MRS Featured Volunteer
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MRS NEWS
Featured Volunteer Dave Poker What is your favorite element? Carbon, of course. It’s the main component of coffee, chocolate, pizza, and ice cream, the four major food groups. What do you read first in MRS Bulletin? Maybe I’m obsessive, but I start at the front cover and read it straight through, rather than miss something. What was the last book you read? Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire. Grandchildren aren’t so far away, and I need to get ready for the little monsters. What inspired you to be a materials researcher? In my first semester of graduate school, I took courses in both highenergy physics and solid-state physics. An assignment in the high energy course was to calculate the rest mass of a muon from first principles. I thought I had it wrong because my answer was two orders of magnitude off, but it turned out to be correct. In the solid state course, I had to calculate the cohesive energy of an ionic solid, and found that I could get within a few percent. The choice was obvious. What did you first do as an MRS volunteer? Co-organized a symposium on optical materials at the 1989 MRS Spring Meeting.
Dave Poker at the console of one of the accelerators at Oak Ridge.
What is your Motto? In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. It has helped me many times to understand situations where what’s supposed to happen is not what is actually happening, both in my work and personal life. If you were not a materials researcher, what would you be? Like most men, I think, I’ve always been attracted to operating heavy, earthmoving equipment. Seriously, it would probably be something having to do with computers, instead. What common household item do you use in your lab? Rubber gloves. When you’re cleaning out an ion source that has had every element in the periodic table
run through it, a little protection is very reassuring. Dave Poker is a senior research staff member in the Solid State Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He served on the MRS Program Committee and Electronic Services Committee, chaired the Publication Committee and its Bound Volume Subcommittee, and is currently co-chair of the Information Services Committee. He co-chaired the 1993 MRS Fall Meeting and co-organized several MRS symposia. To contribute to MRS Featured Volunteer, send in your responses to the questions to MRS Bulletin, 506 Keystone Drive, Warrendale, PA 15086-7573, USA; fax 724-779-8313; e-mail Bulletin@ mrs.org. Include your name, volunteer activity, address, fax, and e-mail.
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www.mrs.org...the Materials Gateway MRS BULLETIN/FEBRUARY 2002
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