The move this summer into the president’s residence on Highland Avenue completed a circle that began when Birgeneau left U of T in 1963, diploma in hand, and headed south. His journey took him to the halls of Yale and lawns of Oxford and to the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey during the institute’s golden age of research. It also took him to the troubled American South as a civil rights advocate before he and his wife settled at MIT 25 years ago.

It is a remarkable path for a teenager who had a helping hand financially from his church to attend St. Michael’s College School in Toronto and who helped support himself and his family by working summers. Birgeneau’s return to the city of his youth and his Alma Mater is no nostalgia trip. In fact, it’s a challenge neither he nor his wife, Mary Catherine (BA 1962 St. Michael’s), expected. Last year he turned down a chance to be president at a leading American university and passed up a shot at a senior-level job with the Clinton administration in Washington. In the summer of 1999, the couple felt rooted enough to renovate their longtime home in the Boston suburbs, adding a sun porch and redoing the kitchen. All four of their children live in the United States, their first grandchild was born recently in nearby Connecticut, and the Birgeneaus were even considering finally becoming American citizens. “We had pretty much decided Boston was where we would stay,” says Mary Catherine.

But the presidency of his old school proved too tempting for the peripatetic physicist, who despite white hair retains the lanky frame, frequent smile and sharp eyes of a younger man. “There’s genuinely a possibility of Toronto moving into the very top ranks of public universities internationally,” he says. “And I thought it would be interesting to pay back my debt to Canadian education and see if I could make a contribution to research in Canada.”

At first, Birgeneau’s wife had a few reservations about taking on such a public role. “For him it’s a wonderful challenge, but I’m a quieter person, and while I will enjoy the people part of the job, I don’t like being the focus,” she says. But family ties to Toronto, where her 91-year-old mother and two brothers (and Birgeneau’s two sisters) live, made the move more palatable. “Besides,” she adds with a laugh, “he’s not the kind of person I imagine retiring early and walking on the beach with me.”

There will be precious little time for beachcombing in the new position. Leading one of the largest universities in North America – with an operating budget of nearly $700 million and a student body of more than 50,000 – is a far cry from managing a half-dozen science departments at an elite private institute.

Birgeneau already has a clear idea of the challenge he faces in converting his rhetoric about a world-class university into reality. “There is a fundamental economic problem for education in Canada compared with the United States – which is that universities are underfunded and salaries are significantly lower.”To address these issues, he wants to seek out new funding sources and squeeze more out of old ones. The Ontario government, he says, needs to increase core support for salaries. The federal government is already preparing to fund about $900-million worth of research chairs nationwide over the next five years, and U of T will receive the largest number of them. Birgeneau wants to build on that momentum, and on Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s call for a “brain gain,” to reverse the decades of emigration by Canadian academics to Europe and the United States.

In addition, he wants to take a page from the book of American universities, whose strong alumni associations contribute substantially larger sums than their Canadian cousins. “In Canada, education has traditionally been seen as a government responsibility,” he says, “rather than as a target for private financial commitment.”

The last and probably the most controversial funding source is industry. While MIT has a long history of collaboration with industry, U of T does not. The subject stirs strong passions on campus. At an initial meeting last fall in Toronto, Birgeneau received an earful from students who said, “We don’t want any dirty industry money.” He just said, “I’m sorry, this is an area where we will disagree.” From his perspective, universities provide both students and a knowledge base to industry, and companies should be willing to pay academia back. “You shouldn’t see this as industry contaminating universities,” he insists. “This can and has to be done so it does not alter our core values.”

Birgeneau spent a good deal of time as dean of science at MIT striking deals with industry, and he says those agreements have retained MIT’s intellectual property rights, while imposing only minor limitations on how and when researchers can publish their findings. His savvy in this complex and difficult field is a good sign to some, including Bill Graham, former president of the U of T Faculty Association. “We think he will actually be a help, given his experience,” Graham says.

Increased funding from such a variety of sources will help ease the pressure on students’ limited pocketbooks, says the new president. As a student of modest means who commuted to the university while living at home, he says he is well aware of the trials of students. “You cannot increase tuition indefinitely at the rate of 10 per cent a year,” he insists, while noting that tuition costs here are far lower than at comparable American institutions. “And if you are going to pay faculty higher salaries and provide startup packages for star faculty, then you have to have more resources.”

While raising money is central to his strategy, Birgeneau is also focused on other issues he says are vital for his campaign to boost U of T’s quality and reputation. Though a scientist, he says he is keenly aware of the need to maintain strong humanities and social sciences programs. “Our role is to educate people, not to train them, and we want to educate leaders.” Leaders, he adds, must know where they come from (history), who they are (psychology) and what impact they have (economics and social science). And that assertion is not likely just diplomatic talk, given that he won a scholarship to U of T in classics and has a great respect for Greek and Latin.

