Otello is a story that everybody knows, they have studied it at school, they have read it at some time or another, and it's a very simple, direct, and remarkably clear story in the opera as put together by Boito and Verdi. It's all about an evil lieutenant of Otello Iago, who really poisons the mind of Otello against his own wife, and it's all out of jealousy. He in fact is the one who's jealous, he's jealous of Casio having received promotion, but he's always warning Otello not to be jealous, and in those moments when he does it, we hear very sinister music underneath. Well, Otello falls for the story, he gets tricked, he's made very jealous of his own wife, and he murders her, and he finds out at the very end that in fact Iago was behind the whole thing, he was pulling the strings, and knowing that he has no future, that he has killed the only love he ever really had, Otello suicides at the end. So it's a great tragedy, and it's a tragedy about the frailty of human beings, the fact that we do listen to gossip, we often believe it to our own detriment as Otello discovered. Otello is such a powerful work that you shouldn't do it unless you have a first-rate Otello, and that was the first element that I needed to have in considering doing the opera at all. And when I heard Sergei Lahren, I knew that he would be appropriate for it by 2003. We actually discussed it in 1999 over dinner in Paris, and he agreed that he would take on the role for the first time here in San Diego, and then we built the cast around him with Marina Miseriekova, Alexandru Agache, Richard Troxel, Priti Gandhi, and we've developed, I think, a wonderful ensemble for this production that allows him to excel in the role of Otello. I think that for every tenor who can maybe in the whole career afford this role, every tenor is a lucky person. It's difficult, but it's so exciting, so interesting. When you start from the very top result, so you really live in this drama, and that's why I like so much Otello. I can tell it now because before it was, I was always thinking, yes, I like the character, but maybe it's not completely my cup of tea, but now I tell that I love this character, and you cannot tell that Otello is completely positive or it's a hero. Maybe, especially during the development of the story, maybe he's more negative than positive, but the end of the opera, when he kills this demon and comes this moment of catharsis when his soul is completely cleaned. He killed his wife, but he cleaned his soul because he understood what he did. I'm so attracted by musical drama, by this masterpiece of Verdi, and I will try to do this, at least in one production. I cannot think about the future, but I should, and I must do, honestly, my duty now, here in San Diego. Marina Ayador, I think she's a fun lady, a wonderful singer. I'd seen her work in Europe, and we had a wonderful long dinner once in Italy after a performance that went on for hours. And she's such a sensitive, enjoyable, happy woman, and I knew that she would fit the nature of our company. With all our information, with all the years which were prepared before, the most difficult to be still innocent, to be still really clear with your old decisions, it's a big challenge for that role. And you have to feel it all the time what you're doing in this piece, from beginning to the end. Well, maybe it's not really the right word for the English, the role is very clean. You don't need to be dramatic on it, you don't need to be showing everyone in the public that, you know, look, I'm dying, I'm just so beautiful, I'm dying in a few minutes. No, it's just, you know, normal, like she did before, many, many times. And it's just take a little bit more emotionally when she starts to speak about herself. And the most beautiful, per noi, per noi, tu prega. This is the most beautiful, you know, always you pray for us. And that's the beauty of this scene, and again, very, very clean. And this is, I think, the most dramatic. You don't need to be, you know, showing everyone is too, too complicated, too, too non-natural, let's say. You know, before people, of course, she felt something, that, you know, something fatal things has happened with you. But, you know, you don't need to show in this. It's my feeling. It must be the most innocent on it. Alexandru Agache first was heard by me on reporting, and then I saw him at Covent Garden as a wonderful Simon Bokenegra quite a few years ago with Kiri Tekanoa. And I knew that he had the strength of character as an artist, as a singer and a performer to stand up to Sergei and Marina. The character of Jago, it's a complex one. He has very more faces. And these faces, I think, he changed all the time the relationship in order to whom he's speaking with. So he has, for instance, with Roderigo, he is very ironic with Casio. He's very free and easy with Othello. Othello is very respectful and very admirative. He shows, of course, he's not. But he's an evil. He's a villain person, a villain man. He's not a Satan. He's not the Mephisto.  So he cannot laugh. So he hates the people who are in love, who showed love and respect for the other people. He's not a courage man.  He's a violent, a perfid. So what's worse, it's Jago. He has no principle of morality and religious, how do you say, when some believe in the God and everything. That's why, for instance, in the credo, when he sings credo, he tells that everything he believes in is an evil God, in an evil man, in an evil nature. And he's a very terrible character, I think. Let the San Diego Opera orchestra. When it comes to the great Verdi works in this company, I always think of Eduardo, because Eduardo has a long association with us. He cares about the company standards, he cares about where we're going, and he brings such a wealth of experience and knowledge, and particularly when we have a singer doing a role for the first time. It's very important to know that this is the mature Verdi, the completely mature Verdi. Verdi had three periods in his life as an artist. The first period was beautiful tunes, beautiful singing, great aggressive theatre. The second period was more mature and he entered in the human soul of the characters he was depicting. In the third part, he not just was able to enter in the human soul, but he was able to use completely new means for describing this. And I think this comes from what he used to call the parola shemica, which means the scenic word. He starts with this cooperation with Boito, and he starts from the meaning of the word. And then he translates these words in music, not just in the vocal lines, but in music in the orchestra. What is interesting, and I'm asking the public to pay attention to this, is the kind of color the orchestra will have, the kind of instruments that he will use for describing situations. To perceive the color of the English horn when in the last act Desdemona is singing that song of her mother a long time ago. To pay attention to the color of the bass when Otello enters and he is going to kill Desdemona. Deep, dark, only that instrument could describe the situation. And also the way that he suggests the musical line in one way and then it doesn't go in the obvious ways as one could expect. But it goes somewhere else according to the meanings of the words. So in this sense he is very modern. I would like to do from letter N, which means Valporto. Valporto con quanto più posto? This has to be piano. In my opinion there must be a part of improvisation in rehearsals. I try not to come to well prepared with an idea. And the results of the work will be done with the kind of singers that I will have, the kind of orchestra, and of course according to what the stage director thinks. And sometimes I can have also some different opinion and sometimes I have some argument. But this is life, this is part of art. Now, move. You've got...  