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A lumni
IAESTE Alumnus Thomas Hughes
on his life and traineeship in Sweden in 1960
N etwork 19
My name is Thomas A. Hughes and I was born
in Rockaway Beach, NY, in 1933. I attended
Regis High School (scholarship only, private,
Catholic) and Holy Cross College, Worcester,
MA, from which I received a B.S. in physics in 1955.
After college I joined the US Marine Corps as a 2nd
Lieutenant and served for three and a half years as a Naval
Aviator and flight instructor. I returned to academia at Marquette
University and subsequently Vanderbilt University. I
received my PhD in theoretical nuclear physics in 1965 from
Vanderbilt and was awarded a postdoctoral appointment at
the Bartol Research Foundation of the Franklin Institute in
Swarthmore PA. During this time I authored a number of
papers in nuclear physics.
In 1967 I joined the Scientific Center of the IBM Corporation
in Houston, Texas, and pursued research and development
in Power System Engineering and computer applications.
This work involved security analysis for real time
systems at the Southern Company’s (a joint partner) electrical
grid and the development of computer algorithms to determine
the stability of the grid in the case of line fault outages.
A number of papers were published in IEEE/Power Systems
as a result of this work. In 1976, I transferred to the Scientific
Center in Palo Alto, CA, and managed research in an
advanced database project. During this time I taught physics
and mathematics as an adjunct professor at a number of local
colleges, which I continued to do after retiring from IBM in
1991.
In 1998, my wife and I moved to Arroyo Grande CA and
I taught, as an adjunct professor of mathematics at The California
Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. I am
now fully retired and have taken up other pursuits, such as
political cartooning and maintenance of a web site on political
and cultural issues. My wife and I travel and bicycle both
in the United States and Europe. I also play tennis as fits my
age.
In my first year of graduate school at Marquette University,
I saw a bulletin in a science magazine concerning the
IAESTE program. I applied and requested an assignment to
Stockholm Sweden.
When I went to Metallografiska Institutet in Stockholm,
my experience with physics was primarily through understanding
the principles and theory of science. I had never
been in an actual research environment before. But I soon
learned about the excitement of investigating physical properties
that no one had before seen. Dr. Hellmut Fischmeister.
The director of the Lab provided a research oriented environment
that helped me in my future scientific research. He
eventually retired as director of the Max Planck Institute for
Metals Research at Stuttgart and lives in his native Austria.
I think IAESTE provides an even more positive influence
to young technically proficient students today than they did
in 1960. The international scope is amazing. And the number
of countries involved is wonderful.
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