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Still marching: Dan Cheatham ’58 (left) was drum major of the Cal Band as an undergraduate, as his yearbook made clear. Last fall, he returned to campus for Homecoming weekend and his Class’s 45th reunion, where he showed current students his Blue and Gold. Rockets and Roll On a brisk autumn day in Iowa, Craig Kletzing ’81 looks very Californian--shorts, sandals, wire-rimmed glasses, lank hair pulled into a long brown ponytail. He sounds very professorial, however, as he consults with his Taiwanese postdoc, Li-jen Chen, on a study he’s reviewing for a journal. Sharing his reservations about the study in the specialized language of physics, he draws squiggles and formulas on the blackboard that takes up most of one wall in his office in Van Allen Hall on the University of Iowa campus. A nod from Chen, a wisp of a woman, seems to settle the matter, as Kletzing concludes, “So you see a few problems with this theory as well.” You’d never realize Kletzing’s something of an academic star at Iowa--campus acquaintances outside the Department of Physics and Astronomy know him as the outgoing, unassuming guy who serves on countless committees, and students who frequent Iowa City music dives might recognize him as the hard core rock guitarist in the band Brace for Blast. He’s also an expert on auroral physics, part of a global fraternity studying what goes on in the part of the earth’s atmosphere where natural light shows get produced. He’s helped design equipment that’s gone up on NASA and European Space Agency spacecraft, including a German-Swedish satellite launched from China and rockets sent hundreds of miles into space above Alaska. He also heads an Iowa team conducting laboratory studies of waves occurring in electrically charged gases, or plasmas, which are thought to play an important role in space, funded by a three-year $450,000 National Science Foundation grant awarded last fall. “The aurora borealis is an interesting problem in space science,” Kletzing says. He compares the process to “a natural TV set”--much as electrons glow as they whack into the phosphorus of a TV screen, the light show in the sky results from electrons hitting nitrogen or oxygen in the atmosphere. His work focuses on figuring out what generates those electron beams: “There are a lot of pieces, but no soup to nuts, and you need detailed measurements.” Kletzing’s background is as much in social activism as in science: He grew up in Sacramento, going to peace marches with his parents. His father, Russell Kletzing ’45, Boalt ’49, blind since shortly after birth, served for a period as president of the National Federation of the Blind. Kletzing says his father’s blindness “was no big deal” in his family; “the impact of his social views and interest in science were far more important.” Kletzing began at Berkeley on a thespian scholarship, planning to go into theater lighting. Sidetracked by skateboarding, he dropped out after two quarters, then “came back and got serious,” he says, graduating with honors in physics and going on for a master’s and doctorate from UC San Diego. After a year on the faculty of the University of Alabama and seven at the University of New Hampshire, he arrived at Iowa in 1996. Although he recalls an early interest in science fiction, he cites Eric Clapton and Aerosmith as more enduring formative influences. He’s been playing guitar since high school and has always had a band; his wife, a classical bass player, plays electric bass in his current group. “Some of my best friends are physicists,” he says, “but it’s nice to get away from them.” Science shares much with the arts and humanities, as “part of the human experience,” Kletzing believes. He describes himself as a basic scientist, motivated mainly by curiosity: “I just wonder why the world works the way it does,” he says. --Judy Polumbaum |
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