Those two words really have got to register with you. This is a special human but also professional relation with Sonia. Because we know, let's say, 40 years probably something like that. Before we both came to La Scala working as assistant. I was assistant of many conductors and she was assistant of many directors. Don't fuss with this. It's very important. However it's... Just grab it. You know where she's going. Emilia Tene Prego. When she calls you the Emilia, counter clear, rather than going to her, so that you're closer to this. Okay. I'm not one of these directors that tips the interpretation one way or the other or tries to be very intellectual. They just listen to the music and try and flow with the music and express that on the stage. Sorry, I'm pig-headed. Think of that and see what comes out of it when you don't do it. Yeah, that. And start the tension earlier. On amore. They fully jante amore.  More na bianca. Even that. Just one hand as you turn to go away from him. I have to show singers what I want because I don't know what I want until I do it myself. I know the score very well. But the encounter with every singer is different. So you can't come in with a fixed set of ideas or something written down in paper because it's a building process which happens in the encounter of your two personalities. I have to stand up and show what I want.  And I always felt, well, there was something missing in my way of directing until I read Taran Guthrie's memoirs. And Taran Guthrie says, I don't know why, but the how is inextricably linked with the why. So then I thought, OK, if Taran Guthrie does that, then it's OK. Question of how you direct. Everybody directs in a different way. Some people direct. Peter Hall once said, it doesn't matter what you do. It matters why you do it. It matters what you're thinking. First of all, you have to get the thinking process right, and then you do it.  When I was doing the Don Carlos in Los Angeles, there was a singer who was singing to Bartlett who wanted to be a director, and we went out one day. She took me on a hike in the mountains, and she said, I'm very lucky to work in Los Angeles because Peter Hemmings has so many great directors coming in, and I learned from watching everybody's style. And so there's people that direct by being totally brilliant and were all fascinated by the fact that they never stopped talking. There's people that direct by terror. You know, everybody's shaking and their knees are trembling. There's people direct by secrecy and taking people off into the corner and whispering, and nobody else ever knows. She said, it's strange because you don't do any of these things.  Well, I'd never stopped to think or formulate how or why I directed until she said this. I have to tell you, as I've got older, when the flow of energy hasn't made me be nice. As enthusiastic as it used to be, it's a bit more wearing on me. But it's true. I mean, the music somehow makes something happen, and I have to get up and move it on. I can't sit still. I can't actually sit in rehearsals. I have to stand all through rehearsals because I want to feel the life of the thing. There are some operas in which the chorus becomes a real protagonist and is very dominant. A good example is Puccini's Turandot, where the whole of the opening is devoted to the chorus, and much the same happens in Verdi's Artello. Without a great chorus to launch the opera, as it were, during the storm, the opera will fall flat. Unfortunately, we have a great chorus here in San Diego led by Todd Simmons. I believe that Otello is probably next to the Requiem, one of the most difficult choruses for them to learn. At the same time, it was one of the easiest ones in that they enjoyed it so much. With Norma, it was difficult to learn because there was not a lot musically challenging about it. It appears like this because it's so musically challenging. They have to concentrate more, they have to focus more, they have to work harder to learn it, and so they learn it more solidly and quicker. You begin by breaking them up, teaching them individually who sings what, how they interact with each other, because you can't learn your individual line. You'll hear throughout, particularly during the Fogoneggioio, they have individual lines, but they form one solid line. They have to learn individually where they are and how they work with the entire structure. They have to be singing everybody's line in their head or they'll be late. In the opening of the opera, the chorus is a very important character in that they are the ones who are seeing the battle at sea. It has our boat sunk, we see a flag, we see a sail, it's the lion, it's our guys. Then they sink, and then, oh, he's okay, but oh no, now the hotel ship is sinking. Oh, he's okay. And they're the ones that, through their actions and their texts, are the ones that paint the picture to the audience of something that is nowhere being seen whatsoever. But because they're there, they give the audience this big image that's offstage. The chorus has to act, not just physically, but with their voices. And we do that from the beginning. They're opening una vela, they have to say that with fear in them. They have to sing that, that's almost spoken. They have to give you, if you're only hearing them, the picture of how they are feeling. Eduardo likewise wants that exact same thing. If that's not there, no matter how much direction that Sonya gives you, it's not going to make sense just because they're standing in a position or doing something. They have to be able to act with their voices and their minds and their bodies. Chorus, we have the artists, we have the conductor, we have the director, and this is an opera not to be missed.


This is Anna Adapmek in Vancouver, August 29th, 2017. Could you give me your name and tell me what you were born? My name is Hany Henneth, and I was born in Cairo, Egypt. Could you talk about your childhood? What were your interests like? I lived in Egypt almost 12 years, and spent six years, roughly in Cairo, and six years in Port Said. My interests were not so much technical, but I enjoyed going to the beach, which Port Said is very close by, and lots of seafood that was plantially available. And that was... And I also got... My schooling was my first exposure to the French language, because I went to a French private school in Egypt. I was run by the La Salle brothers, so I learned after Arabic, French was my second language. And then I got my third language being English after I came to Canada. At that time, there was no ESL or any programs like that, so you learned it by immersion. Why did your family move to Canada? We moved to Canada because of persecution against Christians. I'm Coptic, my family's Coptic, and there was a fair bit of persecution. You have to remember, back in 1952, there was a revolution in Egypt. The Nasser kicked the King out and kicked the British out. And in 1956, he continued a process of nationalization of different entities. And in 1956 particularly, that was the Suez Canal. And we were in Port Said at the time, living not far away from the mouth of the Suez Canal. That resulted in the bombardment of the 56th War. And that was actually my first encounter with Canada, because Lester B. Pearson was then the ambassador of Canada in the United Nations, and they started the United Nations forces. So when we were able to safely get out of our apartment and walk down the streets again, this Canadian soldier, I remember staring at him, he had a Canadian flag on, I still remember that, and of course the blueberry, and stood and looked at him and said, I couldn't figure out those, you know, roughly six years old, and you don't quite understand all these things. I couldn't figure out why it was, this is a friendly soldier all before it was not a very nice soldier that you didn't talk to. And as I stared at him, he kind of pulled out a chocolate bar out of his pocket and handed it to me. And I was taken aback by that. My parents kind of encouraged me, well, no, just fine, take it. That made me even more puzzled. But that was my first encounter with Canada.  