Diversity is also likely to be a focus of his administration. “U of T’s undergraduate body is possibly the most diverse on earth,” he says. But he notes that the faculty is “more homogenous, and that has to evolve over the next decade. We need to be sure that department heads increase diversity in the faculty, and in such a way that they improve the overall quality of the faculty.”

It’s a subject close to his heart. As a 12-year-old student at St. Michael’s from the Dundas and Dufferin area, Birgeneau recalls that some teachers and classmates seemed to assume he lacked brains as well as money. He was put in the class for the weaker students. When the school realized its mistake by the end of his first fall term and tried to transfer him to “the brain class,” he resisted as long as he could because he felt he had little in common with the wealthy kids who dominated that group. “Growing up modestly in Toronto and being sent to a school with a lot of privileged people was an important part of being aware of the difficulties of being in a minority position, being sensitive to how it feels,” he says. “It toughens you up. You survive and you are better for it.”

Last year Birgeneau’s name became a household one in American university circles following his work with a group of women science professors at MIT. With his approval, that group published an article in MIT’s faculty newsletter summarizing a controversial report that concluded the university was systematically discriminating against them in the amount of money they were paid, the lab space they were allotted and the way they were treated by colleagues and superiors. Long before the report was concluded, Birgeneau had already put pressure on his department heads to hire more women, which they did in record numbers. The inequity issues were quickly addressed, and President Chuck Vest made the results known to widespread praise from national leaders, including President Bill Clinton. MIT’s Hopkins, who led the group of women, gives Birgeneau high marks for the role he played. “He listened,” she says. “Once he knew the problem for the women was real, he was determined to understand it, no matter how much time and effort it took – and it took a lot. He stuck with it.”

Birgeneau is quick to point out that he has much to learn in his new job. “I’m not going to do anything drastic at first because I don’t want to alienate others,” he says. And unlike the insular and tight-knit community of MIT’s upper management, U of T “is a lot more bureaucratic because it’s a public university. I’m much more constrained now.”

The goal of pushing U of T higher in the ranks of the world’s top public universities will doubtless put his political skills to the test, since it will entail making substantial changes to hiring and promotion practices. Birgeneau says he will work gradually to upgrade those practices. “I will have to have the full cooperation of the faculty otherwise it won’t work. Faculty will have to realize the changes are not something threatening to them but in their best interest.” Practices at top American research universities – such as promoting only one-third of junior faculty – simply won’t work at U of T. “That’s a harsh thing to do, particularly at a large public university,” says Birgeneau. And when it comes to hiring, competing monetarily with American universities is not a realistic goal, he adds. Other strategies must be found. “First, you prevent the best people from leaving. Then, if they do, you try to get them back” by trying some combination of quality-of-life arguments – and by taking advantage of what he calls old-fashioned Canadian chauvinism.

Although he spent most of his adult life in the United States, Birgeneau’s pro-Canadian feelings seem undiminished. It was only last summer that he and his wife gathered the forms to file for U.S. citizenship and took them along to a physics conference in Aspen, which is where he got the call from the U of T search committee charged with finding a new president. “Canada is, frankly, a much more humane society,” he says. “There are many great pluses in the U.S. as a high-achieving society, but the cost is a general level of harshness, which affects people in their daily lives.”

Birgeneau is closely acquainted with what that means. His wife has a master’s degree in social work and did volunteer work for an after-school program in the black and Hispanic area of Roxbury in Boston. Birgeneau himself has seen something of the world beyond lab and office. While a graduate student at Yale, he worked with a friend at a recreation centre in the grim inner city of New Haven, Conn. In the early 1960s he worked with a group that aimed to increase the quality of teaching at black universities in the South and in 1965 he taught briefly at a small college in Columbia, S.C. “It was a tense summer and a close-up look at the effects of segregation,” he says.

Birgeneau’s own early life, which he is reluctant to discuss, was not free from harshness. Born of an Irish Catholic mother and French-Canadian father, he laboured in the summers to help make ends meet, including a season when he was 15 at the Yardley factory compressing talcum powder and working on the loading dock. But the priests at St. Michael’s soon recognized his intelligence and told his mother he must use his talents for public service rather than remain a labourer. “That made a huge impression on me, he says. By the time he was ready to graduate, he was so adept at physics that his teacher let him grade the papers of other students.

