Retirements

Professor Robert T. Schumacher will retire in May 1997 after 40 years of service on our faculty. Professor Schumacher came to the Carnegie Institute of Technology Department of Physics in February of 1957, after 18 months as an instructor at the University of Washington. His undergraduate degree was from the University of Nevada in Reno in 1951, and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1955), where he worked on magnetic resonance under Charles P. Slichter. Except for an NSF senior postdoctoral fellowship in 1965 in Erwin Hahn's lab at UC Berkeley, and sabbatical semesters at Cambridge, England (1977) and Stanford (1989), he spent his entire career at Carnegie Mellon in the Physics Department. His professional career has been divided into two distinct halves. In the first half he was concerned with applications of magnetic resonance in solids. In that period, with the aid of several accomplished postdoctoral "students" he shepherded 10 students to Ph.D. degrees on a variety of thesis topics involving both nuclear magnetic resonance and electron spin resonance. He is very proud of the subsequent careers of his students and postdocs, which include among the students the late Bill Vehse, Provost of West Virginia University, and John Hall, the only Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Among the postdocs he is particularly pleased to have worked with Walter Goldburg (now at Pitt) and Ned VanderVen (now at Carnegie Mellon).

In 1975, stimulated by the lack of appropriate explanations of musical instrument oscillations suitable for explanations in the undergraduate musical acoustics course that he initiated in 1970, he changed research fields to musical acoustics. Fruitful collaborations with Cambridge University colleagues lead to techniques for computer simulations of musical instrument oscillations that have even seen commercial applications. He has recently allowed his life-long interest in the violin to steer him into a research interest in friction of the kind that causes the bowed string to sometimes produce beautiful music. He expects to have an interesting "after-life" pursuing that path and others of similar ilk.

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