Were your parents involved in science? No, neither one was. In fact, I think on my mother's side, there was nobody really involved in science or technology. On my father's side, nobody either was involved except for my eldest cousin. My eldest cousin, his name is Andrew Sidra, and he later immigrated to Canada as well and went to University of Toronto, got his PhD there, rose to be Provost, and became Dean of University of Waterloo and he's now retired and lives there. So he's the most technical person in the family. But at the time after the 56th war, there was a lot of upheaval in Egypt. My recollection is that you ended up with the British being kicked out. The next group of managers tended to be Christians and a few Muslim people, which were well-educated people. But the government wanted to, you know, they were a bit suspicious of that group because they worked with the British and so they tried to suppress that group as much as possible. And in the schools as well, there was a lot of spying, there was a lot of secret police from the government and everybody was in fear as to who's going to disappear tomorrow. My parents realized that we weren't going to be able to get a fair education and a fair progress in our lives had we stayed. And my father decided we were going to move into Europe's Canada. We almost ended up in Brazil, but there was a revolution there, a coup there I think at the time and we ended up going to Montreal. So that was the reason we came in Canada was open and welcoming so we were very pleased and we learned English. Can you tell me about your education? Certainly. So at the time I chose to continue, I sort of finished grade 7 in Egypt and then coming to, I don't know if you want me to start that far back or later. But at that time, about 62, the method in Canada for helping people learn English is to put them back a couple of years in schooling. So I went to grade 6, picked up English. Afterwards I went to jump on to grade 8 because I felt that this is where I was. I was quite fortunate actually because being an immigrant and still learning English, I was not put in the enriched classes. I was more put into the lower level classes, regular classes. And particularly in some of the courses like science and math, I was really getting bored. One day the principal walked into our classroom and said the enriched class right now has got two places for students to go there. Who would like to go there? Well as soon as that happened my hand went up. And he kind of stared at me and said, are you sure you can be able to do this? Yes. Where I got that confidence from, I don't know. But certainly the thing my parents always did to me is encourage me to always do the best I can and always work hard in school. Even when I was in Egypt, if I was the third in the class, it was like that. I should have done better. So I was used to working hard and trying to excel. So that was good. And then as soon as I moved into that particular class in math, they realized that I could survive and do okay. So they moved me in all the enriched classes except for English language. They kept me in the regular stream. But that was good. That was fine. And that was good because it gave me interaction with a group of friends that were also high achievers and hardworking. And so from that point it was a matter of deciding where do I go study beyond high school. And those days in Quebec, we left high school at grade 11 and then went on to university. Except that I decided there was the option to go to grade 12. And I decided to do that as a way to save money. So I went to grade 12 when I had still figured out what I wanted to get into. My parents, my mother in particular, was encouraging me to go into engineering. My father was very silent. Many years later he said he wished I became a physician. But I don't have the gift for biology. It just never struck me. My chemistry teacher in high school was extremely gifted. And I look back now and I remember learning about many of the things that today we call metallurgy and materials and the way she taught and the way she presented things to class was a very clear, very exciting experiment with throwing sodium on the bath of water and watching it go into flame. It was exciting to see. So after grade 12 I decided, okay, I'll do engineering. I got accepted at McGill to go in. And at that time, even the first and second year were general years. And in that time I had to decide what I was going to get into after that because then you start to specialize for three more years. And there was a course in Introduction to Material Science. It was taught by the chair of the Department of Metallurgical Engineering, Professor Bill Williams. And he showed us, recommended a book called Man and Iron Age, which I read. I was captivated by the history of metals and so forth. And then one day he showed us a movie in a classroom. And this movie was about how copper was made. And that fascinated me. And the thing that fascinated me wasn't so much the techniques or the technical aspect. It was the beauty of copper, how you start off with a rock. And in those days they didn't show you a beautiful mineral that's glistening, but you saw kind of a rock that was mainly material that was at no economic value with a few specks of mineral.  