Thanks to a classics scholarship to U of T, he began to climb the educational ladder – an exceptional effort, given that he was the only person in his grade school to finish high school. At a dance on the first day of classes at U of T, Birgeneau spotted his wife-to-be, whom he had already met in high school. They were engaged three years later. He threw himself into applied mathematics rather than classics – which he considered more a hobby than a potential profession. But a stint at IBM soured him on the idea of following the math path. “I came in one day wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt rather than a white one. The salesman congratulated me on my courage – and I thought it was a joke, but he was serious. On the spot I decided I would not survive in this kind of a life. I could not live a life where people thought it took courage to wear a shirt that had stripes.” So in the middle of his senior year, he dropped a pure math course and picked up a physics course, a first step toward his ultimate change to physics.

MIT rejected his bid to go there for graduate school, but Yale University accepted him, and he won a spot as a summer student at Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Northern Ontario, where his love affair with research began. His former adviser Gerald Dolling, researcher emeritus of the National Research Council, recalls going to Europe for a conference that summer – and returning three weeks later, pleased to find data for an experiment on the interatomic forces of nickel complete and neatly catalogued.

In 1964, Mary Catherine and Bob married, moved to New Haven and soon had their first of four children. Granted a PhD at the young age of 24, he was offered a job at Bell Labs. But wary of being drafted into the Vietnam War – his Canadian citizenship did not protect him – he taught a course in computer science at Yale for a year then went to Oxford until he turned 26, when he was no longer eligible for military service. When he eventually went to Bell Labs, which had held a job for him, it was at the height of its renown as a temple of research. “That was the first time I felt below average,” he says. “I was always among the best where I had been before.”

After a few years at Bell, he decided to move into academia. The company was pushing him to move into management, but he craved research – and students. “I’m an instinctive educator,” he says. So in 1975 he joined MIT’s physics faculty and he and his wife settled in Boston. His energy and enthusiasm for research became legendary there. “I got lots of Saturday afternoon calls with a new idea to discuss,” says Marc Kastner, a close friend and MIT physics department chair. And even after Birgeneau became dean of science in 1991, Kastner says with awe that his research output remained phenomenal for someone not doing research full time.

U of T officials have agreed to support a research program for Birgeneau, and his passion for science likely will stand him in good stead with a faculty eager for a leader with a strong academic interest, says Graham.

This is, after all, a man who as dean spent much of his summer working at a facility on Long Island, N.Y., doing basic research. Kastner thinks the dean’s job was Birgeneau’s hobby, while science was his real job. That love of research is unlikely to change. “I’m a faculty member first and an administrator second,” Birgeneau insists. No doubt he will frequently be spotted striding across campus, eagerly grabbing a few precious hours to spend in the lab.

Andrew Lawler is a writer for Science magazine.

Superconductors have the potential to make life so much easier – except for one big snag. There is no theory to explain why electrons behave as they do in a high-temperature, super-conducting state, and the best minds in physics have been at a loss to explain the phenomenon.

Superconductivity, discovered in 1911, occurs in many metals at extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero (-273.15°C). The need to use cumbersome, costly cooling devices based on liquid helium put nearly all practical applications for superconductors on hold for years. Then, in 1986, came a groundbreaking discovery. Two scientists working for IBM in Switzerland, Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller, found that copper oxides became superconductors at unprecedented high temperatures. Liquid nitrogen, which is cheap and plentiful, can readily cool the material to the required level, although the highest temperature at which scientists have produced superconductivity is still a frigid 16O°C above absolute zero. There is still a long way to go to reach the ultimate goal – a room-temperature superconductor (about 300°C above absolute zero). More significantly, 14 years after the discovery of high-temperature superconductors, the microscopic mechanism that causes this phenomenon remains unknown.

Theoretical physicists around the world have grappled with this problem and have come up with conflicting theories. The path to a solution seems likely to lie in experiments designed to study and characterize the odd behaviour of electrons in the superconducting state. Bob Birgeneau, the new president of the University of Toronto, is one of a handful of key experimenters working to solve the mystery. “Quantum physics is 75 years old,” says Birgeneau. “Yet there is still a deep hole in our understanding of matter, solids and liquids at the quantum level. We hope to fill that hole.”

This task is difficult because the behaviour of electrons in interacting quantum states is hard to predict. First of all, electrons are impossibly small (like a football in a subatomic stadium). Microscopic phenomena in physics simply don’t have parallels in our everyday macroscopic world. Secondly, the laws of quantum physics are consistently right, even when they don’t appear to make sense. They are counterintuitive.

