Peter Taborek

Professor of Physics and Astronomy

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

I was born in Toronto, Canada, of Czech parents who had recently fled the turmoil of post war Europe.  My father was a chemical engineer, and the family soon moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where my father worked for a large oil company. Some combination of the sputnik-era culture and genetics caused me to be interested in science at a very early age.  I knew I was going to be a scientist by the time I was eight. I had a basement laboratory where I conducted experiments using all kinds of toxic materials, high voltages, open flames and live (at least initially) animals. Most of this activity took place with the support and appreciation of my parents to whom I am grateful.  Although the things I did in the basement would not be tolerated today, I had a great time and learned a lot. My appreciation of hands-on learning stems from those experiences.

As I was starting junior high school, my parents moved the family to Southern California where I lived until I finished graduate school. I actually didn’t finish high school because I spent my senior year in Germany and England, but I competed in math contests, and I won first place in the California State Science Fair. I went to Harvey Mudd College and, even though I majored in Math, decided that physics was more to my liking. I also met my future wife, Barbara, who was a student at Scripps. I was very excited when I got accepted to Caltech, as Richard Feynman was my idol. He was a frequent visitor to the low temperature lab where I did my Ph.D. with David Goodstein, and he was on my exam committee. Stephen Wolfram, a member of my graduating class, was already working on the ideas that would evolve into Mathematica. He stimulated my interest in symbolic computing.

My first job was at Bell Labs in New Jersey, where I worked for about 7 years. I joined Doug Osheroff’s group and routinely had lunch with Bob Dynes, who worked in the same field.  This period also coincided with the breakup of AT&T and the disintegration of Bell Labs as a premier research institution. This event provided the incentive for me to try something completely new, and I spent two years at Texas Instruments in Dallas setting up a facility for vapor phase growth of diamond films. I finally realized my ambition to be a professor when I was recruited to UCI.

My work in developing the Chemical and Materials Physics program was influenced by my experience in industry and by my long-standing interest in applications of computers to research and teaching. As part of the development team, I designed a graduate Laboratory Skills class and a new class in Computational Methods for which I have written an ebook described at http://mathematicahandbook.com/.  My research at UCI involves table-top scale experiments on superfluidity, surface phase transitions, friction, and more recently, singularities in fluid flows associated with droplet breakup and coalescence.