>> PROVOST ISAACS: As the provost of the University of Chicago, I am
pleased to introduce, Juan de Pablo who will present today's Convocation address.
He's the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Theory and Simulations in
The Institute of Molecular Engineering and the College and Senior
Fellow in The Computation Institute.
Professor de Pablo is a leader in developing computational simulations of molecular
and large scale phenomena. The materials he has helped to
create have implications in the areas of health, medicine industry and
academia.
As a founding faculty member of the University's Institute
for Molecular Engineering, and a senior scientist at Argonne National
Laboratory, Professor de Pablo develops new technologies and shapes the
direction of research in his field.
He holds more than 20 patents on multiple technologies and
has over 450 publications, which have received more than 18,000 citations.
In 2016, Professor de Pablo was elected to the National Academy of Engineering
one of the highest professional distinctions awarded to engineers.
He was also honored with the 2016 DuPont Nutrition and
Health Sciences Excellence Medal, for work that is currently used in the
global food and probiotic industries and presents opportunities for the
preservations of pharmaceutical cells and tissues.
Professor de Pablo is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and the American Physical Society. He's an honorary member
of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and serves as the chair of the editorial
board for the interdisciplinary journal Molecular Systems
Design and Engineering.
Professor de Pablo has been a member of the University of Chicago
faculty since 2012, the title of his talk is "Fate, Preparation, and Opportunity".
Juan.
>> JUAN DE PABLO: Thank you. Provost Diermeier.
I'm so excited to be here.
I cannot think of an occasion that is more worthy of
celebration than graduation.
You have worked so hard your entire lives to get to this point.
And here we are.
You are graduating with an advanced degree from one of the finest universities in the world.
That is an extraordinary achievement.
And to the parents, husbands, wives, partners, and children of the
graduates, we say thank you, because we know that without your help and
your support it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to get to
this point.
So yes, today we celebrate.
We are all very lucky to be here.
But tomorrow we'll continue preparing for the
rest of our lives.
And we all hope that fate will be on our side and
allow us to lead rewarding productive lives.
And that is really what I wanted to talk to you
about this afternoon, fate, preparation, opportunity, and luck.
The stoic philosopher Seneca once said luck is what happens when
preparation meets opportunity.
As I was reflecting on my own career, and I tried to remember the things that I
did when I was exactly at your stage in life, fresh out of graduate school,
it became apparent that the extent to which I was lucky, it was
because I was prepared to take advantage of a series of unrelated events
that occurred to me as I went about my own business.
You see, just as I was finishing my Ph.D. degree I went on several
interview trips and I decided to accept a lucrative job with a large
chemical company in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam.
I was so excited about moving to Europe, being on my own,
to Amsterdam of all places and looking forward to having more money.
That was important to me.
I was done with school.
Like perhaps some of you are.
But, just as I was getting ready to make that transition from academia to
industry, my advisor told me, Juan, you know what?
Before you go to Amsterdam, I like you to give a seminar about
your research to the University of Wisconsin.
I talked to a friend of mine in Madison and he's eager to meet you and so are his colleagues.
So of course I followed his advice, went on the trip.
I met most of the faculty there.
And at the end of that visit the chairman of the department
sat down with me and he simply said, how would you like to join us
here as a professor?
And right there I knew that's what I wanted to do.
And I said, I would like that very much.
So without a written offer or anything, that night I called that
company, in the Netherlands and said I'm not coming, I found a
different job.
And I never regretted that choice.
So eventually I joined the University of Wisconsin as an assistant
professor full of enthusiasm and right about the one year mark things
were not going that well.
I was having trouble recruiting students, my lectures were not very good.
You should have seen my teaching evaluations.
And a dear colleague who happened to be my next door office,
neighbor, passed away unexpectedly.
And before he died, he left instructions to my other colleagues to
have his experimental equipment be given to me.
I didn't know what to do.
You see, I was trained as a theoretician, all I wanted to do was use super computers
to design new molecules.
My plans had nothing to do with real life.
And here I was, faced with a choice of launching an experimental program.
Now, I am an engineer, but throughout my life I have always been
interested in biology, animals, insects.
So as a hobby I often read journals and books having
to do with biology, as I was pondering this choice about whether to
start an experimental program or not I ran into a really intriguing article about
various organisms, insects and plants that are able to survive extended periods
of drought without any water.
Some of these insects can in fact survive for over 100 years.
In the absence of water.
By entering a state of suspended animation.
At the time it wasn't clear how that worked, but
biologists sought that they did so by producing large amounts of
special sugars and replacing the water in their body with those sugars.
In a sense what these insects animals were doing was coating themselves
with hard candy.
I found that fascinated and I decided to pursue the study of those processes
as a research topic.
So I did agree to inherit my colleagues equipment and I started to experiment with insects,
plants and the sugars they produce.
And perhaps foolishly I invested all of my start-up
funds on that project.
Which was really far from my expertise.
Turned out to be a very good choice.
And one that led to publications and with time, to processes that allow one to
store pharmaceutical product, cells and tissues for subsequent transplant
overextended periods of time.
