An award-winning chemist at Rutgers U. takes students under her wing
Here on the main campus of Rutgers University, Martha Greenblatt often passes buildings that were once part of Camp Kilmer, a military base that received European refugees in the 1950s.
An internationally known chemist, the Rutgers professor remembers the camp from her days as a teenager from Hungary, alone and unsure of what lay ahead.
Now her lab is filled with smart young graduate students from China, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. Over the years, she has had 27 graduate students and 25 postdoctoral students in her lab. Because of her own personal and professional experiences, she understands what they are going through, and she goes out of her way to guide them. That means pushing them in their research, encouraging them to make outside contacts, even coaching some in English, all to develop in them the skills to become independent thinkers and successful scientists.
In the spring, Ms. Greenblatt, 62, received the Francis P. Garvan-John M. Olin Medal, given annually in recognition of significant achievements by a female chemist in America. The American Chemical Society honored her as “a leading solid-state chemist and scholar, teacher, science advocate, and outstanding role model.” The award is particularly satisfying to her because it celebrates her serving as a mentor to young scientists. In addition, the university has made her a Board of Governors professor, the highest rank a Rutgers faculty member can hold.
In any field, a great mentor can make a big difference. But, in the sciences, such a figure can mean the difference between a lackluster dissertation and a mediocre job offer, on the one hand, and a publication that is a catalyst for a promising career in academe or industry, on the other. An effective mentor acts as an advocate, a role model, and a guide to academic and professional development.
Perhaps most important, a mentor shows students things that they won’t necessarily learn in the classroom, says Catherine J. Didion, executive director of the Association for Women in Science. “You can be the most phenomenal organic chemist, but if you don’t understand the unwritten rules of how we share information, you’re at a disadvantage,” she explains.
Not all talented scientists have the desire, the training, or the talent to take time away from research for responsibilities as mentors, which usually go without reward. But if the relationship is established, it is as if a professor shines a light into hidden corners, says Ms. Didion.
“You take a person who knows so little,” says Ms. Greenblatt, “and you see them develop into a mature scientist. That’s very satisfying.”
First to Arrive, Last to Leave
The professor tours her laboratory like a proud parent. She points out the sophistication of a uranium experiment created by a doctoral student from Germany. She coaxes him to explain how pressurized gases create different conditions. She introduces young chemists as the best and the brightest from their countries. Photographs of her former students line her bookcases. In one, a student receives a Ph.D.; in another, five students pose with Ms. Greenblatt at a recent reunion.
But she is hardly the indulgent maternal figure with her students. She demands hard work and leads by example. “Her car is often here on weekends,” says Ronald M. Levy, a colleague at Rutgers. “She’s the first to arrive and the last to leave.”
Her brother, Peter Katz, describes her determination and passion for her work in a story. When he was in college, he asked her for help on a take-home chemistry exam. She told him to work on one possible solution to a problem that evening while she tried another. He did calculations for a couple of hours, gave up, and turned in for the night, only to be awakened at 2 a.m. by his sister, who had come up with the correct answer. “She once told me, ‘I don’t take an exam unless I’m going to get 100 on it,’” he says.
She expects the same of her students. “She’ll make a suggestion and you’re supposed to try it out for yourself,” says Oliver Bune, a Ph.D. student starting his third year in her lab. “It’s just enough to push you off.” Once, he had spent two months unsuccessfully trying to purify a chemical compound. When Ms. Greenblatt suggested simply substituting one element for another, it made all the difference, putting Mr. Bune back on track. “To her, it’s a small thing,” he says. “To me, it’s like one of these keys that opens a door to a huge room, a whole new set of possibilities.”
One former postdoctoral student of Ms. Greenblatt’s says some of her students have other motivations as well. “They are afraid of her,” says Kandalam V. Ramanujachary. But they respect her, too, he adds.
Indeed, Ms. Greenblatt’s demanding nature may not make her the ideal mentor for all students. “She is a tough person sometimes,” says Pavel Shuk, a postdoc in her lab from 1995 to 1999. “If she needs something, ... she’ll put pressure on you, which is a good thing.”
On a recent summer day, though, she spent most of the time in her faculty office while her students were busy in the lab. “I don’t hover over their shoulders,” she says.
But she does require monthly progress reports -- not universal among campus labs -- training students to note their mistakes and their advances in a way that’s accessible to others. The system also gives them time to experiment on their own before checking back in with her. There are monthly meetings, at which students discuss their work with the professor, their peers, and invited faculty members. “They learn about the intricacies of how to attack various problems in different areas,” she says.
Some of her students have a gift for science, Ms. Greenblatt says, but lack organizational and communication skills. Of one former Ph.D. candidate she recalls: “He was always brilliant, but he couldn’t write a sentence. Now he’s a very respected scientist.”
For the foreign members of the lab, the papers and meetings are especially useful. Jane Zhang, now a scientist at the pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc., earned her Ph.D. and worked as a postdoc under Ms. Greenblatt. “She would spend hours and hours of time revising our drafts,” recalls Ms. Zhang, who is from China. “Through this process we learned a lot about the English language and writing.”
What also impressed Ms. Zhang was how Ms. Greenblatt helped her adjust not only to work in the lab, but to life in the United States as well. The postdoc attended Thanksgiving dinners at the professor’s home and looked forward to the annual lab barbecues. Such events “helped us to ease homesickness during the holidays,” she says.
