Reporter Volume 25, No.17 February 17, 1994

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

When it comes to creating materials that can improve other people's
lives, Deborah Chung believes that there's only so much computers can
do. If you want to make new and better materials, and not just analyze
old ones, Chung insists that computers are no substitute for the hard,
and sometimes dirty, hands-on work of the laboratory.
	That philosophy has helped Chung, the UB Niagara Mohawk Chair
of Materials Research and a professor of mechanical and aerospace
engineering, win many awards and create materials that have astonished
her engineering colleagues around the world, and revolutionized the
way many structures in the next century may be built.
	Chung, who was born and lived in Hong Kong until she went to
college at the California Institute of Technology, decided by the time
she was in high school that she wanted to work in engineering and
science.
	"I was very excited by the first moon landing," Chung says,
"and I think that had something to do with my decision. When I was in
college, I decided that I didn't want to do just fundamental science,
but something that was more immediately useful. So I slanted my major
toward computer and electrical engineering.
	"In my senior year I was exposed to materials research, the
study of engineering materials such as metals, ceramics, polymers,
semi-conductors, and compositesQany material, that is, that builds
anything. Materials are the foundation of technologies, and it's
according to the use of materials that human societies have changed.
That's why, for instance, we refer to the 'Bronze Age.'"
	Chung was one of the first four women to graduate from Cal
Tech, and the very first to graduate in engineering. "Not only was I
often the only woman in the class," Chung says, "I was often the first
woman that the professors I worked with had ever taught."
	She didn't really experience discrimination as a student, she
says, but that was mainly because she trained herself to ignore it. "I
just told myself that I didn't care, that I would just do my stuff and
do it well," she says.
	"To many people's surprise, the top students in engineering
classes are very often women," Chung says. "It's quite consistent, I
don't know why. Women have at least as much ability for engineering as
men. But women will sometimes shy away from engineering because they
don't think they have the backgroundQthey never played with
transistors as children. Which only goes to prove that little girls
should be given a broader range of toys."
	Despite her ability to ignore discrimination and get on with
her work, Chung says she's very aware that "many professional women
engineers are met with some degree of discrimination. You can see that
reflected in pay differentialsQthe chances are that male engineers
earn more. You can certainly see that in my case. Men in similar
positions to me at UB are earning more than I do."
	After receiving her Ph.D. in Materials Science from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chung worked at several other
universities before coming to UB in 1986.
	Her revolutionary research has been in the area of what she
calls "smart materials," which, she says, are materials that can
sense, report, and even correct their own structural flaws before they
become significant.
	"Imagine an airplane wing that can change its shape in
response to the air flow around it," Chung says. "Or a mirror that can
change its shape, or even a highway. 'Smart' materials are materials
that have the ability to sense that they're being pushed, or stressed,
and that in response give a signal, or even move themselves around to
fix their own problems."
	Smart materials differ from more traditional construction
materials in that more traditional materials need to have sensors for
stress either embedded or attached, which can sometimes weaken the
structures built with them. "Because I've been able to make the
structure material itself sense the stress," Chung says, "there's no
need for sensors, the durability of sensing is better, and sensing
happens everywhere and not just locally."
	In January, Chung presented her research on smart materials at
the International Workshop on Civil Infrastructure Systems in Taipei,
Taiwan. "People were startled," she says. "They hadn't dreamed that a
material could be its own sensor."
	Chung's research has also led her to teach a special topic
graduate course on "Smart Materials" in mechanical engineering at UB.
There is no textbook for the course, which, she says, she developed
from scratch. She doesn't know of anyone else in the world who teaches
such a course in higher education, she says.
	In fact, Chung says that the trend in higher education is to
move away from materials research, something which she sees as a
serious problem. "More and more, people emphasize modelingQdoing
calculations and computer research that doesn't involve labs," she
says. "I think that's bad for the country, because while computer work
may be cleaner, modeling can only help you understand why currently
used material behaves the way it does. But it doesn't help you create
new materials.
	"Right now, UB has no academic engineering program on
materials. We teach materials courses in various areas, but there's no
program and so we don't train materials engineers."
	Chung, who won a Teacher of the Year Award in 1992-93 from the
UB chapter of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi, sees teaching
and research as intimately related. But she says that another current
trend in university engineering departments is for faculty members who
are productive in research not to teach very much, while many
well-known teachers are not active in research. She says that this
"two group" situation is not healthy, because research and teaching
should "flow into each other. 
	"My Smart Materials course flows naturally from my research,"
she says, "and many of the examples I use in my undergraduate course
also come from my research. Research should boost teaching--that's the
advantage to students of being at a research institution.
	"The Teacher of the Year Award was most meaningful to me
because I'm heavily involved in research, but the reward shows what's
also close to my heart. I like having a university career because I
have a strong interest in both areas."