My Favorite Thesis Committee Member

Rest In Peace Professor Ryu

I haven’t written much about getting a PhD or my graduate school experience, but the recent passing of Professor Chang Ryu has been weighing on me for the last week or so and I felt that I needed to write about him to add to what has already been written. A bit over a week ago friends started texting me if I had heard about his passing while he was in South Korea with his family. He was still very young. This might be somewhat different than what I usually write here, but for those who are not interested in this story please stay tuned for Friday’s issue.

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Starting at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

I had just transferred to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in the fall of 2013 with my thesis advisor Richard Gross and I was going to be occupying some labs in the New York State Center For Polymer Synthesis. There were some big names there, at least to me, including Professors Jim Moore, Jim Crivello, and rounding out the polymer center faculty were professors Chulsung Bae and Chang Ryu (both were members on my thesis committee). Professor Ryu was the director of the polymer center while I was at RPI (2013-2016) and his office was just a floor below the lab where I worked. 

I didn’t know much in 2013, but by the time winter rolled around I had somehow stumbled into the makings of my very first paper on biobased epoxy resins. One thing I had noticed in making all these different epoxy resins was that the structure tended to influence the viscosity of the liquid resin significantly despite the relative purity of the resins. At the time Professor Ryu had recently landed a big grant for the polymer center and this enabled me and a bunch of other students access to a dynamic mechanical analyser (DMA), a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA), and a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). Combined with Professor Ryu’s rheometer in his lab I had four very powerful instruments at my fingertips for polymer characterization.

These instruments allowed me to cure and characterize my new to the world epoxy resins (shout out to Stephen Spinella for teaching me how to use many of these instruments) and in learning more about structure-property relationships of polymeric materials I was able to better able to know where to go for the next synthetic target. At the time of learning these things it felt normal, but when I got into the working world having both synthetic and polymeric analytical skills was somewhat rare. After graduate school I was able to have constructive conversations with pure analytical materials scientists and the synthetic chemists and often I would help bridge the communications gap in meetings. 

I attribute much of the opportunity to learn and bring my ideas around analysis of polymers to Professor Chang Ryu. I used to bring him data and my methods of how I obtained them with references from the literature and we would talk for an hour at a time about what exactly I was trying to do. He gave me tips on how to best present data and complementary techniques to confirm some of the strange data I was getting in my experiments. He would always tell me, “Morphology by Rheology is Theology,” which means that you cannot just rely on rheology to prove that you have dispersed that nano-filler or that you have a completely miscible polymer blend. 

I often didn’t know much of what I was doing when it came to rheology aside from reading papers, doing experiments, and showing my data to Professor Ryu. Chang Ryu often just laughed at me and shook his head and said, “you did this on your own?” and then would proceed to give me a bunch of reasons why I might be right, why I might be wrong, papers I should go read, and why I needed more data. His lab felt like part of my own lab. He always had a fun story to tell about being an expert witness or his time as a graduate student or a postdoc. 

Professor Chang Ryu was an excellent thesis committee member, a great mentor, and a great scientist. He will be missed.

Tony