And then you cast it and you put other elements on it and you roll it or draw it and so forth. And you end up with a shiny, beautiful copper-looking material. That's so beautiful. And look at what they started with. How did they do that? That intrigued me. That captivated me. So I went into the field and it was rough. It was a pretty challenging program. I went through it. Bill Davenport was one of our instructors at the time. Others were people like John Jonas and Rob Guthrie. John Gursleski was another one. And so they taught us. Tal Salman was our prof in mineral processing. So they gave us a really good, well-rounded education. We went to work in the industry in the summertime and came back. So when the time came to finish fourth or fifth year, it would have been, we had the choice of going to industry or going to university for a master's degree. And I decided I was going to explore both. Then I'm going to explore the master's as if I was doing an interview for a job. So I went around and interviewed a lot of the professors about what life is like as a graduate. What did they do? What kind of projects they possibly had? And I got also two job offers in industry. After I visited those locations, I realized very quickly that I would be bored in those jobs. I wouldn't be very much challenged. I'd be the lowest man on totem pole, which is fine. But I'd be doing routine activities and I didn't feel challenged. I thought to myself, I'd go to school for four or five years and work so hard just to forget all my materials engineering. I kind of like it. I'll do masters. And I decided to do a project with Rod Guthrie. I hoped to have worked with Bill Davenport, but it just didn't work out. The problem that Rod Guthrie presented to me was very intriguing. So that's what I ended up doing my project on. Can you tell me what that project was? Yes. When you make steel and you've got a bath of liquid steel, in order to get the right chemistry, it's not just iron and carbon. It has other alloying elements, other elements added to it, either to control the impurities or to add to give it better properties. Well, one of these additives is aluminum and it kills, so-called kills, it gets rid of the oxygen to a safe level to make a sound ingot. But it also refines the grain size of the steel so it improves its strength. So aluminum is typically, at those days, was essentially, ingots of it were thrown into the bath of steel. And the yield of aluminum was pretty poor. People didn't know why. So what had been done before I came along is the previous student had taken pieces of aluminum and dunked them into a bath of steel in the lab and pulled it out and found that there was a steel shell frozen on the outside of the aluminum, which meant that if you throw a piece of aluminum into a bath of steel in an industry, the first thing that would happen is it would suck so much heat from the steel because it's a better conductor that the adjacent liquid steel would freeze and then the aluminum would melt inside of this steel shell and only then would that steel shell melt back. So they had done these kind of experiments and they were sure, and they'd done mathematical modeling of that process and they weren't sure if the conditions in the model were correct or not. So my job was to figure out and do some measurements with thermocouples to see if the measurements were right or not. But the furnace wasn't available at the time. So Rod Guthrie, my advisor, said, go away and think about the problem. Do a literature review. So I did, and I would come back to him periodically and say, I can't find anything. Nobody's done the kind of work that you're asking me to do. And so he said, no, you're not looking hard enough. Go back and look again. In those days, it wasn't like a computer where you kind of type everything in. You've got a little library. You pull out the chemical abstracts books.  So it was quite an arduous process, a long process. And I would come back and say, I'm sorry, and nobody's ever done anything like this. The only thing people have done is looked at the thermodynamics of aluminum and oxygen. And that was work that was done by, continued to be done by Professor John Elliott at MIT. He was very strong in that area. And so again, he would say, no, you have to look hard enough. Go back and do that. And we went back and forth. And so finally he sort of said, OK, I walked in one day and sort of told him, look, forget all this literature review. I can't find anything. Aluminum is very light. It's got a density of 2,700 kilograms per cubic meter. And steel is about 7,000. How long do these aluminum pieces stay in the molten steel? If you're throwing them in into something lighter, they're just going to bob out into the surface. And the light went on for both of us. And he said, oh, that's a good question. I won't do a quick calculation and see how long it would last. So I did. And I came back and I said, fractions of a second. And certainly it was far less than all the melting times that they had predicted before and found before. So he said, my gosh, that means these things are bobbing up to the surface and oxidizing. So we have to prove that that's the case. So that became my master's project. So I couldn't, of course, right away do experiments with aluminum and steel, but I had to figure out how to do experiments at room temperature. So using appropriate equations developed a what we call a similitude, a physical model at room temperature. And I had to go and hunt wood balls, different types of wood, water, properties of water and wood. And I developed a contraption that would drop these wood balls from 10 feet into a bath of water, high speed camera to photograph them and wrote a model and did all that. And then afterwards I did do it in aluminum in a bath of steel in the lab. And it was quite these experiments you would never do today because of safety issues. So I had this bath of steel that was like right there, about 50 kilos. I had somebody up at the 10 feet above in the mezzanine dropping these aluminum spheres that I had cast with quartz rods and a little flag, a foil flag on the top of them. And I had a third person over on one side running a high speed camera and a fourth person on the other side controlling the furnace. And I had this board in front of me and I was all dressed up in a suit. And I had this board in front of me because as soon as the aluminum comes down it's going to splash, so it doesn't have to splash on me. But I wanted to recover the samples as soon as they bobbed up because I wanted to measure the thickness of the steel shell to check against my model.  So the joking part is after I finished my masters Rod Guthrie complained to me that I used up too many right-handed gloves in the lab. Too many left-handed gloves left. Anyway, the work was well. It was fun. I enjoyed it very much. We got a couple of awards out of it, which was really exciting. My father at that point got up after me, so you've got to get up in the real world.  You'll be a permanent student forever and ever. So I went out and worked in the steel industry for about a year all the time thinking about, okay, what do I want to do? What do I want to go? And decided, it was very clear at that point I wanted to do modeling and simulation more of what I was doing. And in the company, there was only one person that did that kind of work and that person had a PhD. So I talked to the company management about... Which company was that? Sint-Bectosco at the time, about doing a PhD. They were about doing that kind of work. As I said, I have the background to do it. And they said, no, no, no, we have one person that's good. So it became clear to me in order for me to do that kind of work, I needed to get a PhD. So I left the company, went back to McGill for a few months to do a bit of work, because I wanted to get back into a more research-type environment. I was in the research department at Sint-Bectosco, and industrial research is often about generating a new statistical model for a process line. And I didn't find that satisfying. So then I applied to different universities. I got accepted at the University of British Columbia for a PhD. McGill, some of McGill folks wanted me to stay for my PhD at McGill. Bill Davenport, bless his heart. He gave me very good advice. He really encouraged me to move on and go somewhere else. And he didn't tell me what to do, but it was very clear what he thought, what his advice would be. And so I went to UBC, worked with Keith Permicombe, who's passed away, and