Following the unpredictable path of discovery in polymer research, Chris Ober was looking for potential applications that would make a difference in human health and quality of life, not fame. But it found him anyway.

By Kenny Berkowitz ’81

First, there was a telephone message from the president of the American Chemical Society. Then there was another, and another, until Christopher Ober, the Francis Norwood Bard Professor of Materials Engineering, found time to return the call.

“I knew he wanted to talk to me, but I thought it involved work, so I wasn’t trying to get back to him right away,” says Ober, taking a break in his Bard Hall corner office. “When I did, it turned out he wanted to let me know that I’d won this award and ask if I was willing to accept it. I said yes. I was thrilled to receive the news, because a lot of the best polymer scientists in the world have won this award, and I’m flattered and pleased I am to be included in that number. There’ll even be a symposium given in my honor, which will be really strange. But there’s an element of mystery to the whole thing, because they haven’t yet revealed to me why I won it.”

Given the chance, Ober argues that he doesn’t really deserve the ACS Award in Applied Polymer Science. There are any number of other medals on his shelves, which he also downplays as “just little trinkets,” and his only rationale for this latest is a quietly shrugged “maybe just hard work.” With long hours and looming deadlines, he’s perfectly happy to wait for the formal presentation this spring and to rely on the ACS’s 22-word citation until then: “For his exceptional ability to craft unique polymer architectures having practical applications in solving timely and important environmental, microelectronic, and biological problems.”

Like Ober, it’s far-ranging and broadly defined, using only as many words as necessary to summarize a lifetime of research. But for his colleagues in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), there’s little surprise he’s been given this award and absolutely no question about whether he deserves it. “He’s an outstanding researcher and an excellent teacher,” says Emmanuel Giannelis, Walter R. Read Professor of Engineering and the current director of MSE. “Some of us are good in one or the other, but there are very few people who can do an outstanding job at both. Chris leads by example, and he continues to push himself and his group to have an impact on research. He is well-recognized both nationally and internationally, and we knew it was only a matter of time before he was given this award.”

"Chris is a great man," says collaborator and fellow MSE professor Uli Wiesner, who credits Ober with his initial Cornell appointment. "He is a very humble person who always puts down his own contributions, rather than trying to appear in the limelight. He’s one of the kindest researchers I know, someone who deeply cares for the people he works with and for this university. And he’s really devoted to polymer science."

As Ober tells it, after studying chemistry in high school, he fell in love with polymer science as an undergrad at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1978. He still thinks of his co-op experience as the turning point in his career and was in the process of synthesizing natural materials for pharmaceuticals when he realized that something was wrong.

"I knew this was a noble calling," says Ober. "But what frustrated me was that at the end of the day, I might hold up a container that looked entirely empty, because there were only a few micrograms of material sitting at the bottom. Somehow, I liked dealing with things that were more substantial. In the polymer world, the chemistry can be just as complex as it is with pharmaceuticals, but you’re not done until you have a substantial amount of material—something you can actually see, with some pretty well-focused properties. And you have a huge number of tools to create materials with all these different properties."

As a grad student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ober began concentrating on liquid crystalline polymers, and he’s never slowed down. For four years, he worked in industry, investigating polymers at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada. But the longer he stayed, the narrower his research became, and the only way to recapture that larger picture was to return to the academic world.

3D structures used to test concepts in microfluidics

Those two inventions—Ober estimates that he has "a dozen, fifteen, twenty patents for a variety of things"—bookend his work, with little in common except for his method, which relies on subtle changes in polymer structure to lead him from one discovery to the next. While some researchers seek solutions for existing problems, Ober works in the opposite direction, exploring the properties of his newly created materials to discover potential applications.

"Sometimes we dress things up to give them a good story, but usually these advances are evolutionary," says Ober. "We’re pulled in directions we don’t always expect, and sometimes it’s a chance conversation with a colleague, and sometimes it’s a researcher who approaches us to ask, ‘Can you do this?’ ‘Well, I don’t know anything about it—but it sounds interesting.’ Every time we take on a new project, we learn something that helps us move on to the next one, even though we’re not always sure what that next project will be."

Ober talks about the advantages of having a short attention span, and how polymer science has encouraged him to jump easily from one research project to another. But his real strength, says Ned Thomas, who has co-authored sixteen papers with him in the last 10 years, is Ober’s ability to move smoothly between different fields.

"He’s an anomaly, a researcher who’s equally at home with chemistry and materials science," says Thomas, the Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Some people have lots and lots of citations, because they do something that’s really easy and they do it first. And some people do things that are really hard, that nobody else can do, and they get a lot of citations because everybody recognizes just how good they really are. That’s the category Chris is in. He would be equally at home in a chemistry department as he is in a materials science department, and those two worlds aren’t easy to straddle. But he can do it, because he’s a damned good chemist."

