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Rachel Segalman draws inspiration from both sides of her family tree Chemical engineering professor Rachel Segalman comes from a long line of chemists and engineers. Chemical engineering professor Rachel Segalman is a member of the third generation of female chemical scientists in her family. On the maternal side of the family, her Chinese grandparents built two sulfuric acid factories in mainland China before WWII. After the war they relocated to Taiwan, where her grandfather was the CEO of a paper factory and her grandmother taught physical chemistry. Her mother and two of her aunts are biochemists, and an uncle is a chemist as well.
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From the paternal side, Segalman acquired her talent for engineering. Her father, a mechanical engineer, was born in Sioux City, IA, and is best known for the JohnsonSegalman equations that are used to model fluid dynamics.
whitewater rafting in the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains, and taking trips to the cliff dwellings at Bandolier National Monument. But Segalman spent many hours in high school doing something far less conventional — working at a national weapons laboratory. “New Mexico is a relatively poor, rural state,” she says, “and the local high schools didn’t have much in the way of honors or AP courses.” So Segalman, as part of a small group of outstanding students, went to work part-time at Sandia National Laboratory. Sandia, in Albuquerque, performs engineering and applied research to complement the fundamental research at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. At Sandia, Segalman first began to discover how to create specialized materials, a task that still drives her research. “I worked on techniques for the rapid prototyping of ceramic materials,” she says. “We used a ceramic slurry with a consistency similar to cake icing that we shaped to create new materials with the characteristics we were seeking.”
Carefully designed semiconducting block copolymers have self-assembled into 10 nm-wide sheets.
Segalman herself was born in 1975 in Madison, WI, when her parents were graduate students. The family eventually settled in Albuquerque, NM. Like many young people in New Mexico, she took advantage of the outdoors — hiking and
College of Chemistry, UC Berkeley
Segalman earned her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. The city is known for its college town atmosphere and its music scene, including the PBS music program “Austin City Limits,” which was taped across the street from Segalman’s dormitory room. “But Austin was a blue dot in a big red state,” she says. Upon graduating in 1998, she moved on to a chemical engineering Ph.D. program at UC Santa Barbara. “The cultural landscape in Santa Barbara is unique,” she says. “You have people whose
lives look like a page from Sunset magazine, and you have the undergraduate party scene in places like Isla Vista. But at the graduate level, UCSB is not a party school. When I was there, the high rents didn’t leave us with much disposable income, so we socialized by getting together for gourmet cooking. Thanksgiving dinners were elaborate affairs with as many as 30–40 people.” Edward J. Kramer, Segalman’s dissertation adviser, headed a research group that focused on understanding the fundamentals that control the structure, properties and processing of block copolymers — polymers comprised of two or more polymer subunits linked by covalent bonds. Segalman’s research concerned controlling the longrange order in block copolymer thin films. It was over a microscope at UCSB where Segalman first met her husband, Tal Margalith, now a materials scientist who develops high-power LEDs for lighting applications at Philips Lumileds Lighting Company in San Jose. They married in December 2003, after her one-year postdoc in France. “Tal lived in Santa Barbara while I was in France. We couldn’t find a solution to our two body problem for that year, so we just flew back and forth a lot.” For her postdoctoral appointment, Segalman wanted to learn more about polymer synthesis. She spent 2003 working with Professor Georges Hadziioannou at Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, 250 miles east of Paris in the Alsace region on the border with Germany. Daily conversation was French, but English was spoken in the lab. Segalman took French classes and studied with a tutor, and she quickly learned enough French to get by.