It was fundamental physics that laid the foundation for the wonders of electronic engineering – the transistors, integrated circuits, lasers and fibre optics that drive our high-tech world. Scientists have since moved into the study of more complex states of matter. Birgeneau offers an analogy: “Picture the electron as an individual in a crowd. To predict the behaviour of that electron, it is often enough to know the average weight and height of the surrounding electrons. Now, in quantum many-body physics, my territory, knowing the average behaviour in the neighbourhood is not good enough. To predict the behaviour of an individual electron, we must know the precise weight and height of all of the surrounding electrons.”

Birgeneau experiments with exquisite, single crystals of high-temperature superconducting materials, which he probes with neutrons. These crystals are composed of isolated sheets of copper oxide; his experiments suggest that there are magnetic “rivers” of superconducting charge in the copper oxide layers, and this appears to underlie the wondrous properties of high-temperature superconductors. His experiments are designed to find out what is fundamental and what is mere detail because, as he reminds us, “we still do not have the mathematical tools, the theory, to describe this exotic behaviour.”

Current research at U of T complements Birgeneau’s own work, and the president will form part of a core group determined to unravel the paradoxical nature of high-temperature superconductivity. Physicists Louis Taillefer and John Wei are each looking at the same class of problem, although with a different focus. Taillefer is an expert at making high-purity materials and measuring their properties at very low temperatures. Wei is setting up a new tunnelling spectroscopy lab along with facilities for making very thin samples, in an effort to study the problems microscopically. Two theorists, Michael Walker also a professor of physics, and WaIker’s former graduate student Bob Gooding (PhD 1987), now at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., will be part of the group, and Birgeneau’s senior researcher from MIT, Shuichi Wakimoto, will also work on campus.

When Birgeneau began his scientific career with a summer job at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Northern Ontario after graduation from U of T in 1963, his timing couldn’t have been better. Canadian scientists like Bertram Brockhouse (MA 1948, PhD 1950), awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1994, had recently pioneered the use of neutron beams from the new Chalk River nuclear reactor to probe the atomic vibrations of elemental metals, semi-conductors and simple compounds. A resulting paper on the interatomic properties of nickel, which Birgeneau co-authored, was his most cited paper for two decades. “It was an extraordinary privilege for me as a young U of T graduate to be able to work with this group of Canadians who were true world leaders.”

Now, those high-level experiments are carried out collaboratively in multibillion-dollar facilities in the United States, Japan and Europe. Birgeneau dreams that the Chalk River nuclear reactor, in danger of being mothballed, might be transformed into a neutron research centre, putting Canada back in a leadership position in the international field of neutron scattering.

How will Birgeneau the scientist and Birgeneau the president balance these two demanding roles? “My first responsibility is to help lead the University of Toronto into the realm of the very best universities in the world in both education and research,” he says. Then he adds, “But my soul is that of a scientist, and I need to show that it is possible both to be a high-level administrator and to carry out leading-edge research.”

Taniguchi’s U of T-inspired dining club uses the restaurant listings in the Toronto Yellow Pages as its guide and dines, in alphabetical order, at almost every establishment listed. The club started at A in 1989 when Taniguchi was in his third year and is now midway through the Ds.

Each year the official switch to the new Yellow Pages occurs July 1. According to club rules, members pick up exactly where they left off in the old Yellow Pages, ignoring any new restaurants that were added earlier in the alphabet. On the club’s seemingly momentous 10th anniversary last November, there was barely a celebration. At Diamond Pizza on Main Street, members simply played a special diners’ history trivia game and passed around a copy of the first-ever Serial Diners’ invitation.

“The Serial Diners evolved out of gatherings I had in residence,” explains Taniguchi. The English major (BA 1991 Trinity) set aside every Friday afternoon to “hang out” in his room at Trinity College. Friends would meet and then go out for dinner.

“It took us 40 minutes to figure out where to go,” he recalls. So he looked to the Yellow Pages to impose a selection on everyone. In its first year, many members were Trinity College students. But as word spread the club attracted more foodies beyond the campus. Go figure, but this wacky little club kept growing. If all continues to go well, members should be dining in the Zs in 33 years.

Without fail, participants meet every Friday night at 6 p.m. at the appointed restaurant. They usually number between seven and 20. Out of the several hundred people who have attended, some come once and never return, some show up a few times a year, and some – including U of T alumnus and club chronicler Charles Levi (BA 1992 UC) – maintain a fiercely loyal core group.

“Everyone here is a character in the old-fashioned sense of the word,” says Stephen Barringer (BA 1993 St. Michael’s, MA 1994), a member since 1993. In fact, they seem to pride themselves on looking out of place whether they’re in an upscale restaurant or a seedy dive. They are easily identified by the gales of laughter resonating from their table.

