Reimer, J: “People Are More Important than Things”

In the Winter quarter of 1974 Professor Tom Gerig asked me to use the departmental Varian T60 to provide him my best-resolved NMR spectrum of neat ethanol. As a sophomore chemistry student, I was excited to show Professor Gerig my enthusiasm for undergraduate research; the resulting spectrum was awful. Ever patient, Tom mentored me through a book by Ted Becker on high-resolution NMR, then opened his lab to me for 2 full years of great fun. Gerry Matson, then a postdoc with Tom, even let me work on his new home-built pulsed NMR instrument and introduced me to “relaxation dispersion” via CPMG experiments. Tom Gerig also let me set up the new Varian CFT-20 over the winter break, and the world of FT-NMR appeared to me. That was also the year in which a paper by Richard Ernst on 2-D NMR spectroscopy appeared in Journal of Chemical Physics! I vividly recall being in the lab early one Sunday morning, only to find Tom pipetting something into an NMR tube. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me that he was attempting to reproduce some of my 19F NMR data on flourocinnamates. I remember marveling at his focus on reproducible science, even to the point of repeating lowly undergrad experiments. The freedom and privilege afforded to me at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the years 1974–1976 are the greatest professional gift I have ever received. Working in Tom’s lab at UCSB taught me a great deal about instrumentation and conducting research. In the Fall of 1976, I went off to Caltech to join Bob Vaughan’s lab where I was exposed to analytical rigor and discipline. The rage in those days was Average Hamiltonian Theory, with particular application to the analysis of errors in multiple-pulse line narrowing sequences. Calculating error Hamiltonians to several orders was exacting, and Bob’s group would meet regularly for hours checking and rechecking each other’s work. Meanwhile, Bob would run group meetings using his “dice roll” format, with each member of the group subject to the randomness of the dice for presentation to the group. One of Bob’s many pedagogical tools was to insist that every group member be able to give a 15-min-talk about any other group member’s research! The free-wheeling nature of Bob’s leadership was perhaps why, in May of 1979, his group was so diversified as to be actively studying bi-, and tri-nuclear metal complexes, heterogeneous catalysts and adsorbates, hydrogen bonding in organic solids, inverse detection and separated local field spectroscopy of nitrogen and carbon, further development of pulse sequences using average Hamiltonian theory, site-dependent cation motion in fuel cell materials, multiple-quantum effects in quadrupolar systems, and two-quantum filtered proton NMR in minerals. The Spring of 1979 found Bob and me seeking a silicon-hydrogen system that would further demonstrate some separated local field experiments. Months before leaving for a conference in the Midwest, Bob had contacted someone at Xerox PARC, asking if we might have some of their “amorphous silicon-hydrogen films” for NMR studies. John Knights from PARC obliged, and I started looking at the proton spectra from these materials. I was very excited about the data, so when Bob left for the conference, I gave him a couple of spectra to ponder. I would never know what he thought of them. The American Airlines crash in Chicago brought his life to a tragic end. John Knights and his colleagues at Xerox PARC, including former Charlie Slichter student Jim Boyce, were to become my adopted advisors. The simple proton spectra turned out to tell a great story about the distribution of hydrogen in amorphous silicon and its relation to solar cell efficiencies. A flurry of papers was the result, including a PRL that is one of my most cited works. John Knights and the whole Xerox PARC gang of solid-state physicists turned out to be fabulous mentors. For the first time in my life, I was outside of the NMR community and was delighted with the depth and challenge of physics. John became another of my mentors that would help shape my life. Indeed, he helped me get a postdoc at IBM Research in New York. Before I could go, however, I had to finish a thesis. Sunney I. Chan became the gracious, yet demanding, academic advisor that would see me finish my thesis. In particular, the separated local field studies I had been doing needed polish before they could be published, and Sunney met with me at 7 am for an hour each day until the work was ready for submission. His work on my behalf was without reward or acknowledgement, and I owe him a considerable debt for his insistence that I write better, ask harder questions, and temper my exuberance with a sobriety for the difficulty of good science. In those last few months at Caltech what was left of the Vaughan lab was waning quickly. To finish my amorphous silicon story, I needed some sophisticated help with experiments and analysis, and three colleagues were there to provide it. I needed to know the extent of susceptibility broadening in the proton NMR spectra obtained from amorphous silicon films, and CRAMPS was the way to do it. Bernie Gerstein opened his home and lab in Iowa for me to get the data I needed. And when it was time to offer a mathematical model for spin–lattice relaxation in these systems, Cecil Dybowski at Delaware and Lex Vega at DuPont provided the critical sounding boards that I needed to publish the work. In the Fall of 1980, then, I headed off to IBM in New York, dedicated to leaving the NMR world and dreamed to join the solid-state physics community. For the most part, I achieved my dream. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center was just as exciting as Caltech and PARC, and my postdoctoral mentors Bruce Scott and Marc Brodsky were the “ying” and “yang” of postdoc mentors: the former a chemist with a knack for synthesis, the latter a hard-core physicist for whom analysis was central to everything. Homogeneous gas phase chemistry and metal silicide physics became my day job. Across the Hudson, however, lay the evil empire, AT&T Bell labs, where my former Caltech office mate Mike Duncan was busy pursuing applications of NMR toward catalysis. So I would head off to Murray Hill occasionally