40-Year Service Awardees

The 59th Annual Staff Service Awards will be presented in Beckman Auditorium on Monday, June 2, at 10 a.m. During the ceremony, more than 250 staff members whose service ranges from 10 to 50 years will be honored. A full list of awardees can be found here.

This week we are featuring Caltech staff members who will be recognized for 40 and 45 years of service to the Institute.

The honorees include three 40-year staff members: Eugene Akutagawa, a senior scientist in biology and a member of the professional staff; Susi Martin, assistant to the Board of Trustees; and Steve Vass, a senior instrument specialist at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO).

Eugene Akutagawa graduated from UCLA with a bachelor's degree in microbiology; a help-wanted ad in the Los Angeles Times for a lab assistant brought him to Caltech, where "I was standing in the hallway, waiting to be interviewed, and there's [Nobel Laureate] Max Delbrück coming out of the lab. To me, a microbiologist, he was like a god, and there he was, right in my face—so I knew this place was going to be great. And I liked its smallness, especially contrasted with UCLA, where undergraduate biology classes were 700 or 800 people spilling into the aisles."

Nevertheless, his first job proved unrewarding. "I was implanting electrodes in rats and watching them press the lever until they pooped out," Akutagawa recalls. (The lab belonged to Research Associate Marianne Olds, whose husband, Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology James Olds, had discovered the brain's pleasure center more than two decades earlier.) "Then one day, I was sitting in the parking lot eating my lunch, and a mockingbird landed on a bush and started singing his heart out. I thought, 'I know he's not really singing words, but he's communicating. It would be interesting to study that.' And lo and behold, within a few months Mark Konishi [now the Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology, Emeritus] came here from Princeton."

Konishi had already made a name for himself studying songbirds and owls, so Akutagawa changed labs. The job interview was informal, Akutagawa recalls. "Mark said, 'What experience do you have?' And I said, 'Well, when I was growing up in Hawaii, I tried to save nestlings that had fallen out of their nests.' And he looked at me very sternly and said, 'What did you feed them?' I said, 'Rice. And water.' 'Did any of them live?' 'Nope. They all died.' I think he appreciated my honesty. He never told me I got the job, but he went over to the chalkboard and drew a football shape. He said, 'That's canary seed. That goes to canaries and white-crowned sparrows.' And he drew a little circle, and he says, 'That's millet. That goes to the finches.'"

Within a decade Akutagawa had become a full-fledged collaborator, doing the meticulous microscopy needed to trace fine neural circuitry. In 1985, Konishi and Akutagawa published a paper that showed why male zebra finches sing and females don't: specialized neurons in the male's brain flourish and develop many connections, but in females they atrophy and die. Says Akutagawa, "Our relationship eventually evolved into me doing my own independent research. It's been quite a ride, I must say." The ride, however, is nearing its end; Konishi has retired, and Akutagawa will be following suit.

"I love this job," Akutagawa continues. "It's more like a hobby. It's just an amazing place to work, in large part because Mark was just an incredible supervisor. He gave us a lot of freedom, which spurs a lot of good science."

Susi Martin works in the Caltech president's office as assistant to the Board of Trustees. The Board has 85 members and meets five times a year, and Martin manages their comings and goings. She says, "I arrange transportation to and from the airport, hotels, whatever assistance they need. It could be anything." During her tenure, she's moved from a Selectric typewriter to a Filemaker Pro database to the Internet; from three-ring binders to PDFs.

Martin began her Caltech career in the procurement division at JPL before joining the office of then-director Bruce Murray. After a special assignment supporting the Seasat mission's Failure Review Board in 1978, she moved on to one of JPL's early biomedical technology projects before transferring to the Lab's office of planning and review. It was there in April, 1981 that Hardy Martel (BS '49, PhD '56), an electrical engineering professor and the secretary to Caltech's Board of Trustees, called to inquire whether she'd consider moving to campus. One of Martin's former colleagues in the director's office, Mary Webster, had joined the staff of Caltech president Marvin Goldberger earlier that year; when Martel became in need of an assistant, Webster had recommended Martin.

From 1988 to 1994, Martin also served first as assistant secretary and then secretary to the board of directors of the California Association for Research in Astronomy (CARA), a partnership set up by Caltech and the University of California to build and operate the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea.

"I love working with the trustees," Martin says. "It is an honor and a delight—they are a truly remarkable group of individuals, and it is a privilege to facilitate their work on behalf of Caltech." Over the past 33 years, no two days have been the same, she says. "The challenges have been interesting, but the rewards have been awesome and tremendously diverse." For example, Martin was at JPL for the landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, staffing one of the rooms set up for the trustees. "Seeing that first image of the rover's shadow cast on the surface was just amazing," she recalls. "To see something nobody else had ever seen—to be a part of that history—was so cool."

While Akutagawa and Martin have essentially stayed put, Steve Vass has occupied eight different offices in three of Caltech's academic divisions. Vass was born and raised in Hungary, where he learned electronics at a trade school. "I had some college but not too much." He eventually came to the United States, where he landed a job in Caltech's biology division in the laboratory of then-professor Leroy Hood (BS '60, PhD '68). Vass helped Hood and postdoc Michael Hunkapiller (PhD '74) build the protein sequenator, which automatically determines the sequence of amino acids that make up a protein. Two decades later, this machine and the other ones developed in the Hood lab—the protein synthesizer, the DNA synthesizer, and the DNA sequenator—would spark the biotech revolution of the 1990s.

In the early 1980s, Vass moved to the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, where he built X-ray diffractometers for physical chemist Richard Dickerson. Dickerson used them to make high-precision measurements of DNA's crystal structure—both its usual right-handed spiral and the less common left-handed form.

In 1987, Vass moved again—to the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy and the LIGO project. LIGO searches for the gravitational waves that Einstein predicted would be generated by the motions of extremely massive bodies—colliding black holes being an oft-cited example. The detector consists of twin interferometers, each with a perpendicular set of 4-kilometer-long arms, that were built in Louisiana and Washington in the late 1990s. When Vass joined the project, the design's details were being worked out in a prototype interferometer with 40-meter arms that had been built on the Caltech campus. Nearly two decades later, the 40-meter prototype remains the proving ground for next-generation ideas.

Vass describes how LIGO changed his perspective: "In biology, people said, 'Oh, if we only had a good chemist, we would hit it out of the park.' Then in chemistry they said, 'Oh, if we had a really good electronics guy, we would be just the best.' But in physics, they say, 'We know everything. We can do it ourselves.'"

"Basically, I run the lab, but the fun part is you get to do everything. This morning, I've been hunting for 'ground loops.' The east end of the interferometer has a 60-Hertz hum, which is line current, and it's ruining the spectrum. So I'm going around with an ohmmeter looking for something disconnected—or something connected that shouldn't be. My job is to prepare the best possible environment to get good science done."

LIGO measures the distance between suspended mirrors to within a billionth of the diameter of an atom by bouncing a laser beam between them, so Vass begins his mornings making sure the interferometer hasn't lost lock. "If people stayed really late the night before, things will be fine," he says. "But if they left at 10 p.m., everything will have drifted a little. And earthquakes affect the machine. It's much better designed against quakes now, but in earlier days if we had a local magnitude 4, our precious glass might have fallen and gotten chipped, or our mirror coating could have been ruined. Back then it was a baby, and I've seen it grow up with my kids. I have grandkids now, and someday LIGO will produce something, too—some cosmic event will happen close by, and we'll see it."

"I have to say thank you to all the people who've helped me grow," Vass concludes. "I've learned a lot here and had a lot of fun doing it."