started working on a project that was totally different. It was all about one of Keith's projects. And this was a joint project with Paul Watkinson, who's a chemical engineer at UBC in the Chemical Engineering Department. He and Keith collaborated on a project dealing with the processing of rotary kilns. And so they had done some experiments. They had a pilot kiln, they'd done some experiments, and they had some results they didn't understand. So Keith said, your project is to figure out if the way the material, the granular material in the kiln is moving is the cause of why we're seeing these different results. So it was very different. I started looking at what we call bed motion in a rotary kiln. And that became my PhD thesis. And to this day, I'm surprised. It is the two papers that were published out of my thesis are still the most cited pieces of work I've ever done, which is a surprise. They're still used, especially the experimental data, because we collected a lot of experimental data on a whole range of types of materials, sizes, shapes, wall characteristics. It was a pretty exhaustive set of data that people still apparently seem to be using for various types of, whether it is ballmills or rotary kilns or dryers or those kinds of things. That's excellent. It is. Yeah, it's interesting. You talk about your supervisors. Who do you consider your mentors? I mean, those, I would say, certainly Keith Bermacom was a mentor, Rob Guthrie and Bill Danuport. Those three, I would say, are key mentors in my career. Keith, in particular, once I got to UVC, he cared about the welfare, the personal welfare of the students. And that was very important to him. So you would have the students over in his house all the time and socialize with them, not as a friend but still as an advisor. So we got into really good conversations about the field, about many things. That was also the time when I had my first international interaction. He had Professor Denis Abdiser from École Nationale Supérieure de Nancy, the École des Nines, a Nancy. And he came over to do a sabbatical with his family. I was the only one in Keith's group that could speak some French. So he looked at me and he said, you're in charge of looking after him, because that was our tradition in the group. And so it was enjoyable. And many, many years later, we kind of, after he stayed for a year, his sabbatical, he went back. I finished my PhD and I moved on to the rest of my career. We didn't really interact or our paths didn't cross until I met him at a meeting of one of our professional societies called the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, TMS for short. I met there and he kind of stopped me in the hallway and said, look, we can't talk right now, but you've got to contact me. You have to come and visit. You have to come and visit. He kept after me for two or three years until I finally did go and visit. And I regretted not going earlier. But after I finished my PhD, I still didn't know whether I should pursue an academic or an industrial career. I interviewed far and wide. I had offers from both. And I finally, I ended up with a job at Carnegie Mellon University. I ended up choosing it over a job at the Alkan Research Labs in Kingston. They offered me a fabulous job at R&D and it was really exciting. But to do the research I wanted to do in processing, if you went to industry, you wouldn't publish it. If you went to academia, you could publish. So I thought to myself, if I went to industry and did publish and it didn't work out, I'm stuck. It's hard to move. But if I went to academia and it didn't work out, then at least people know who I am a little bit. I'm still a young professional and I can move from there. And so I went to Carnegie Mellon and I chose that because of that reason and enjoyed it. It was very challenging, very hard work. My first day on the job was intimidating. It's probably the best way to say it because on one hand you board a plane in one city where all the staff and all the people around you see you as a graduate student. And you get off the plane at another place. I did do a post-op. I just went straight into it. You get off the plane at another place and all those graduate students and all those staff see you now as a professor. Wait a minute. When did this change take place? And then you give in an office and you give in a pad of paper, a pen, and a telephone. And you say good luck. And now you say, OK, now I have to do something. What am I going to do? What am I going to study? So what did you decide to do? There was a colleague of mine by the name of Gary Warren. We became good friends. And so we started doing exploring. He had been there for a few more years than me. I had some industrial connections. And so we started exploring those in terms of industrial connections. And I started to make my own industrial connections. I had an office colleague, Cope, share the suite with Dick Fruhan, who had just started as well that same year as a faculty member. He had come from U.S. Steel's research labs. And so he had the vision of starting a Steel Center. With my background, he said, OK, would you like to help me? I said, absolutely. So we started visiting different steel companies. And they were interested in doing that. So we proceeded to start up a center on iron and steel research. And it was very successful. It really was starting to grow, attracted a lot of good students. And my work with Gary also grew. But that was more in the processing of hydrometallurgy. It got to a point where what we wanted to do, some of the companies saw as competitive. And so we had a roadblock to proceed further in that area, which is unfortunate because it would have been an exciting route to continue going down. Through my work in steel, because we looked at steel making, we looked at casting. And I kind of was aware of these things because of my time at Keith, because a good part of Keith's work was in continuous casting. And so as students, we would talk to each other about what everybody was doing. So he kind of became familiar with different areas that people were doing research in. An important piece of history is that when I was at UBC, during the start of the second year, a young lady came to join Ph.D. at UBC. And they ended up putting her in the office with me. And she came and kind of wondered, who am I going to work with for my Ph.D.? She had done a master's at the University of California, Davis. Started looking around different professors. And she sort of asked me, well, who do you think I should do a Ph.D. with? I said, quite frankly, in my opinion, the only person in this department worth doing a Ph.D. with is Keith Birmacol. I was biased. She ended up doing a Ph.D. with Keith Birmacol. She ended up doing extremely well. She became then a faculty member at UBC and moved on to be Vice President of Research at UBC and moved on to be President of the University of Alberta. Her name is Indira Summersacara. So that's my claim to Ph.D. Excellent. Yeah, so we're still good personal friends. Did you come back to Canada for the job at the University of Alberta, or did you come back early? Yes, I came back early. Over 95% of the materials research done in the United States in universities is funded by defense, defense agencies. And so they typically tend to be interested in the first cubic centimeters of a brand new material. I came from pedigree of working with industry in research and doing fundamental