The professor has also acted quickly to help lab members in times of crisis. One of her postdocs from China was accused of sexual harassment after a girl at a bus stop called the police. “Dr. Greenblatt went to court with [the student] and took care of the legal battle,” says Ms. Zhang. “The girl never showed up.”
Mr. Ramanujachary arrived at Rutgers from India in 1983. Over the course of a decade, he moved up the ranks from postdoc to associate research professor, learning such crucial lessons as how to write an effective grant application. Ms. Greenblatt also advised him at important junctures in his career. When he considered returning to India after only a few years, she persuaded him to stay and helped him fill out his green-card application. She even offered to set him up with dates.
Mr. Ramanujachary, now a chemistry professor at Rowan University, credits his former professor with his decision to teach. She spent days coming up with simple examples to explain difficult concepts, so that her students not only came to understand and appreciate the information but also to retain it, he says. Mr. Ramanujachary wants to do the same for his students.
Escaping Eastern Europe
In her recent acceptance speech at the chemical society’s awards ceremony, in New Orleans, Ms. Greenblatt talked about her life. She was born in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1941. When German troops occupied the country, her family, which was Jewish, was forced into a ghetto. Along with her mother and brother, she was put on a train bound for Auschwitz. Somehow, the train took a detour and ended up in Vienna, where its passengers were taken to a high school that had been converted to a concentration camp.
“Near the end of the war, the SS ordered, at gunpoint, the whole camp out on the highway on a death march toward Germany,” she told the audience in New Orleans. “My mother turned off at an opportune moment and escaped with her children.” Eventually they walked back to Hungary, where they “found my father waiting for us in the apartment where we lived before the Nazis threw us out.” He had survived a Nazi labor camp.
The family then had to endure the ensuing Soviet occupation. Ms. Greenblatt remembers standing in long lines for bread and other essentials. “We had a terrible life. The only good thing was school.” She went to the best Gymnasium in Debrecen, which she explained was equivalent to American college training. In 1956, during the chaos of the Hungarians’ failed revolution against the Soviets, many people were able to escape.
“There were rumors of the Iron Curtain lifting,” says Ms. Greenblatt. “I wanted to leave. My parents were afraid. There were rumors of people being shot at the border.” The 15-year-old left her home with a girlfriend. They managed to make it on foot with hundreds of others across the Austrian border to Vienna, where she met an uncle. They eventually found passage aboard a U.S. troop carrier carrying refugees to the United States. She still tears up at the memory of sailing into New York Harbor: “It was a misty day in the middle of January. You can imagine this young girl seeing the buildings and Statue of Liberty. I’ll never forget it.”
Ms. Greenblatt finished high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., where her family settled once they joined her in America. Not speaking English was an immediate barrier. She missed her friends back home. “It was so traumatic that I stopped communicating with my Hungarian schoolmates,” she says. “I broke all contacts.” She forced herself to learn English in one year and, she says, soon became the best student in her literature class. At 16, she met a fellow Hungarian émigré, whom she married two years later.
At the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, where she was on a scholarship, she earned a B.S. in chemistry with honors in 1962, and went to work as a chemist in the nearby Chiclet chewing-gum factory. But the job bored her, so she applied to the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, where she found her way into the solid-state-chemistry lab that opened up her future.
There, her mentors pushed her to prove herself. One was a scientist named Benjamin Post. “He was a really inspiring man,” she says. “He came to you every day and asked you what you had accomplished. ... I wanted to succeed because there was a personal interaction between Post and myself.”
After receiving her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 1967 and spending a postdoc year at New York University, she returned to Brooklyn Poly for a teaching job. Soon, though, she realized that because her academic interests were too similar to her mentors’, she had little chance of getting a tenured position. She spent a year in Israel on a fellowship in a physics lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and in 1974 found a job in the chemistry department of Rutgers’s evening school.
Ms. Greenblatt overcame several difficulties in her first few years there, including a heavy teaching load, a lack of start-up money for a lab, and a long commute home to New York City, where her husband worked in the diamond district as they raised two children.
In 1980, she took a year’s sabbatical at Bell Labs, where she saw what it takes to build a top laboratory. “I learned how to be aggressive,” she says. She began winning grants, publishing more and more papers, attracting students, and buying equipment for her lab. “I had to really build it myself.”
Solid-state chemistry focuses on the study of chemical, structural, and other properties and processes in solids. Ms. Greenblatt has developed new compounds that have the potential to be used in making computer chips, batteries, fuel cells, and sensors. Some of the materials she investigates are semiconductors. Other materials could be used to make humidity or acidity sensors. She holds three patents on sensor materials that have not yet been commercially developed.
Back in her Rutgers lab, she grew single crystals, important for identifying new compounds. “This made me famous,” she says, tapping on a glass vial, filled with purple crystals, that she keeps in a box in her office. “This is a superconductor. I discovered it.” She published her discovery in 1984, when superconductors, which have the potential to make the transmission of electricity more efficient, were a hot new commodity.
Ms. Greenblatt is spending less time working in the lab these days. But there’s no sense that she’s slowing down. She publishes 15 to 20 papers a year. During one recent week, she was sending samples of her work to a scientist in Paris; choosing submissions for Materials Research Bulletin, which she edits; and reviewing faculty applications for a university in Stockholm. And she continues to share her passion for chemistry, and for hard work, with the students who go through her lab.
“I can compare it, perhaps, to having children,” she says. “You want your children to grow up to become mature and self-supporting citizens. It’s the same with your students. ... You have grown so close to them, professionally and emotionally, it’s hard to let go of them. But once that happens, you are very proud.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 49, Issue 47, Page A10
