MRS Fills a Niche
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MRS Fills A Niche Ken Jackson, 1978 MRS President The discussions which led to the founding of the Materials Research Society began sometime around 1970. The driving spirit was Rustum Roy of Pennsylvania State University. He assembled a Founding Committee of about a dozen people or so, and we met intermittently over the next few years, drafted a constitution, and argued about a name for the society. The two proposed names were Materials Research Society and Materials Science Society. The objectives of the Society as stated in the initial constitution were to: • Foster interactions between various areas of materials science, • Sponsor interdisciplinary meetings, and • Disseminate information relevant to materials science. The first conference organized by the Society was on "Applications of Phase Transitions in Material Science," and was held May 23-25,1973 in University Park, Pennsylvania. The proceedings of that conference were edited by L.E. Cross and published by Pergamon Press under the title "Phase Transitions 1973." The Society's second conference was held March 24-25, 1975 at Princeton University. It was organized by Bill Bottoms, then a professor at Princeton, and Jack Wernick of Bell Labs. The topic of the conference was "Defect-Property Relationships in Solids." The proceedings were published in The Journal of Electronic
Materials, Volume 4, No. 5, 1975. These were both single-symposium conferences, each with about 100 to 150 attendees. In 1975, Harry Gatos became president of the organization, I became vice-president, with responsibility for organizing the next meeting, and Bill Bottoms became secretary. Aram Tarpinian, who was at Watertown Arsenal, became executive secretary, in order to provide a permanent address for the Society. Bill Bottoms and I felt strongly that there should be an annual meeting of the Materials Research Society and that it should be a multisymposium meeting. The council of the Society did not share our enthusiasm, but supported the venture. Bill and I began to plan the meeting, but Bill left Princeton University for a demanding new position at Varian in California, and became too busy to participate. I believed, however, that there
was still enough support available in the Society and in the materials science community to organize a multisymposium meeting. Bill and I had strongly promoted an annual meeting because materials scientists had no societal home of their own. In the large industrial laboratories, and elsewhere, major materials problems
I remember laying out one program booklet on the floor of my office with the help of my secretary, then assembling it and carrying it off to the printer. were being attacked by scientists and technologists with a variety of backgrounds. Solutions to these problems depended on crossing boundaries between the conventional disciplines. These scientists and technologists attended meetings of the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, The Metallurgical Society, the American Ceramic Society, the Electrochemical Society, I
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