research, but relevant for industry. And the way I've always described it is my job is to generate new knowledge that could be used by industry to apply it into their operations, to improve their operations, make them more efficient and more effective. And so that was much more difficult to do in the States. I had full funding, but I was always chasing funds all the time. And at that time, I was also raising half of my salary from research funds. And that was particularly stressful on the family. So we decided that we'd try to come back to Canada. Now, you can say that, but at the time, there was Keith Permacome at UBC doing similar things to what I was doing. There was Alex McClain in his group at the University of Toronto doing very similar areas. There was Rob Guthrie still active at McGill. There was Gordon Irons at McMaster. I was looking at this and said, where am I going to go? They already have people. They don't need me in any of these places. And just at one meeting that we came back to Conference of Medellers, just a colleague sort of said, well, the University of Alberta is looking. You should put in your applications. I didn't know they had a materials program at the time because they were very small and very low key. Provided excellent bachelor's education, but they weren't really visible in research at the time. So I went and interviewed and they gave me an offer and we accepted and made the move. And that was in 1989 when we made the move back to University of Alberta. So I decided at that point, the other thing was because of the structure of research in the United States for materials and for the area that I was interested in, it was extremely difficult to say that in five or ten years, these are the questions I would like to see answered in the field. These are the things I want to try to achieve. It was much easier. The system in Canada was enabling one to try and do that. Yes, periodically you get a project that turns you to one side or another, but you learn something from that and eventually that you're able to bring back your original goal and focus. So some of the research I was doing in continuous casting was in the later years, Carnegie Mellon was with Alan Cram, who's now president of IIT in Chicago. And we would ask ourselves why is the microstructure the way it is in the casting? And we got a project with a company where they had designed a new gas animizer nozzle and they wanted us to understand how it worked. So I worked on that project for a year and then they decided to abandon things but they left the equipment with us. So I thought, okay, well, let's see what happens and if we can find a particle that's generated through this atomization and you don't turn things into atoms but it's a euphemism that's called in the industry where you take a stream of metal and break it into droplets and then those droplets freeze into powders. So if I take a powder particle, look at its microstructure and I can trace its origins in terms of that particular part of the screen and I pick another particle that was generated in completely different conditions and I could trace its history and if they had the same microstructure that could tell me a lot about maybe the microstructure that I'm seeing in a casting. It was very naive at the time but so I pursued how do I generate a droplet of molten metal that would be under control conditions that I would know exactly what its history was and then I could backtrack and find out what the conditions were for that particular microstructure that led up to that particular part. And so that was the idea that one of the ideas that came back to Canada to pursue and my first graduate student that was the project I gave her at Ding Yuan and she did it. She developed a technique which we call impulse atomization that does that and I remember after I talked to her and we looked at the microstructures and the powders and we started looking at this it was a very simple frame that we built at the time a very open frame it had a very simple crucible resistance heated plug in the wall and she put some lead tin alloy in there and atomized it. The technicians that we had at the time at that time at U of A were absolutely instrumental in that happening. We could not have done it without their creativity on their part and their excitement and they were excited to do something new and they really put a lot of their talent into supporting what we were doing and so I remember one day coming home after really looking at this and realizing my gosh there's so many variables that could go into this particular study there's so many materials that we could do there's so many different ways we could do it there's so many different applications that we could consider for something like this there's so many scientific studies that we could go down I said I could live the rest of my career without having a single other idea this is going to carry me for of course that doesn't happen you've got other ideas down the road but that was sort of my realization sort of my goodness my career has just turned a corner I got this thing that I think is exciting whether other people find it exciting or not is another issue but at the same time though living in Alberta I very quickly realized that the importance of steel in the West and particularly for pipeline and oil and gas transmission that it was critical and there was a steel company that was really the premier steel company at the time it was Ipsco in Regina that was essentially the premier pipeline producer in North America there was so I initially convinced my colleagues that let's take the students on a field trip to Ipsco to visit them and develop a relationship with people there and see if we can convince them to start a project and we did this for about two years and then fortunately Dr. Laurie Collins who was working at CANMET up to that point in time got a job as director of research at Ipsco now I had worked with him when he was at CANMET because he was also interested in rapid solidification which is what happens with these droplets when they freeze and we had worked together on a project his PhD was on rapid solidification when he was down at MIT so that was sort of a foray of research that he was interested in pursuing to some degree so we already had a relationship so when he moved to Ipsco at the time I started talking to him about why don't we try to set up a project he was interested in doing that because A we are the closest materials program to Regina this is a program that generates bachelor degree students and from his perspective if we are able to if Ipsco could have good recognition into our program and be seen as a partner into our program then the students that go off afterwards and work in the industry would have a very whether they worked for Ipsco or not would have a good impression of the memory of Ipsco in the workplace and that would turn favorably towards Ipsco when the time comes for different projects and they would have a relationship because they knew each other so he was that was a good strategy on his part he also wanted to establish a core group of faculty that would work collaboratively together to address problems that he would come that he ran into periodically where he needed expertise beyond what he had at the R&D center in Regina and he wanted to promote good knowledge in the university that he could use in the R&D labs to help improve operations and development