Lisa Marie Dougherty

Metallurgy and Our Aging Infrastructure
 

Unlike many of the scientists at the laboratory, I didn't care much about science when I was a kid. I wanted to be a rock star. I did well in math and science, but I also did well in English, art, and music. And those subjects were a lot more fun, so I spent my free time writing poetry, drawing pictures, and playing my guitar. Science was the last thing on my mind.
 
In high school, I joined a few rock bands and told my parents I was going to play music for a living. Of course, they strongly urged me to pursue something with a more stable future. Mostly to make them happy, I worked hard in school to keep my grades up, but secretly yearned for the opportunity to leave academics behind and focus on my guitar. My frustration grew until, only two weeks before the end of my senior year, I left high school. However, a month after the rest of my class graduated, I took my final exams and quietly received my diploma.
 
Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, offered me a full scholarship as well as a music performance award, so I decided to enroll in their music engineering technology (MET) program in 1989. The unusual major would allow me to pursue my performance ambitions while gaining practical skills to work as a music engineer at the same time. It included a minor in physics, which I unexpectedly enjoyed more than most of the music coursework. In fact, after two years, I changed my MET major into a classical guitar performance major and added a major in physics.
 
My new majors were in different colleges, so their coursework didn't overlap. This meant that, most semesters, I took over 20 hours, and I attended nearly every summer session. Complicating the situation, I also had to work to help with my room and board. It was an intense five years, but I managed to graduate summa cum laude with both a Bachelor of Science in physics and a Bachelor of Music in classical guitar performance. However, my dreams of becoming a professional guitarist were dashed when, during my senior year, I developed severe tendonitis in both wrists. It seemed my music career was over before it even began.
 
Fortunately, with my physics degree, I had other options. I decided to charge straight into graduate school in materials science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign since I enjoyed solid state physics. Unfortunately, I didn't account for my complete lack of an education in materials science. I enrolled in graduate level classes and found myself failing within the first month, and my advisor, an old ceramist nearing retirement, was no help. Wisely I changed advisors to Ian Robertson, a relatively young metallurgist and electron microscopist, but the change didn't help me with my classes. I was still flunking out.
 
Halfway through the semester, I withdrew from all of my classes and told my advisor I was going to drop out of the program. He offered to keep my position open for a year, but I told him I would not return. I moved back in with my parents and, until the next summer, worked a bunch of odd jobs. Flirting with depression, I decided to get into athletics and discovered bicycle racing, which offered both camaraderie and challenge. Quickly it became an obsession, and to this day, I don't feel like me unless I'm on my bicycle at least a few days a week.
 
Eventually I became tired of tedious nine-to-five jobs and began to wish for a better life. I called up my advisor and found that, as he had promised, my position was still open. He welcomed me back and let me start over again. The second time around, I supplemented my graduate work with undergraduate materials science courses to familiarize myself with the subject area. My research involved recrystallization in superplastic aluminum alloys and required me to travel to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for extended periods of time. The trips there familiarized me with government laboratories, one of the only environments left in our country where basic science is appreciated and encouraged.
 
Throughout my graduate studies, I raced for the university and a local bicycling team. Three years into my research, I became enamored with a cyclist, Gene Dougherty, visiting from the Chicago area during a team group ride. A year later, we married and, a year after that, started our family with a beautiful baby girl. Suddenly it became clear that we needed to get on with our lives, so I quickly wrapped up my doctoral work, receiving my Ph.D. in 2001. We moved to Los Alamos in 2002 for my husband to take a position in the High Performance Computing at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Half a year later, we expanded our family by one more and agreed that I would stay home with the kids until our youngest was three. Not long after that agreement, though, I needed a challenge, so I started a novel. It expanded into two books, both of which have been recently published.
 
In 2006, five years after receiving my Ph.D., I was hired by the MST-8 group at LANL as a postdoctoral associate. My work primarily concerned the effects of shock on the microstructure and mechanical behavior of steels, although I worked with a number of other metals and alloys as well. From 2006 to 2008, I attended a number of conferences around the country to present our work as well as several training programs to expand my educational background, including a workshop on transmission electron microscopy in Santiago, Chile. In December, my postdoctoral appointment was transferred to a new group at the laboratory in order to facilitate a conversion to full-time staff. Despite recent changes at the laboratory, I have enjoyed working at LANL and look forward to tackling the challenges of my new position.