Michael Costolo `95
B.S. Physics
M.S. Materials Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
Principal Scientist, Physical Sciences, Inc., Andover, Massachusetts
"After graduating from Behrend I moved to Santa Barbara, California, to take a job with UNIAX Corp., which was founded by Alan Heeger, who is known as the father of conductive polymers and shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000.
After working there for two years I became interested in graduate school. When I mentioned this to Alan he invited me to study with him at UCSB. The materials department there is world-class, so it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. I ended up doing my research at UNIAX and my studies at UCSB, so it isn't quite fair to say that I opted for grad school over the workforce. I did them both together-not traditional, but it worked for me.
Alan's work at UCSB is in metallic and semiconducting polymers. Traditionally when people have thought of metals or semiconductors they hadn't been thinking of plastics. So this relatively young field of research was, from a physics perspective, quite exciting, and there was much exploring to be done. The other faculty members at UCSB were great too. I got to take a quantum mechanics course from Herb Kroemer, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. It was quite a course. I ended up dropping it because of the sheer amount of work that one course required, but the lectures were so good that I attended class for most of the rest of the term.
In our research at UNIAX we were primarily exploiting semiconductor materials for their light emitting properties or organic light emitting diodes. I was able to build some of the first-ever OLED displays at UNIAX. I also spent a good deal of time working with metallic polymers for my graduate research. It was really a great deal of fun in a geeky sort of way.
I should point out that it wasn't my grades that got me into UCSB. More importantly, not being a straight-A student didn't keep me out. Professor Heeger saw a motivated young physicist and welcomed him into his research group. Part of it was certainly luck, but I wouldn't have had the opportunity to be there in the first place without my Behrend education."