so that was exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to do so it was a very good partnership and I can't remember exactly what year it started but we are I think on the fourth or fifth Bensroek CRD with them we brought on and the third one we brought on TransCanada Pipeline the next one we brought on Alliance and Enbridge but they decided they didn't want to continue which is okay so now we have a project that is with Evraz because the Swedes bought them and then the Russians bought them and we have a project with TransCanada Pipeline in them and it involves four faculty it has about six graduate students on it two postdocs one lecturer half a lecturer because the other half comes from the department and and we work on problems that we feel are appropriate to be done in the university we can publish we generate knowledge for Evraz that they use and improve them and we have been able to change and modify our approaches and our projects to suit their ongoing moving challenges that they keep facing whether it is the Arctic strain-based design or right now thicker wall pipes that they have to so what are some of this challenging in developing still specifically for pipelines and for sagdi operations what are you trying to improve or what problems are you trying to solve in the earlier days of this project when people made steels for pipelines they were prompt to a lot of corrosion and it turned out that the a certain phase a certain chemistry and steel FE3C which is part of what we call Perlite is very is very Landler in structure and so it would provide and it's brittle so it provided an easy path for cracks to grow and so people had to figure out how are we going to eliminate Perlite but yet retain the strength of the steel and at that time people were interested in developing stronger steel so they were using what's called X52, X being the API American pipeline industries standard it sort of means that it's X65 being 65,000 PSI is the yield strength and so there was a lot of interest to go to X70, X80, X100, X120 and there were people throughout the world that were working in that area just obviously us and people basically developed steels that required a certain amount of niobium and niobium has a number of effects in the production line it controlled the recrystallization of the austenite during rolling it helped create a pancake structure people knew that at that time and we started to develop steels with that kind of structure and then afterwards the transformation to ferrite was there and then you had niobium dissolved whatever's left dissolved in the steel and also you formed little precipitates and people had done transmission electron microscopy on these niobium carbides and saw that there was a string of them and there were 5 nanometers in size and basically said this is how the strength of the steel has improved I personally wasn't satisfied with that as an answer because I tend to be a little bit more quantitative and I said well we're adding such 0.03 0.09 maybe 0.1 percent niobium how does such a pinch affect the steels properties to that degree so one of the projects that we did supported by by Evraz or Ibsco was to develop a method by which we would take a representative quantity of steel and dissolve it and recover the residue which essentially was carbides and analyze it and weigh it and figure out what the chemistry was and from doing that and from measuring the properties of the steel and using mathematical models we can kind of say alright the dissolved amount of niobium is contributing x percent to the yield strength of the steel the precipitates are contributing y percent and so forth and we came up with essentially the grain size of the steel was about 40-50 percent niobium had an effect on that grain size but putting that aside the niobium precipitates and the solid solution strengthening was another 40 percent and we could quantify that and we did it for a number of ranges of steels including some x80s and x100s that we that we were looking at so we could put a number this amount is contributing this much to the strength and now with Evraz going towards thicker walled steels and they have to change their chemistry they have to change their processing techniques we're using a technique like this to help guide this is the way you should go you've done this this is the precipitate results that you're getting and the strength that you're getting so we're able to use that kind of technique in a quantitative way to help them and I think it's it's a value to them so that's one example of the many projects that we worked on so is there an innovation or a set of innovations that you are the most proud of for the pipeline certainly I think that's one the other one is recently we finished the project with a student where we decided to add a cold wire to the welly improve productivity and improve toughness and improve properties and we're very proud of that and we're hoping to do that further with these thicker wall materials it's interesting in that we haven't really focused on being necessarily innovative in our relationship with the steel company we focus more on we're going to generate knowledge and understanding so that you folks can take that knowledge and understanding and turn it into something practical in the plant because one of the things that we worked on that we insisted on in this particular type of project we were going to work with the real steels we were not going to work with model chemistries we were going to work with the steels that is produced commercially and we're going to do all of our analyses on that so in many respects we did the SAGD work we did we did it on their steels only the precipitate work I just described we did it on their steels the welding was done we did it on the commercial steels they would allow us also into the plant to take measurements of their industrial operations and we would come back with those measurements and carry out analyses and models so we were in a role of generating that knowledge that they needed to be able to implement to improve their product and retain their competitive place in the marketplace between you and I I don't think it's a sort of thing that NSERC would necessarily rank highly in their synergy awards but be that as it may I think it's provided a valuable service to the company it brought a bunch of colleagues together at the university that continue to work together we've generated a lot of students that continue to work in the field in the industry in Alberta and I think we've provided Evraz and TransCanada pipeline with good knowledge that has been valuable to them and continued to be valuable to them so I'm very proud of those accomplishments and I would say we are probably the largest concentration of faculty and students in Canada if not North America that are looking at pipeline skills so and it makes sense Alberta is the centre of oil and gas and we shouldn't be doing that for Canada for the Canadian economy making sure that we are doing our part to provide Canadians with on the one hand a safe and sustainable transportation system that enables us to improve our standard of living because energy products are a major contributor to our genically that's the reality and it will continue to be so and as academics we've been entrusted with a very special gift of being in a university and having academic freedom shall we say but we need to use it responsibly and in this case I