V. Ara Apkarian

Professor of Chemistry

2006-07 Recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching
Team Award

I was born in Damascus Syria, of Armenian parents. My early childhood was spent in Aleppo. At age seven, after the third assassination attempt on my father, we moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where I almost completed high school. Since I had been accepted at Loyola Marymount in LA, there seemed to be little point in completing the last year of high school. Only after arriving on campus, in time to start the winter semester, did I discover that Chapel was part of the curriculum. I drove across town to USC, where I was admitted and started on the same day. College was the ruse to leave home – any major would have been acceptable. An undecided, declared EE by my father who had filled out my application, I was intent on exploring my newly found freedom. A bit lazy, I pursued what required the least amount of work – the physical sciences were sensible and natural. What really hooked me though were the early experiences and opportunities to carry out independent research.

A year after I had started at USC, Chris Reed offered me an invitation to join his group, to synthesize octaethyl porphyrin. The compound had been recently reported in the literature and was a candidate for artificial blood. I thought there was something wrong with a system that offered an eighteen-year old a well-equipped laboratory, freedom to tinker, advice when needed, a loose target to pursue, and financial compensation…I kept that suspicion to myself. At the end of the semester, I succeeded in making 100 mg of the compound, all that I had been able to coax out of large vats of starting material. It was enough to verify the structure, if you did not sneeze at it in the process. Despite Chris’s encouragements, I was quite disappointed: there were too many mysterious inexact steps. My next lucky encounter happened in P-Chem lab. The Assistant Professor teaching it, Steve Leone, was quite ambitious. He wanted to introduce lasers to the P-Chem lab, and needed a volunteer to help build one and to design an experiment around it. The offer was irresistible – one project to replace five standard labs. I volunteered. The laser was built and performed to specs – this had the feel of exact science (in retrospect, I recognized that Leone was a master at planning). I was offered RA-ship to build a nitrogen laser and then a sulfur (S2) laser, but the position was only open to chemistry majors. A Chem major I became. But the big surprise came in the discovery that, were I to go to graduate school, I would be paid to learn and play (research) while earning a Ph.D.!

I still follow the general field that was introduced to me by one Assistant Professor while I was an undecided undergraduate. The penchant for connecting observations to first principles, defines the general area of my interests as molecular physics. Lasers and their applications to investigate the microscopic world still thrill me enough to keep me up at nights. I am still surprised that U.S. graduate schools of science have not crumbled under the weight of the hordes demanding to enter, to be paid to learn, to tinker, to create.