Chemist Martha Greenblatt serves as a mentor to her students Archived article from Nov 18, 2003   By Debra Galant Martha Greenblatt, Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry, with postdoctoral fellow Guerman Popov, one of the students she mentored through a Ph.D. Photo by Alan Goldsmith In December, 1956, Martha Greenblatt, then a 15-year-old girl living in Soviet-occupied Hungary, took a big chance. That fall, the Hungarian people had risen up in revolution against the Soviets, and in the frenzy, some were able to escape. With two friends, Greenblatt made a dash for the Austrian border, leaving her parents and a younger brother and sister behind. The family had already survived Hitler, and although there were no guarantees that they would reunite, they later did. The barrier to Greenblatt’s freedom was the Iron Curtain, so named by Churchill because of the landmines placed on the borders of the Soviet satellite countries to prevent people from leaving. But Greenblatt lucked out, taking a train to the Austrian border and, finding herself on a train platform with thousands of other refugees, she and her friends managed to walk across the border on railroad tracks, which were not mined, to safety. When she told this story in March in New Orleans, where she was picking up the prestigious Garvan-Olin Medal Award, given by the American Chemical Society annually to female chemists who have made significant achievements in America, Greenblatt described her decision to flee this way: “The Iron Curtain became porous. People were getting through.” Few people would choose the word “porous” to describe the Iron Curtain or the tumultuous state of politics in Hungary in the fall of 1956, but then Greenblatt’s field is solid-state inorganic chemistry. She studies solids. And so she knows that “porous” was really an apt description of the Iron Curtain at that time. “It was really a solid wall. You couldn’t get through, without risking being killed,” she explained. “And then it was possible to get through.” Greenblatt, at 62, is at a satisfying place in her career. In addition to the ACS-Garvan-Olin Medal, she is a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and is editor-in-chief of Material Research Bulletin. She also serves as a mentor to numerous Ph.D. candidates, many of whom, like herself, came to the United States from other countries. She worked in the field of superconductors in the 1980s and 1990s, when that was hot, and she is now working in the area of electronic materials, including fuel cells, which are used for alternative power generation. All this in a field, chemistry, in which only 30 percent of the Ph.D.s are women. But like much of the circuitous story of her life — well before her escape from communist Hungary, Greenblatt was saved from the Nazis when her mother, during a Nazi death march, bolted from the pack (she was 4 and her brother , 16 months) — Greenblatt’s journey through academia has not been straight or easy. In the jargon of her field, one might say that there was more than a little resistance. Greenblatt was always a good student, in Hungary and later in Brooklyn, where her family resettled and where she earned both her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees. Greenblatt credits her love of learning to her mother, who came from a family of religious Jews. Her mother had to fight her family’s attitudes toward both secular education and teaching girls. “Formal education was not allowed,” Greenblatt says. “But she always went to school and was always learning something.” Greenblatt showed similar grit in the 1960s while earning her Ph.D. at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, an eight-story building in downtown Brooklyn. “I was often the only woman in the elevator,” she said. But it was her early days at Rutgers, where she started as an untenured assistant professor at University College, that really tested her. Greenblatt had a heavy teaching load, classes that met late into the night, little money for research but the need to do it to get tenure, and two small children. “It was hell,” she said. “The chair wanted me to be here 48 hours a day. I desperately wanted out.” Unlike Hungary, there was no getting out. The economy was bad, and having relocated her family from New York City to Highland Park, Greenblatt felt trapped. “Those were very hard times, the early 70s, hard to find a job,” she said. “The kids were happy. My husband’s business tied him to the area. So I stuck it out.” Things did improve, year by year. Then she had a one-year stint at Bell Labs, in 1980, where she was able to do research with “the best equipment,” meet “really wonderful first-class scientists” and learn “how to do first-rate science.” During her absence, Rutgers reorganized its campuses, and the chemistry departments were consolidated into one, coming to occupy a large chemistry building on the Busch campus. When Greenblatt returned to Rutgers, she found that the changes greatly improved her situation. Her teaching load became more manageable and her children, at 10 and 15, were finally old enough to leave alone. Her career began to soar. “All of a sudden, I was liberated,” she said. “My career took off.” These days Greenblatt is helping launch her students’ careers, and she says that it’s one of the most satisfying parts of her job. “You take a student and guide him to become a mature scientist,” she said.” This is an important job — raising the next generation of scientists — not so different from raising your own children.” One of the recent beneficiaries of this attention is Guerman Popov, now a postdoctoral fellow in ceramics at Rutgers, whom Greenblatt mentored through a Ph.D. In addition to giving Popov good scientific advice and steering him deftly through his research, Greenblatt was an understanding mentor who remembered what it was like to be an immigrant, said Popov, who came to Rutgers from Russia six years ago. “She knew about language barriers, so she was quite patient,” he said. “She not only has knowledge, but she has wisdom,” Popov said, calling the chemistry maven “tough” but “fair.” Greenblatt’s relationship with her protégés extends beyond the lab, too. She invites them into her home, Popov said, throwing parties whenever somebody graduates or leaves the program for a new opportunity. Greenblatt, who still lives in Highland Park, remains a religious Jew, strictly observing the Jewish Sabbath and the kosher dietary laws. In addition, she is a great admirer of the state of Israel, where she travels frequently. Although she was in Israel on August 19 when a bomb explosion on a Jerusalem bus killed 21 people and injured more than 100, she said that being there doesn’t frighten her. “Life is very normal in Israel. They are an amazing people,” Greenblatt said. “People carry on.” She said she is actually more afraid here, since 9/11. Despite the recent spate of honors, and the fact that she is highly esteemed in the field of solid-state chemistry, Greenblatt realizes that her work is difficult for many people to understand. “My field is just a narrow area in inorganic chemistry,” she said. She’s not sure how much her children understood about what she was doing when they were growing up. Her son, now a physician in New York City, took a lot of science courses, so he is at least familiar with the language of chemistry. But her daughter, who works for a publishing house in Jerusalem, was an English major. Nevertheless, when Greenblatt was in New Orleans this fall, receiving the 2003 ACS-Garvan-Olin Medal, her daughter showed up, from Jerusalem, with her baby. “She surprised me in my hotel,” Greenblatt said. Although Greenblatt is uncertain how much her daughter understands about solid-state chemistry, there was no misunderstanding the standing ovation she received from the 100-plus crowd after she told her life story. “My whole family and I were moved by the experience,” she said.

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