Do they eat at every restaurant the Yellow Pages dictates? Not quite, but close. For instance, in June they faced dining at two doughnut shops – what they called the Homer Simpson Fortnight. Instead they opted to dine elsewhere rather than subject themselves to a dinner of doughnuts. When this happens, a favourite alternative is Ristorante Roma on Bloor Street West, which they say has one of the best pizzas in the city. “It’s probably the closest the diners have to a favourite because it’s often the choice when our official restaurant flounders for one reason or another – which is funny because it’s an R restaurant, so we never should have eaten there in the first place,” says Levi.

Interestingly, they do not have a favourite U of T haunt. “You’d think after 10 years we’d have found a place around U of T that would have been a delight,” says Taniguchi. Levi sums it up best: “Students who attend the university are tempted to eat in all the restaurants in the Yellow Pages precisely because the campus precinct is so dismal.”

Clearly, the group has not been lured alphabetically near campus often enough since graduation. If they had advanced to the Ms (Messis) or to the Gs (U of T’s own Gallery Grill), they would have encountered enough delicious options to send Homer Simpson straight to heaven.

Surprisingly, I first really met him while visiting Harvard – where he was the first Mackenzie King Professor of Canadian Studies from 1967 to 1968 – and he was gracious and direct. “You must be Saul’s son.” (He had graduated from University College in 1936, the same year as my father.) “He was so bright and so funny. Are you, too?” The conversation then turned to the wider world of politics and university protests, which were beginning to dominate the scene on every campus. I must have seemed not so bright and not so funny, but I was impressed by his willingness to engage in debate, and to listen.

In a Hart House debate in 1968, Claude Bissell upheld the right of students to exercise power in university affairs. Bob Rae is behind Bissell, at right

The following year, 1968 to 1969, was in many ways very difficult for the president. He had wanted to reform university governance because he was troubled by the gap between the academic and business sides of the university, and I think he was tired of being caught in the middle. His return to U of T from Harvard that fall was to have marked the beginning of a gentle campaign to make some fundamental changes. What he found was that the students and faculty wanted to control the process. Claude Bissell and I ended up spending many long hours in each other’s company as members of the Commission on University Governance. It was here that a wary tangle across the generations became a friendship. He was not happy with the politicization of his project; indeed, he was troubled and depressed by it. But I came to understand the depth of his love for the university, his intimate knowledge of its every nook and cranny, and his deep political skill at managing it. I see him now as comparable to a master first minister temporarily reduced to leading a minority government. He would probably not have enjoyed being described as having great political skills, but he had them in abundance. And it did not take long for him to regain his majority.

He had a commanding physical presence, a great voice, and a love of debate and repartee. He took enormous joy in conversation and discussion of all kinds. He was irreverent, witty and eloquent. On public occasions, he always spoke carefully and with immense thought. He admired wit and possessed much of it himself; when introducing John Kenneth Galbraith at a public lecture, he combined the personal with the public in a completely compelling way. He understood that leaders had to inspire and, while an effective manager, he understood that leadership is far more than that. He took issue with the rhetoric of the student left, but he was not by any means a reactionary. He understood that an openness to reform was the best technique to keep other forces at bay.

As the years passed, I would see him in our new and different roles. I treasure the note he sent with a cheque for my first political campaign, and the kindness he showed me on my defeat in 1995. Age was not kind to him in the end, but he soldiered on with immense courage. He was president for 13 years, from 1958 to 1971, the years of the university’s greatest growth until the present time. Claude Bissell will certainly stand with the greatest of our presidents, Sir Robert Falconer and Sir Daniel Wilson. He was a man of vision, humour and uncommon decency. I am proud to have sparred with him, but prouder still to have become his friend.

Bob Rae (BA 1969 University College, LLB 1977, LLD Hon. 1999) is the former premier of Ontario.

The story could begin in 1987, when Sajeev John, a physicist who grew up in London, Ont., wrote a seminal paper in theoretical physics while an assistant professor at Princeton University. His topic? How to make materials that would cage light. Such materials would enclose photons, the particles of light, rather than electrons, and could be used to create circuits and switches that would use light, rather than electricity.

Or, if you take a long view, the story could begin in 1948 when William Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen created the first transistor. They later shared a Nobel Prize for their work, which led inexorably, as we all now know, to today’s silicon-based society.

But for our purposes, let’s take a closer starting point: The St. George campus of the University of Toronto, late in 1998. John, now in the physics department, is a guru of the new science of photonics. His theoretical insight is central to a worldwide drive to make light jump through the same hoops as electrons do – to make optical microchips, for instance, instead of electronic ones. And central to that endeavour are “photonic bandgap” materials that can cage light with a specific wavelength of 1.5 micrometres (the wavelength used in fibre-optic cables).