In 1995, after co-authoring his first paper with Thomas, Ober became associate editor of the journal Macromolecules, and in 2000, he became the director of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. That launched a time of great change, when Ober helped restructure the department’s undergraduate curriculum into four research areas—nanotechnology, biotechnology, energy and the environment, and information technology—and create a new state-of-the-art laboratory, the Hudson Mesoscale Processing Facility, which, along with the Cornell Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility and the Cornell High Energy Synchroton Source, all play a part in his current work.

During the same period, Ober was given the 2000 Semiconductor Research Corp./Semiconductor Safety Association/International Sematech Award for research in manufacturing and environment, safety and health; the Semiconductor Research Corporation Award for Creative Invention in both 2000 and 2003; the 2003 International Sematech Outstanding Contribution Award; and the 2004 Polymer Science and Technology Award. And in all that time, he was also running the largest research group in the department.

"That’s something I’ve never quite been able to figure out," says Ober, talking about the size of his lab, which currently has 15 members, including five post-docs. "It’s a combination of intellectual curiosity and the relevance of the work that we do. Whether it’s in the area of photolithography or biomaterials or environmentally friendly anti-fouling surfaces, everything that goes on in our group has a very practical focus. That focus directs our activities, and enough people think what we’re doing is interesting that we’re able to find the funding to make it happen—which is ultimately what makes large groups possible. It’s an extremely talented group of individuals, and they’re coming up with some great ideas. Really, my job is just to foster their creativity as best I can, and enjoy the cool things that come out of it."

t her first meeting with Ober, Katy Bosworth knew she’d found the right lab. "I came for visiting weekend, and the second I met Chris and the other group members, I absolutely wanted to join the Ober Group," says Bosworth, currently a third-year Ph.D. student in chemistry. "I just felt like I fit, and it’s turned out exactly as I hoped it would. We work on things that have real structure, and do things on a scale that you can observe. The engineering is very palpable, with very real-world applications. And from the start, Chris has been very calm, fair, and patient."

"Chris is a very easy-going guy, so getting along with him is really no problem," says Nelson Felix, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in chemical engineering and the senior member of the Ober Group, currently working with supercritical CO2. "He’s not a fan of putting pressure on people or trying to force the situation, and I think that says a lot about him. You have to be passionate about your research, because he’s not going to micromanage you; he’s not going to egg you on. He’s going to let you figure it out on your own, give you the space to do it, and keep his eye on the grand vision of how all this work fits together."

At the start of each year, Ober refocuses the group on that larger picture, bringing members together with Ober Group alumni, colleagues in industry and academia, and collaborators from around the world. Held at sites around the Cornell campus, the Ski Hut Meeting has since retreated to the warmth of the A.D. White House, where its 40 or 50 participants spend a January weekend sharing their work and discussing their strategies for the coming year’s discoveries, with a little time left over for skiing.

Photos from past years’ Ski Hut Meetings serve as the screen saver for Ober’s computer, alongside pictures of his wife (an editorial assistant on Macromolecules), son (a chemical engineering sophomore at Cornell), and two daughters (a high school senior and third-grader). The family likes to travel together and is looking forward to Ober’s sabbatical this year, when he plans to split his time between MIT, collaborating with Thomas, and the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where he was a visiting professor in 2004.

Until then, Ober has set up any number of challenges for himself. He’s serving as vice president of the polymer division of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and reviewing proposals, among other things, as a member of the Cornell Nanobiotechnology Center’s executive board. In keeping with his group’s new directions, he’s teaching an undergraduate course in biomaterials, which he’s never done before. And in the coming year, he’s pushing his group to drive polymer lithography toward smaller and smaller scales; collaborate with New York’s Wadsworth Center in a study of brain function; refine its environmentally friendly photo-acid generators; and explore the possibilities of molecular glasses in photoresists.

Along the way, he’ll need to prepare his talk for his award symposium and find something to wear for the award ceremony. "I don’t own a tuxedo, and I’m going to try to find a way around it," says Ober, who describes himself as an oxford-shirt kind of guy. "I wouldn’t rent a tuxedo for my wedding, so how can I possibly rent a tuxedo for an awards ceremony? But there’s going to be this symposium in my honor, with all these presenters talking about my work. Then, there’s a ceremony where all the national award winners get dressed up and have a fancy dinner and traipse across the stage and shake hands with each other.

"That’s what’s going to happen," he says. "And I think it’s going to be pretty cool."