Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–58
You have to figure out which ones go where. You have to sort of figure out what the
personalities are. How do you put each one of them with the right person, where the personality
will not be jarring? They vary in their ability to deal with the undefined. Remember, they’re
very young, they’re all teenaged. So the first term, pretty much, we work on toy problems. I get
used to listening to them; then I sort of parcel them out.
ASPATURIAN: What’s a toy problem?
TOMBRELLO: Ah. A problem you find in science—something where you can see if they can
make any progress in a couple of weeks. Not some big research thing, but “Why don’t you look
at this?” Sometimes they turn into real problems. Dave [David J.] Stevenson [Goldberger
Professor of Planetary Science] has been part of the course for maybe the last ten, twelve years,
and he will take a couple of students and be part of the weekly tutorials when he’s in town.
That’s been a big help. Dave’s a gifted teacher. He’s a brilliant scientist. It’s good for the kids
to work for him. Some of the kids he’s had have done extremely well and published nice papers
with him. I could do it without Dave, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.
ASPATURIAN: Whom else have you had, in terms of teaching faculty?
TOMBRELLO: None. The students are parceled out to different professors for these research
projects I mentioned. Kimble’s had one. Zewail’s [Ahmed Zewail, Pauling Professor of
Chemistry and professor of physics] had a couple. Rob [Robert B.] Phillips [Morris Professor of
Biophysics and Biology] had one. How much attention they get all depends on group dynamics.
LIGO’s had one. But you see one of my former research undergrads was Ken Libbrecht, who
sort of runs the student thing for LIGO, and Ken is a true believer. He’ll always buy one if I
need him. [Axel] Scherer [Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, and
Physics], of course, has done absolutely better than everybody else at taking a student and
getting something just so unexpected and so brilliant. I remember Brian D’Urso [BS 1998] when
he was a freshman. He was working on a problem of how you model photonic chips. This had
defeated just about everybody except a professor at MIT with a supercomputer. But Brian, I
think, figured it out with a Mac, a laptop. I remember Amnon Yariv came in. He was waiting to
talk to Scherer, and he met Brian. Brian was a freshman. And it was so funny; I wish I had a
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