Electrons want to stay in wires, but light just wants to be free. Sure, with some engineering, you can confine light to a fibre-optic cable, but even then, a slight kink in the cable and the photons escape. Making light work, as we routinely make electrons work, requires a material that won’t let photons escape.

The bad news was: no one had such a material. The good news was: John knew how to make it. All he needed were a top-notch materials chemist, an experimental physicist who understood photonics, and a source of exquisitely engineered artificial opal to serve as a template. As it turned out, all three came together dramatically over a period of a few months.

John’s theory called for a lattice of air bubbles of a certain size, surrounded by silicon and joined by little silicon tunnels. Such a lattice of air bubbles, he theorized, would be completely opaque to light at 1.5 micrometres. Carefully engineered defects in the material could then create tracks along which photons would have to travel – wires for light. The problem was how to make such a lattice.

Here again, John’s theory provided a blueprint. To make the lattice, you need to start with a template – a kind of negative image of the final structure. In technical terms, what was needed was an almost perfect array of tiny glass balls, arranged in what mathematicians call a face-centred cubic lattice. And that, chemist Geoff Ozin thought, was going to be tough.

Ozin has spent his professional life making new materials. Seated in his spic and span office in the chemistry building, under a black and white poster of John Cleese doing a Silly Walk, Ozin says: “That’s what people like me do – we make stuff.” Designing new materials is literally a family matter for Ozin; his father was a bespoke tailor near London’s Savile Row and his sister worked for some of the top fashion designers in London. “It’s in my genes,” he says. “The esthetic that drives me to do what I do is clearly design.”

But in late 1998 when John first approached him to work on a photonic bandgap material, Ozin was reluctant. He had been working – as many chemists do – on a scale of about 10-billionths of a metre, the so-called molecular scale. “What Sajeev was basically asking me to do was to jump from 10 nanometres to 1,000 – and he wanted it done in hurry,” Ozin says. There was no doubt in Ozin’s mind he could increase the scale 100 times; he had been finding ways to do chemistry on a larger scale for years. But the question was time. He figured it would take at least six months to learn how to make the opal templates, before he could even start figuring out how to make the silicon lattice. So he said no.

Half a block south, in his 10th-floor physics building office, John greets me from behind a desk crenellated with stacks of paper. He takes a nearby chair – a good thing since he’d be hidden from view if he sat at his desk – and immediately slides down onto his tailbone, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. It is about a month after he and his colleagues have published their landmark paper, “Large-scale Synthesis of a Silicon Photonic Crystal with a Complete Three-Dimensional Bandgap near 1.5 Micrometres,” in Nature. Hidden in that rather ungainly title is all the excitement in the world, although John tries to be measured: “It certainly has the potential to be technologically like a revolution, in which you have photons entering technology the way the electron has done,” he says. “It makes us feel like we’re back in the 1940s, when the electronic semiconductor was being developed.”

But late in 1998, John was still trying to find someone to make his lattice of air bubbles. He was in contact with a group of researchers in Spain – Francisco Meseguer and Cefe Lopez, with students Hernan Miguez, Marta Ibisate and Alvaro Blanco – who were making exquisitely engineered artificial opals. On the microscopic scale, an opal is an ordered array of tiny balls of glass – just what John ordered for his template. John told the Spanish that Ozin felt it would take too long to make the template. No problem, the Spanish researchers replied – we’ll make the template, you get Ozin to make the lattice.

The lattice and the chemistry weren’t the only obstacles; John also needed someone to show that the material – once made – did in fact have a bandgap. Luckily, that person, physics professor Henry van Driel, was on the next floor up and eager to get involved, because he had worked on photonics with John for years. He, too, started to work on overcoming Ozin’s reluctance. Van Driel remembers meeting with Ozin and his graduate student Emmanuel Chomski; Ozin said the work would take two years, Chomski said it would take two weeks. This was May 1999, so “it clearly wasn’t two years,” van Driel chuckles, although it did take the summer and most of the fall.

With Ozin on the team, John says, “Suddenly I knew I had all the things would need to translate this into reality.” For van Driel, a key element of this story is teamwork. Grad students Jessica Mondia and Stephen Leonard and post-doc Serguei Grabtchak in van Driel’s lab worked with Chomski and Ozin to test and refine the materials, in consultation with John and student Ovidiu Toader. Unfortunately, van Driel himself was sometimes out of the loop, because he was on sabbatical in Amsterdam.