think one of the areas we use it responsibly for is to help in that generating that knowledge and people so that they're well equipped and well prepared to contribute to Canada and what was the most difficult or dysfunctional project that you worked on something that you would consider a failure well that's a hard question I would say the atomization would be probably it had offered many highs and successes but it offered a lot of lows because at the time it was just before we got into the pipeline research I learned something when I was a Carnegie Mellon that I needed to establish a strategic advantage and with so many high powered people doing work in the process medleurgy area in Canada I thought to myself how in the world am I going to get somebody to get off a plane and admitted to come and visit us I need something different I need something new so when this Ding Yuan came up and succeeded with this atomization which we were seeking to do succeeded experimentally I thought well my strategy is going to be I'm going to patent I worked with the university to try and get that done I declared the university at the time they were really not equipped to deal with such innovations and how to patent basically they were trying to get me to find a company that will pay for it and it was like I'm going to do research and so at the end they said you take it and you run with it so I thought I need this to be able to get companies to get off the plane and visit us so I pursued it and pursued a patent on it at the time I wanted to pursue further improvements on the process but at the time my dean of engineering kiboshed that whole thing and said no you can't do that our rules at the time say that if you're going to personally benefit from an invention you're not allowed to do research on it I said what? wait a minute you can monitor my graduate students all you want you can review and check out any publication any paper that I have for publication to make sure I'm not lying sweet in the pot you can check by proposals all you want you're going to get a benefit out of this because it's coming out of the University of Alberta you want me to stop it makes no sense but he was of the it was his way or the highway so I said fine alright I'm not going to use graduate students to develop the process I'm going to use graduate students to understand the droplets and how they solidify so they worked on the process we changed things as we went along we never published what we changed but they got their thesis done on the basis of the microstructure that they saw and quite frankly I'm thankful to him because it opened up a whole area of thinking and of research that I wouldn't have thought of at the time because I was very process oriented not so much microstructure oriented although I wanted to move in the microstructure realm so we kept the process to some degree going but on the other hand we couldn't pursue it to the degree that we wanted once we got the patent we had a deluge of companies interested and that was the sad part most of the companies were coming wanted in what we were doing without what are you doing? for free so that was not a relationship that was particularly enjoyable a process that was particularly enjoyable getting into NDAs it just consumed huge amounts of time and effort that were just you know when their intentions were not noble really at the end of the day there were a couple of companies that were quite quite positive and quite open and quite forward about the whole thing one was Naranda the other was Alcoa and we did a license with Naranda for alkaline battery applications and they went ahead and adopted the process and their pilot facility they loved it it worked like a charm it was very productive it generated a unique product for them they generated a product patent out of it they worked with one of the big battery companies I can't remember which one it was developed a product that improved the performance of the alkaline batteries by a good 20 percent 15 to 20 percent of that order for the anode and then they waited for the company to put in an order and company one day came back at the end of that two year pilot period and said we've got a technology in the cathode that we think we want to pursue next so Naranda just kind of closed everything, put it on the shelf and let the dust collect I was like that's sad and then they got the idea to use our technique to try to make magnesium granules as feed materials for thixotropic applications and because at that time people were just taking ingots and chipping them and then there was problems of contamination and so forth but if you could make granules millimeter sized granules then you could they flow much more easily they're finer in structure so when you semi melt them for thixel molding you would have much finer structure you'd have better properties upgrade we showed them how to do it they adopted it they started doing pilot scale testing because they had an operation in Spokane made magnesium and they did a whole cost analysis and in three months they could turn profitable which is unbelievable then all of a sudden I get a phone call from them and say we have to stop our plant is being shut down the Chinese were dumping magnesium in North America to the point where nobody could make money in North America making magnesium so all the magnesium plants in North America shut down overnight then the folks at Alcoa Research Center try to convince their management by saying look we can still get into this business we'll buy Chinese magnesium and we'll granulate it and we'll sell it in companies just not interested so that went nowhere that's very interesting you want to see your stuff that's going and that was kind of brought me back to our dean who didn't want me to pursue further research in the process side I thought to myself he's wrong because there are so many forces that determine whether something is going to be commercially successful or not it isn't the technology the technology of course is needed but there's market forces there is applications there is production forces there are political forces there's so many things that come into play that he's wrong in the path that he chose to go now but anyway I know we are running out of time but just last question then you are the director of the advanced materials and processing lab what are your goals for this lab my goal is to develop young people for the next generation that are well prepared and well equipped for the challenges they're going to face in the future whether they are academics or work for industry that's important I think for them and I'd like us to think that we have made the University of Alberta known for the research that we do and for the quality of research that we do and that I think we're better known now than we used to be not just because of what I do but many other contributing factors and so we now participate in space research on the space station because of this work that we do with atomization and microstructure evolution we're getting into additive manufacturing and we were approached to participate in a consortium of universities to do it so there's a number of these successes and visibility that we hope can be maintained and enhanced in the future in terms of the way we're moving so I'm proud of our achievements and however small they may be but there's always going to be bumps in the road Thank you very much for this interview Thank you