Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–252
Apparently did very well there. By then, Gordon Garmire was at Penn State University, in
astronomy. They were looking for a chair. It was a tiny little department, and they hired her as
chair. She went from there to being chief scientist at NASA and from there to being vice
chancellor for research at UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara being one of those schools that had
gone from, you know, a beach college to something more in physics and materials science and
engineering. I think our friend [Robert A.] Huttenback, who was not considered to be great by
the people in HSS here, did a fantastic job there, carrying UCSB into the future. And so France
then went from that to being chancellor at UC Riverside, and now she is president of Purdue
University. She’s an interesting protégée. We occasionally talk. I like her very much. I think
she showed not only intellect but also the discipline to keep this moving forward in a direction
she wanted to go. She knew fairly early on—I think probably by the time she got to Penn State
as astronomy chair—that her future career was going to be linked strongly to running things.
I’m picking a little bit on the women because I think the women may have a harder time
breaking into leadership positions, but they may be tougher than the men so they actually make a
pretty good job of it.
So now I can circle back to Fiona Harrison. I would like to think that Fiona’s going to be
running things and that, for example, chair of PMA would be her next step. I think she’d be a
very credible division chair or even provost at Caltech, if she decides that’s what she wants to
do. I think she’s not going to be happy doing that until she has scored the points she wants to
score in her own scientific work. We have an associate professor here, Maria Spiropulu, and I
believe she will probably do extremely well at high-energy physics. She’s at CERN most of the
time. I think she has the mark of a university president on her forehead. I think suddenly people
are going to realize that not only is she a decent, very good scientist but she also has the right
personality to run a university. I mean, she’s already being propositioned by people in industry.
[Google founders] Larry Page and Sergey Brin like her very much. Jim Simons, who ran
Renaissance Technologies—the case of a mathematician who starts a high-frequency trading
company and becomes a billionaire—he would just love to hire her.
ASPATURIAN: Well, might they succeed in wooing her away?
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