A Physicist Flows Between Fields

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By SCOTT SMALLWOOD

Most graduate students only dream of choosing between multiple job offers. Todd M. Squires not only had that choice but then had the trickier task of choosing between departments in different disciplines.

When the postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology went on the job market this year, he had 10 interviews and received five offers. The physics department at New York University wanted him. So did the chemical-engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, two different engineering departments -- chemical and mechanical -- made him job offers.

In the end, he decided to stay in California, taking a job as an assistant professor in the chemical-engineering department at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The weird thing is, he isn't really a chemical engineer. His Ph.D. from Harvard University is in physics. And for the past three years, he has been splitting two different postdoctoral fellowships at Cal Tech -- one in the physics department and one in applied mathematics. When pressed, he calls himself an "in-betweener" or, jokingly, a "fluid mechanic."

He studies microfluidics -- basically, the way a tiny bit of fluid moves. How does, say, water behave when you put it in a channel the width of a human hair? Or how might tiny crystals floating in the fluid in the semicircular canals in your ear make you dizzy when you look up?

At Cal Tech, Mr. Squires, 32, held an independent postdoc position, meaning that he was not tied to another professor's research project and was able to range widely. He worked with a professor there on a major review article about microfluidic devices. He and an MIT professor explored ideas that might one day lead to tiny battery-powered microfluidic chips. He also got fascinated by the design of the semicircular canals that help vertebrates balance. Now he's kicking around a small project involving sharks.

It may seem disjointed, but for Mr. Squires, who describes himself as very gregarious, being at the intersection of a number of fields feels just right. Fluid mechanics, he says, "has the perfect mixture of things that are intellectually interesting but also things that I can talk to my parents about."

Happenstance

After an early childhood in Wisconsin, Mr. Squires grew up in Southern California. His mother taught elementary school; his father worked in marketing for food companies. He stayed close to home for college, graduating from the University of California at Los Angeles with bachelor's degrees in both physics and Russian. Happenstance, he admits, got him into both fields.

In high school, he had to choose between taking physics and physiology. "I didn't know the difference and just picked one at random," he says. At college, he tried to pass out of his foreign-language requirement by taking the Spanish exam, but he didn't score high enough. So he enrolled in Russian and ended up loving it.

In addition to Russian, Mr. Squires speaks fluent French and passable Arabic. He loved traveling the world, but does less of it now that he is married and the father of two children under 22 months.

He is adept at explaining his research in simple terms. He sounds a bit like an excited kid when he starts talking about how microfluidics devices could be created using the tools that have been developed for making microchips.

Imagine, he says, tiny chemistry labs where a slew of reactions could be done with a single chip. Or imagine taking a tiny drop of blood and doing a full set of lab work. Imagine an implantable device that monitors the level of a certain drug in your bloodstream.

Then he pauses, worried that he's spinning too many science-fiction tales. "I don't want to sound like a wild-eyed pitchman," he says, "but there's a whole lot of possibilities." Two generations ago, he says, "when you had the first computers that filled a room, who would have thought that now we would use computers for all the things we do?"

He has a good sense of the overall possibility of the field because he worked with Stephen Quake, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, on a 50-page review article that will appear in the journal Reviews of Modern Physics.

He has not stopped dreaming about putting microfluidic devices into the human body. He has also spent time studying one that's already there. That's essentially what the canals in our ears are.

In graduate school, he collaborated on mathematical models to examine the cause of one kind of vertigo. That then prompted him to examine how the structures work. After studying the physics of the canals, Mr. Squires says, he speculated that the canals need to be the size they are to work properly. Essentially, he says, evolution has created a sense of balance that is as good as it is going to get.

Sunny Days

At Santa Barbara, the search committee was attracted by Mr. Squires's "maturity and breadth," according to Matthew Tirrell, dean of the College of Engineering. For instance, as a postdoc, Mr. Squires had organized sessions at scientific meetings -- a task generally reserved for more seasoned scholars, says Mr. Tirrell. "He has the capacity to summarize the whole field and he's also produced some interesting research on fluid motion," the dean says.

But why pick Santa Barbara over MIT's chemical-engineering department, which is generally regarded as tops in the field? It was a tough call, Mr. Squires says. "If decisions are that hard," he says, "I figure that either all the options are great or all the options are terrible." In this case, having his family in California made staying out West attractive. And the sunshine didn't hurt.

"I wouldn't boil it all down to the weather, but lifestyle is part of it," he says. "Having lunch with my kids, being able to live near the beach, being able to bike to work."

Mr. Tirrell cringes when location is mentioned. "We're continually fighting the idea that's the only thing we have to offer," he says. Regardless, he is excited that his chemical-engineering program, which is considered a top-10 department, won out over some higher-ranked programs. "Part of my pleasure in attracting him is the fact that it shows it's not a no-brainer that you're going to go to MIT."

Mr. Squires says that ultimately the interdisciplinary focus of Santa Barbara made the difference. At Santa Barbara he plans to keep working with other researchers -- no matter what department they're in. "Not quite fitting anywhere has its advantages," he says. "It means you can kind of fit everywhere."