So today, I have to give a big shout-out to my dad, Claude Woods.
Pop retires today from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has served on the faculty of the Chemistry Department as Professor of Chemistry for 53 years. Fifty-three years!My dad is too modest to tell you any of this, and too smart to waste his time on Facebook, but here are some interesting facts about him:
He was born in 1940 and his father died just weeks after my dad was born. Raised by his indomitable mother, Thelma, in an era when single-parent households and working mothers were not really a thing, he grew up to be extremely self-reliant while his mother was out earning a living as a barrier-breaking career woman at Bell Telephone.
He earned a scholarship to Georgia Tech, where he thrived, and went on to graduate studies at Harvard, where he eventually completed his PhD in 1965. Having been supported in his studies by the Navy’s ROTC program, he taught at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis for three years before moving to the University of Wisconsin.
Since 1967, he has had his second home in room 4337 of the Chemistry Building and the several labs on the fourth floor around his office. Here he has taught a generation of students, from huge lectures to freshmen to multi-year one-on-one mentoring of PhD students, many of whom have since gone on to distinguished academic and research careers of their own.
My father’s area of speciality is Microwave Spectroscopy, particularly the analysis of the microwave spectrums of ionised gasses. His early research during my childhood in the 1970’s helped contribute to the emergence of the field of Astro-Chemistry, working with colleagues in the Astronomy Department who could look into deep space to search for the microwave spectrums my father had identified in the lab. This research is fundamental our our understanding of the mass of universe, as we can only measure those things in space we know to look for. This research should eventually help us to answer the question of whether the universe will continue to expand forever or eventually begin contracting.
The 1980’s saw a huge defunding of fundamental scientific research in America. Grants of many kinds disappeared, and so university research departments teamed up with industry to develop new projects. My father became one of the founding members of the Engineering Research Center at the UW. There, he turned his expertise in understanding the characteristics of ionised gasses and plasmas to the development of new techniques for making smaller and faster microchips.
In the last 10 years, the area of research he did so much groundbreaking work in during the 1970’s has again become a hot topic, and it’s been a joy to seem him back in the lab, doing what he loves most, and publishing more papers than at any time in his busy career. We all wondered at some point whether he would ever retire given how much he loved both the teaching and the research. Fortunately, he will continue to work in the lab as an Emeritus, so this is really the best of both worlds.
In all those years at the UW, I can’t remember him ever taking a sick day. If he took any, it’s surely less than 10 days in 50+ years.
The university’s loss is surely the grandchildren’s gain, as family visits will no longer have to be scheduled around the academic calendar.
It was a strange year in which to complete such a long teaching career, but in typical fashion, Pop made the adjustment to online learning (an expression that, more often than not, can be an oxymoron), look easy, turning the basement of my childhood home into a home studio.
Well done, Pop! Wish I could be there today to celebrate.
Love from Ken, Sue, Sam, Esther and Zappa.
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