Ceramic Tech Chat

Ceramic Tech Chat opens on a standing question: who are the scientists and engineers who work with ceramic materials? Each episode answers it through one person. Lisa McDonald introduces most of them, often setting up the conversation with a framing idea and a line from the guest before the questions begin. Those framing ideas are part of the appeal. One episode starts from the point that research shaped by Western scientific paradigms often overlooks knowledge from Indigenous communities. Another begins with some society history: Edward Orton Jr., one of the founding members of the American Ceramic Society, also founded what is now The Ohio State Marching Band. From there the conversations mix technical specifics with the turns a career actually takes. Courtney Calahoo describes ionic glasses as vulnerable to water attack and little studied, and she hopes more people will make them so that a review she wrote can be updated. She also tells how a chance connection through her best friend's father got her hired to turn a dissolvable glass rod for wood preservation into glass fiber, at a workplace close to where she grew up. David Jensen talks about working with architects and asking for physical references or images of the roofs they want to match. His roof glazes, he says, hold up in any environment. What shifts by region is style, and Spanish and Mission tile are more common in a place like Florida. Katrina Donovan brings the show into outreach. She describes a high school teacher on a NASA grant who is working out a clay body and glaze from materials in the local environment and turning that research into a K-12 classroom module. The same work looks at local sources of gums and cellulose to help the glaze go on. Tim Powers sits on the board of the Ceramic and Glass Industry Foundation and lays out its two sides: inspiring a new generation in materials science and helping industry with a pipeline of new engineers. He borrows Mark Twain's line about loving your work and calls glass and ceramics a field of hard work and a lot of fun. In 'Focusing on the fundamentals', Rajendra Bordia says his approach has been mostly to listen, talking with a broad spectrum of members, staff, committee members and divisional leadership. He credits DuPont with giving him a chance to develop his skills. He also talks about his work as a professor and mentor, helping students see why the basics matter by linking them to the work ahead. A different voice introduces that episode. A listener comes away with a picture of ceramics and glass through the people in the field: how they found it, what they work on, and how they try to bring others in.