Leaning against a cabinet in his lab, hands shoved into his pockets, van Driel surveys his young crew with pardonable pride: “The feedback was simply intense,” he says, “and they did great work.” It was also a defining moment for the young researchers – to be involved with a major project, in a race with competing scientists in other labs. “This might be a once-in-a- lifetime experience,” van Driel says. Leonard, though, has a more down-to-earth description: It was like baking a cake. “You need a recipe, excellent supplies, good cooks and people who know how it should taste,” he says. John had the recipe, the Spanish researchers had the supplies, and Ozin and Chomski were the cooks. And, Leonard adds, “We knew how it should taste.”

The interplay of scientific theory and practice is rarely direct. It’s not uncommon for theory to languish for years before an experimentalist does anything with it, and it’s equally possible for an experiment to be carried out without any theory to explain what happened. But this story is different – at least partly because three of the four needed elements were within half a block of each other on the U of T campus. It’s also different, Ozin says, because John’s theory was remarkably detailed. “He laid out the road map for everyone – you had only to read the road map and if you had the chemistry, you could go and do it,” Ozin says.

Of course, it wasn’t simple. First, you needed the template – a precisely organized array of tiny glass balls (which is all that an opal really is). The balls all had to be exactly the same size – 870 nanometres in diameter – and they had to be packed together like oranges in a box. Like oranges in a box, there would be empty spaces between the balls. Unlike oranges, however, the glass balls also had to overlap each other just slightly, to be “necked.” Without the necking, the opal template would fall apart, but more importantly, the necking is a key element of the final product: No necking, no bandgap. It was a tough recipe, but the Spanish group was able to do it.

The theory called for Ozin to deposit silicon throughout the opal, using a technique called chemical vapour deposition, coating each tiny ball layer by layer, so that precisely 86 per cent of the space between the balls was filled. Finally, using hydrogen fluoride, in what Ozin calls a “touchy” process, the chemists etched away the template, leaving a Swiss cheese of silicon.

Then van Driel’s posse went to work. The idea of a bandgap is that the material will be opaque to certain wavelengths of light in all directions, unlike normal materials, which block some light in some wavelengths in some directions. But it’s not enough to spray some silicon into some opal and say you’ve got a bandgap – you have to show it really won’t let the light through in any direction. And that’s what van Driel’s team did: testing a sample, making suggestions to the chemists for refinements, testing again.

Finally, late in 1999, they had it – a material that could be made efficiently on a large scale, and that completely blocked l.5-micrometre light. The Canadian researchers had won an international race based on an unlikely combination of experimental and theoretical skills. Says van Driel: “Lots of people were trying to do this, but they were missing some part of the expertise.”

It was a race run on a shoestring: John estimates they spent “several hundreds of thousands of dollars” on last year’s experiments, compared with “several millions” that other groups were spending. And it was a race with a lot at stake: although John might modestly demur, the photonic bandgap material represents a scientific advance on the same scale as the semiconductor/transistor, which was worth a Nobel Prize in physics. But if the scientific story has ended in triumph, the technological story is just beginning. The advance could spawn a huge industrial complex. “We’ve won a race,” says John. “But we’ve created a much bigger race.”

Creating the photonic bandgap material was just the first step. Now comes the hard part: making it into devices, such as optical microchips, waveguides and microlasers. “There is,” John says dryly, “a lot of engineering that lies ahead.” But in theory, if you make the material, but introduce what Ozin calls “designer defects,” you can make light do anything electricity can do and then some.

For now, all three researchers say, the key issue is to begin developing the optical technology made possible by the photonic bandgap material. Some of those technologies may include microlasers, microcircuits of light and all-optical switches, Ozin says. That green-gold speck of silicon could be the basis for a trillion-dollar industry. No longer reluctant, Ozin sees a whole world of new materials to be made, a whole new universe of possibilities both in photonics and elsewhere. “I’m reborn,” he says. “Now I know what I want to do.”

Whether the industry will be Canadian will depend on government and industry. Right now, John worries, other countries could be starting to capitalize on the U of T work and could leave Canada in the dust. Consider the transistor: It was invented in the United States, but the first to make money with it were the Japanese. Time will tell if the same thing happens to the photonic bandgap material – and time is short.

Michael Smith is a Toronto science writer.

The Faculty Club, with 40 years of U of T lore under its belt, welcomes all, including alumni and occasional interlopers like Sir Peter Ustinov

This year the Faculty Club, with a 3,000-strong membership, celebrates its 40th anniversary. And though with its grand, neo-Georgian facade it may look exclusive and remote, inside it is anything but. The building at 41 Willcocks St. dates from the 1880s and was first the home of the sturdily Presbyterian Campbell family. It then served as a Jewish men’s club, the Primrose (to which women were admitted eventually), until it was expropriated in 1959 by U of T and turned over to the Faculty Union to form a club. Until then, the men and women on U of T’s faculty had met separately – the men at Hart House, and the much smaller number of women at the University Women’s Club on St. George Street. But with the prodding of some of the professors, including German scholar Barker Fairley and his wife, Margaret, who offered the club a collection of Group of Seven works on the condition that it welcome women as members, the gender-blind Faculty Club opened its doors in the summer of 1960.