So when I tell this story to my students and friends, to my son, they
all immediately come and -- comment how lucky I was to start career in that way.
It's true I was lucky.
Making that transition I had to take a number of risks.
And I could take them because I was prepared.
I had a broad range of interests and my advisor in grad school had
insisted that I perform some experimental work just to get rid of the fear of
doing laboratory work.
He was just trying to position all of his students for everything.
So Seneca was right: I think that luck is what happens when
preparation meets opportunity.
That is the advice that I like to pass on to you.
Preparation is essential for everything you do, and it allows
you to take risks.
And the story that I just told you really is about creating
opportunities for yourselves that will allow you to pursue exciting
careers.
As professor Zimmer said this is the 528th Convocation of the
University of Chicago, that means that 527 previous speakers have stood
right here in front of you, all of them University of Chicago faculty.
To give you some words of wisdom.
So really much of what can be said, has been said.
These occasion, however, is a little bit different.
This is the first Convocation where the person speaking to you is a professor
of engineering, at the University of Chicago.
So that is really something to think about as
engineers at Chicago.
You see, it is also highly relevant for the thoughts that I'm trying to convey this afternoon.
Engineering really is a profession that is all about preparation and
about taking controlled risks.
In its purest form engineering takes what we learn from the
sciences, the arts and humanities, and we try to develop technologies
that will benefit humanity.
That requires, breadth, you must keep up with the latest discoveries in a wide range
of disciplines, and it involves taking enormous, tremendous risks.
Building a plane that can carry 400 passengers from one continent to
another, that involves a lot of risk.
Designing the pacemakers that millions of people will wear involves
risk.
And it takes a lot of guts.
And of course in this these instances, the difference between
assuming controlled risks and recklessness is how much you know and how
well you are prepared.
So a good example of what it means to be deep and broad and outward looking in your profession
is provided by the life of Carl Bosch, who can arguably be considered one of the
founders of molecular engineering.
With his colleague, Fritz Haber, Bosch developed the
process that is used today to produce ammonia.
Now, Carl Bosch was an heir to a wealthy family, an engineering
concern, really.
But rather than joining the family business he
decided to pursue a career of his own.
He first received training as a mechanical engineer and later as an industrial
chemist.
Now, we're talking about events that happened about a century
ago.
When Europe was still importing Guano from Chile to make fertilizers.
Now Bosch remarkably bright understood the importance of fixing nitrogen from the air
to prepare synthetic fertilizers, he took a discovery by his friend,
Fritz Haber, who had come up with a uranium based catalyst to convert
nitrogen from the air to ammonia.
He understood molecular transformations well enough, deeply enough, that he could come
up with more available materials that could enable commercial
production of ammonia.
At the time very little was known about high pressure processes.
100 years ago.
But Bosch had the engineering background to convince his employer, BASF,
about the feasibility of his ideas.
And he set out to design giant compressors, ultra high pressure reactors
that operated at very high temperatures that handle extremely dangerous
explosive gases.
And within only 5 years from conception to practice, he was producing 12,000 tons
of ammonia.
Now, today it takes us 20 years to do that.
He did that 100 years ago.
Now, Carl Bosch was an outward looking man, willing to take
tremendous risk to fulfill his vision.
In doing so he changed humanity.
His process saved millions from starvation, and unfortunately of
course there's a dark side to this story.
20 years later the Haber-Bosch process that he created
allowed Hitler to produce explosives in Nazi Germany that helped prolong
the second World War.
Bosch himself was a critic of the Nazi regime and he died in despair.
His legacy has survived the test of time and today
half of the world's food is involved with the Haber-Bosch process.
80 percent of the nitrogen in your bodies is produced using this process.
Now of course the story of Bosch, the molecular engineer is repeated throughout
all fields of study.
Take mathematics, for example.
Emmy Noether, one of the greatest mathematicians of all times, took great personal
risk when she decided to pursue a career in mathematics as oppose to teaching languages in a school for girls.
When she started college she was not allowed to formally enroll in
math courses at the University, but she could audit them with the
permission of the individual professors.
She somehow passed her graduation exam from the University, and then
she took yet another gamble.
She was so convinced about her own ideas and her skills that she
worked for over a decade without pay teaching mathematics.
Covering for others, really as a substitute lecturer.
At the time the early 1900s, women were not allowed to teach mathematics
at the university.
But working without pay, without a formal title,
without a formal position she went on to develop abstract algebra.
She proved "Noether's theorem" which in turn enabled the development of
all of modern physics.
She was brave, she was prepared, and she was willing
to gamble her future and her livelihood, really to get the career
that she wanted.
Not the one that she was told to settle for.
So really I am convinced that taking risk and stretching yourself to the limit
of your abilities will make your career and your life a lot more rewarding.
And the beauty of it all is that today you leave the University
of Chicago with an incredible foundation, one that will allow
you to do just that: So I hope that you will be able to build on that
foundation because the possibilities are infinite.
Congratulations on your achievements.
And I wish you very good luck.
Thank you.
(Applause)