Laurie McNeil is the Bernard Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her research as a condensed matter and materials physicist, she specializes in optical spectroscopy of semiconductors and insulators.
Laurie McNeil is the Bernard Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her research as a condensed matter and materials physicist, she specializes in optical spectroscopy of semiconductors and insulators.
I arrived at Illinois as a new graduate student in 1977, one of two women in an unusually large entering class (62, if memory serves). I had been a chemistry and physics major at Harvard and had fallen in love with solid state physics. When I asked Harvard faculty members where I should go to graduate school to pursue this passion, they all replied, “Well, besides Illinois, you should also consider…” I got the message.
The department at Illinois (students, faculty, staff) was generally welcoming, though the extreme gender imbalance did contribute to some peculiar moments. A classmate asked me why the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin had 13 sides—apparently being female made me an expert on that subject (and it actually had 11 sides). Older male faculty members accustomed to calling students by their surnames felt uncomfortable addressing a woman that way, and so didn’t quite know what to call me. I joined a wonderful research group led by David Lazarus, who couldn’t have been more supportive of his female (and male) students even while he took on the role of editor in chief of the Physical Review journals. By the time I finished my studies in December 1982, Dave had been in touch with his graduate school classmate Millie Dresselhaus at MIT, who agreed to take me on as a postdoc. Her mentorship had an enormous influence on my career. Besides the scientific growth she supported me to achieve, she also taught me what being a leader in the physics community looks like, and that we all have an obligation to serve. In subsequent years, she provided opportunities for leadership by recommending me for various roles when she thought I could learn something from them.
After a year and a half at MIT, I became an assistant professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of North Carolina, and except for sabbaticals at Argonne National Lab, DuPont Central Research & Development lab, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, I have been here ever since. I was the first female faculty member in my department—and for six years the only one. When I arrived in 1984, the department hadn’t hired anybody in seven years, so I was also very much the youngest member of the department. The other faculty members seemed pleased that I had joined them, but many were unsure how to treat a colleague who resembled their daughters. The second female faculty member came as a senior professor, and fourteen years after that a third woman joined us as an assistant professor (my joke was that the department hired a woman on average once per decade). Soon thereafter, I became chair of the department and was able to hire several faculty members, including two women. I did my best to provide them with the kind of mentoring my senior colleagues had not been able to give me, including regarding conflicts with difficult coworkers (sometimes tinged with sexism). We now have 11 women among our 36 faculty members, and I’m proud of the hand I had in that, especially considering how successful they have all been.
In my lab at UNC, I undertook research using optical techniques (mostly Raman scattering) to study various phenomena in semiconductors and insulators. Over the years, I have done some very interesting science with many wonderful students who went on to careers in academia, industry, and national labs. Working with them has been a joy, even if we generally had to go through ten drafts of their dissertations and scientific papers before the writing met my standards. As my first grad student told me, by their junior year, most physics majors aren’t writing anything longer than letters to their mothers. (That was back when students wrote letters to their mothers rather than just texting them.)
While I was chair, I also undertook to transform the classroom teaching in my department to incorporate active student engagement. My efforts were inspired and informed in part by what Illinois had done in its introductory courses, which served as a wonderful model of how a physics department could make a profound change even to such a big enterprise. With the help of a dedicated and skilled team (and two NSF grants), I was able to convert all of our introductory physics courses to a lecture/studio model, with outstanding results in learning outcomes and student satisfaction. Now faculty members in the teaching teams of these courses carry the same active engagement pedagogy into other courses, so all of our teaching is being modernized and made more effective. In 2014, UNC bestowed on me the Bernard Gray Distinguished Professorship “for outstanding scholarship, creativity and teaching,” and in 2019 the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society (APS) honored me with the George B. Pegram Award for “Excellence in Physics Education in the Southeast.”
Following Dave and Millie’s examples (though not at their level), I have sought to make a difference in the broader physics community by taking on a range of leadership roles in the APS. I have served as chair on the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, the Forum on Education, and the Southeastern Section; participated in or led the task forces that produced the SPIN-UP Project Report on thriving physics departments and Phys21: Preparing Physics Students for 21st-Century Careers; participated in or led dozens of “climate for women” site visits to physics departments; am a member of the leadership team for the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop (now the Faculty Teaching Institute); and currently serve as a member of the Council of Representatives and the Board of Directors of the APS. These and other activities have given me a chance to work with many dedicated people on important tasks, and I sometimes have the pleasure of intersecting with friends from Illinois.
All of the experiences and successes I have had throughout my career as a physicist are rooted in the excellent education (in all senses) that I received at Illinois. When Dave Lazarus decided to retire in 1987, he said, “this department has been good to me.” My time there lasted fewer than six years compared to his 38, but I agree with him wholeheartedly. For one thing, I met my husband, Pat Wallace, when we shared a TA office in Loomis Lab!