MIT Professor Emeritus Bernhardt Wuensch ’55, SM ’57, PhD ’63, a crystallographer and beloved trainer whose heat and dedication to making sure his college students mastered the complexities of a exact science matched the analytical rigor he utilized to the examine of crystals, died this month in Harmony, Massachusetts. He was 90.
Remembered fondly for his fastidious consideration to element and his workplace full of potted orchids and towers of papers, Wuensch was an skilled in X-ray crystallography, which includes capturing X-ray beams at crystalline supplies to find out their underlying construction. He did pioneering work in solid-state ionics, investigating the motion of charged particles in solids that underpins applied sciences crucial for batteries, gas cells, and sensors. In schooling, he carried out a serious overhaul of the curriculum in what’s right now MIT’s Division of Supplies Science and Engineering (DMSE).
Regardless of his wide-ranging analysis and educating pursuits, colleagues and college students mentioned, he was a perfectionist who favored high quality over amount.
“All of the work he did, he wasn’t in a rush to get a variety of stuff performed,” says DMSE’s Professor Harry Tuller. “However what he did, he wished to make sure was appropriate and correct, and that was attribute of his analysis.”
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1933, Wuensch first arrived at MIT as a first-year undergraduate within the Fifties. He earned bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in physics earlier than switching to crystallography and incomes a PhD from what was then the Division of Geology (now Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences). He joined the college of the Division of Metallurgy in 1964 and noticed its identify change twice over his 46 years, retiring from DMSE in 2011.
As a professor of ceramics, Wuensch was part of the Twentieth-century shift from a conventional concentrate on metals and mining to a broader class of supplies that included polymers, ceramics, semiconductors, and biomaterials. In a 1973 letter supporting his promotion to full professor, then-department head Walter Owen credit Wuensch for contributing to “a totally new method to the educating of the construction of supplies.”
His analysis led to main developments in understanding how atomic-level constructions have an effect on magnetic and electrical properties of supplies. For instance, Tuller says, he was one of many first to element how the association of atoms in fast-ion conductors — supplies utilized in batteries, gas cells, and different gadgets — influences their means to swiftly conduct ions.
Wuensch was a number one mild in different areas, together with diffusion, the motion of ions in supplies corresponding to liquids or gases, and neutron diffraction, aiming neutrons at supplies to gather details about their atomic and magnetic construction.
Tuller, a DMSE college member for 49 years, tapped Wuensch’s experience to review zinc oxide, a fabric used to make varistors, semiconducting parts that defend circuits from high-voltage surges of electrical energy. Collectively, Tuller and Wuensch discovered that in such supplies ions transfer far more quickly alongside the grain boundaries — the interfaces between the crystallites that make up these polycrystalline ceramic supplies.
“It’s what occurs at these grain boundaries that really limits the facility that may undergo your laptop throughout a voltage surge by as a substitute short-circuiting the present by means of these gadgets,” Tuller says. He credited the partnership with Wuensch for the information. “He was instrumental in serving to us affirm that we may engineer these grain boundaries by making the most of the very speedy diffusivity of impurity components alongside these boundaries.”
In recognition of his accomplishments, Wuensch was elected a fellow of the American Ceramics Society and the Mineralogical Society of America and belonged to different skilled associations, together with The Electrochemical Society and Supplies Analysis Society. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from South Korea’s Hanyang College for his work in crystallography and diffusion-related phenomena in ceramic supplies.
“A fantastic, nice trainer”
Often known as “Bernie” to mates and colleagues, Wuensch was equally at residence within the laboratory and the classroom. “He instilled in a number of generations of younger scientists this means to assume deeply, be very cautious about their analysis, and be capable of stand behind it,” Tuller says.
A kind of scientists is Sossina Haile ’86, PhD ’92, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Supplies Science and Engineering at Northwestern College, a researcher of solid-state ionic supplies who develops new kinds of gas cells, gadgets that convert gas into electrical energy.
Her introduction to Wuensch, within the Eighties, was his class 3.13 (Symmetry Principle). Haile was at first puzzled by the topic, the examine of the symmetrical properties of crystals and their results on materials properties. The preparations of atoms and molecules in a fabric is essential for predicting how supplies behave in several conditions — whether or not they are going to be robust sufficient for sure makes use of, for instance, or can conduct electrical energy — however to an undergraduate it was “just a little esoteric.”
“I definitely keep in mind pondering to myself, ‘What is that this good for?’” Haile says with fun. She would later return to MIT as a PhD scholar working alongside Wuensch in his laboratory with a renewed perspective.
Colleagues and college students recall the towering stacks of paper and varied gadgets in Wuensch’s workplace in Constructing 13.
Picture courtesy of the Wuensch household.