In those days membership fees ranged from a mere $12 to $18, remembers Bill Foulds, club secretary from 1960 until 1983. One of the first things the club’s 12-person board did was obtain a liquor licence. The place was unacceptably dry. The club then got on with the business of providing members with a range of amenities, including a luxury that every harried professor needs: a steam bath. (Alas, the water has long since been turned off.)

Forty years onwards, faculty and administrative staff have been joined at the club by alumni. All are welcome to take out a membership for the current unclub-like fee of $300 per year. (For that amount of money in a Pall Mall club in London, you might manage a couple of cold lunches and a jug of house claret.) Belying its name, the Faculty Club reaches far beyond the professoriate. Weddings, bar mitzvahs, retirement parties – the club is the setting for various rites of passage. Included is that ritual known to PhD students as the “Oral Defence Congratulatory Drink.” Once the star chamber of examining professors has been faced (down), and all, including the often dazed candidate, retire for a libation, it is to the Faculty Club they go. Welcome to the club, indeed.

But it is not only long-suffering graduate students who make up the guest list. All sorts of people have come through the doors of the Faculty Club. Sir Peter Ustinov visited once, charming a group of professors with his knowledge of European history – no easy task, even for the flamboyant Ustinov. Sir Edward Heath, former British Conservative prime minister, stopped by for a drink (Chivas Regal). Recently, Michael Burgess of Les Misérables fame sang at the club, but only after having a grand piano delivered to the premises.

Satisfying guests and members alike is a dedicated, family-like staff of 17, led by manager Leanne Pepper. With just six years’ service, Pepper is a veritable rookie compared to Peggy Hopkins, the genial hostess who has worked 18 years at the club, and bar manager Ernie West, a voluble Scotsman with a Methuselah-like 32 years of service. West’s twin, Brian, even more voluble, has seen 20 years behind the club’s bar.

The Faculty Club looks and smells and feels like a club should. Somnolent in the morning, it really begins to come to life in the afternoon when members arrive for lunch in the beautifully appointed main-floor dining room or downstairs in the cosy, wood-panelled pub. In its composition and atmosphere it exemplifies the modern U of T, but with its history and its glorious Group of Seven collection it pays homage to the university’s past. Just like other 40-year-olds, the Faculty Club has seen it all.

Brad Faught (PhD 1996) teaches history at the University of Windsor.

That question brings up a fundamental problem: Canadian universities are underfunded compared to their international counterparts. Local perceptions seem to be that U of T is rich. However, relative to our peers – the top public universities in the United States, western Europe and Japan – we are woefully underfunded. The new Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program, which will provide funding for 251 faculty positions at U of T, is evidence that the federal government is prepared to take the first steps in helping to make us more competitive globally.

There is remarkable diversity among our students and staff. We now have a marvellous opportunity to enhance our faculty and at the same time make it more diverse, through the CRC program and recruitment linked to faculty retirements and enrolment growth. Over the next six years we could be hiring as many as 1,000 professors. This is an unparalleled opportunity that will require us to search worldwide for the best young educators and scholars.

I believe deeply in the concept of the research university. There is nothing more exciting than being taught by someone who last week, in his or her discipline, may have changed how we think about the world. Great scholarship leads to great teaching, and my experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology taught me that seeking the very best candidates in the world inevitably creates a diverse faculty. Diversity thrives in a meritorious environment.

There is considerable excitement on campus about the university’s new campaign goal. Over the past few years, under the guidance of President Emeritus Robert Prichard and Provost Adel Sedra, U of T has done an extraordinary job in identifying its academic strengths and priorities. In response to the campaign led by Prichard and Jon Dellandrea (vice-president and chief development officer), alumni and friends of the university, as well as faculty, staff and students, have given generously and set a national standard for philanthropy. However, I cannot overemphasize that this is the beginning of the process, not the end, and alumni will be critical to the success of this unprecedented Canadian campaign.

Being a member of the University of Toronto community is a privilege, and in return for this privilege we are obligated to give something back to the community. Indeed, one of the reasons my wife Mary Catherine and I decided to return to our Alma Mater was that we wanted to serve the university that not only helped shape our lives, but actually brought us together – at a freshman dance at St. Michael’s College – on the first day of school. Thirty-seven years, four children and several career moves later, we are tremendously excited to be back in Toronto. I look forward to working with you to help make U of T one of the world’s truly great public universities.