Art Friedberg. The Friedberg Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Clive Randall on Tuesday at MS&T. Credit: ACerS

Much of the joy in my adult life can be traced back directly to Art Friedberg.

The clock was ticking in the second semester of my sophomore year at Illinois, and the deadline for declaring a major was looming. A friend suggested ceramic engineering, and, armed with a 20-year old’s chutzpah, I called the department and asked for a meeting with the head—Art Friedberg.

As I recall, Art spent a fair amount of time talking to me about what ceramic engineering is, what a ceramic engineer does and how a latecomer like myself would step into the program. He must have done a good job describing the profession—my parents raised no objections, although they are still trying to figure out what I do!

The next fall I was the only new kid in the ceramic engineering courses and quickly realized I’d found a home, figuratively and literally. A few years later I graduated with a BS, MS and a husband. An interesting career, a happy marriage and four children later, I am grateful to Art for opening the world of ceramic engineering for me.

Many others thought highly of Art, too, and created an annual special lecture that honors his memory.

For 2011, Penn State professor, Clive Randall, will deliver the ACerS/NICE Arthur L. Friedberg Memorial Lecture at MS&T next week. He’ll be talking about sintering of dielectric oxides for cofired multilayer capacitors, and in a perfect set-up for the lecture, a new paper by his group was just published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society and is available via the Early View feature.

You can read it and formulate some hard questions for him, or just read my summary.

I hope to see you at the lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 18, at 8:00 a.m., Greater Columbus Convention Center, Room C113/114.

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