“He simply made seemingly esoteric subjects actually fascinating and was very astute in understanding whether or not or not a scholar understood.” Haile describes Wuensch’s articulate speech, “immaculate” handwriting, and detailed drawings of three-dimensional objects on the chalkboard. Haile notes that his sketches had been so skillful that college students felt dissatisfied once they checked out a determine they tried to repeat of their notebooks.
“They couldn’t inform what it was,” Haile says. “It felt actually clear throughout lecture, and it wasn’t clear afterwards as a result of nobody had a drawing pretty much as good as his.”
Carl Thompson, the Stavros V. Salapatas Professor in Supplies Science and Engineering at DMSE, was one other scholar of Wuensch’s who got here away with a broadened outlook. In 3.13, Thompson recollects Wuensch asking college students to search for symmetry exterior of sophistication, patterns in a brick wall or in subway station tiles. “He mentioned, ‘This course will change the best way you see the world,’ and it did. He was an incredible, nice trainer.”
In a 2005 videorecorded session of three.60 (Symmetry, Construction, and Tensor Properties of Supplies), a graduate class that he taught for 3 a long time, Wuensch writes his identify on the board alongside together with his phone extension quantity, 6889, declaring its rotational symmetry.
“You may decide it up, flip it head-over-heels by 180 levels, and it’s mapped into coincidence with itself,” Wuensch mentioned. “You may assume I’d have needed to have fought for years to get it, an extension quantity like that, however no. It simply occurred to come back my method.”
(The category will be watched in its entirety on MIT OpenCourseWare.)
Wuensch additionally had a whimsical humorousness, which he usually exercised within the margins of his college students’ papers, Haile says. In a LinkedIn tribute to him, she recalled a time she despatched him a analysis manuscript with figures that was lacking Determine 5 however referred to it within the textual content, writing that it plotted conductivity versus temperature.
“Bernie famous that figures don’t plot; individuals do, and evidently Determine 5 was lacking as a result of ‘it was off plotting someplace,’” Haile wrote.
Reflecting on Wuensch’s legacy in supplies science and engineering, Haile says his information of crystallography and the guide evaluation and interpretation he did in his time was crucial. At present, supplies science college students use crystallographic software program that automates the algorithms and calculations.
“The present college students don’t know that evaluation however profit from it as a result of individuals like Bernie made positive it bought into the widespread vernacular on the time when code was being put collectively,” Haile mentioned.
A multifaceted tenure
Wuensch served DMSE and MIT in innumerable different methods, serving on departmental committees on curriculum improvement, graduate college students, and coverage, and on Faculty of Engineering and Institute-level committees on schooling and overseas scholarships, amongst others. “He was at all times concerned in any committee work he was requested to do,” Thompson says.
He was appearing division head for six months beginning in 1980, and in 1988-93 he was the director of the Heart for Supplies Science and Engineering, an earlier iteration of right now’s Supplies Analysis Heart.
For all his contributions, there are few issues Wuensch was higher identified for at MIT than his workplace in Constructing 13, which had cabinets lined with multicolored crystal lattice fashions, representing the preparations of atoms in supplies, and orchids he took meticulous care of. After which there was the cityscape of papers, piled in heaps on the ground, on his desk, on pullout extensions. Thompson says strolling into his workplace was like navigating a canyon.
“He had so many stacks of paper that he had no place to truly work at his desk, so he would put issues on his lap — he would begin writing on his lap,” Haile says. “I keep in mind calling him at one cut-off date and speaking to him, and I mentioned, ‘Bernie, you’re scripting this down in your lap, aren’t you?’ And he mentioned, ‘In truth, sure, I’m.’”
Wuensch was additionally identified for his kindness and decency. Angelita Mireles, graduate educational administrator at DMSE, says he was a preferred decide for graduate college students assembling committees for his or her thesis space examinations, which take a look at how ready college students are to conduct doctoral analysis, “as a result of he was so good.”
That mentioned, he had exacting requirements. “He anticipated close to perfection from his college students, and that made them quite a bit deeper,” Tuller says.
Picture courtesy of the Wuensch household
Exterior of MIT, Wuensch loved tending his backyard; accumulating minerals, gem stones, and uncommon cash; and studying spy novels. Different pastimes included fishing and clamming in Maine, splitting his personal firewood, and touring together with his spouse, Mary Jane.
Wuensch is survived by his spouse; son Stefan Wuensch and spouse Wendy Joseph; daughter Katrina Wuensch and associate Jason Staly; and grandchildren Noemi and Jack.
Family and friends are invited to a memorial service Sunday, April 28, at 1:30 p.m. at Duvall Chapel at 80 Deaconess Street in Harmony, Massachusetts. Recollections or condolences will be posted at obits.concordfuneral.com/bernhardt-wuensch.
