was a prospective grad student meeting with many professors over the course of a day, Laurie was the only one to walk with him to his next appointment. It was a simple act of common courtesy, but because it set her apart, it was a pivotal and memorable moment for him.
And I suddenly remembered that I had a similar story. Laurie gave me a tour of her lab midway through my first year in grad school. I’d recently abandoned my plans to become a theorist and had only just started looking seriously at experimental groups. So as she was showing off one of her shiny steel machines—which looked for all the world to me like a spaceship out of an old science fiction movie—my face must have betrayed the intimidation I felt, because she stopped and said, “You know, I don’t care if you’ve never even held a wrench before. We can teach you how to work with all this stuff.” In hindsight, that’s when I knew I wanted to join her group. It was a small remark, but it said so much about her capacity for empathy, and I think I intuitively picked up on that. I’m glad I did.
Happy retirement, Laurie. Here’s hoping there’s much more to be said in the future tense.
