Joanna McKittrick, a pioneering engineer at the University
of California San Diego and a renowned expert in materials science passed away
Nov. 15, 2019. She was 65.
McKittrick was one of the first women to join the
engineering faculty at UC San Diego in 1988, in what is now the Department of
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and was then Applied Mechanics and
Engineering Sciences (AMES). She is remembered by her colleagues as a generous
collaborator and by students and alumni as an inspiring and caring mentor. McKittrick
was a great advocate for under-represented students in science and engineering
and served as a research advisor for many undergraduate students through the
years.
“She will be deeply missed by her family, her colleagues and
friends, and the UC San Diego community,” said the current chair of the
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego, Carlos
Coimbra.
McKittrick worked closely for 31 years with Jan Talbot, the
first woman to join the AMES faculty in 1986. Being the first two female
faculty in AMES created a strong bond between them and naturally led to
research collaborations, Talbot said.
“We worked so well together,” she said. “I was a big-picture
person and she was a details-oriented person. She was brilliant.”
Research legacy
Talbot remembers coming back from a conference and telling
McKittrick about a talk on making oxides via combustion. “Let’s do it,” McKittrick
said. The two rushed to the lab right
then and there. They were able to make a zinc oxide powder that
luminesced. In the decades that
followed, Talbot and McKittrick worked together to develop luminescent
materials for heads-up displays, flat panel displays and for drug delivery
systems. More recently, McKittrick’s work focused on the synthesis and
development of materials for LED-based solid-state lighting.
In later years, McKittrick also turned her attention to
biomaterials. She worked closely with Marc Meyers, a professor of mechanical and
aerospace engineering who had also joined UC San Diego in 1988 as part of the university’s
first materials science group. “She
loved nature and she fell in love with biomaterials,” Meyers said.
Their work on biological and bioinspired materials received
many research accolades. Their papers on materials inspired by seahorses, sea
urchins and other animals were widely covered in mainstream news outlets,
including ABC News, Popular Science and the Smithsonian magazine.
An advocate for
under-represented students in STEM
During her 31-year career, McKittrick encouraged women and
minority students to pursue science careers, working with high school,
undergraduate and graduate students. Her research group always included women
and minorities. She welcomed high school students from both sides of the border
in her lab over the summer as part of the Enlace program, which is run by
Olivia Graeve, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering at UC San Diego. Graeve was one of McKittrick’s mentees as an undergraduate
student, starting in 1993.
McKittrick encouraged Graeve to apply to graduate school and
wrote her letters of recommendation, continuing to act as a mentor for the
subsequent 20 years. “She was instrumental in me coming back to UC San Diego as
a professor,” in 2013, Graeve said.
Recently, McKittrick congratulated Graeve on her successful
career. Graeve replied that it was all because of McKittrick. “She said: ‘No,
it’s not. It’s because of you’,” Graeve recalls. “But I really truly believe
that a lot of my success has to do with her. From my point of view, she was
like a second mom.”
Keeping in touch with
alumni
McKittrick was a very supportive mentor and wanted her
students to succeed, said Frances Su, who graduated with a PhD from the
McKittrick Lab in December 2018. “She taught me how to treat other people with
respect,” Su said. “She also taught me not to be afraid of being critiqued.
It’s part of the scientific process.” Su
landed a job at SigRay, an X-ray systems company in the San Francisco Bay Area.
She was planning to meet with McKittrick here in San Diego during Thanksgiving
break.
“She was the ideal mentor,” said Michael Frank, who
graduated from McKittrick’s research group in 2014. “She knew the maturity level of the people who
joined her group. She would trust us. And if you were struggling, she would
help.”
McKittrick welcomed Frank into her lab without hesitation
after he left the Department of Chemistry. While in her lab, Frank and his wife
had two children (in addition to an older daughter). McKittrick always asked
him how his family was doing, Frank recalled. “She knew that quality of life
was important,” he said.
McKittrick was always thoughtful when it came to current and
former students. She and Michael Porter met at a materials
science conference in Hawaii about two years later. She had brought him a glass
sponge, an invertebrate that lives deep in the ocean and is exquisitely
fragile. Porter was touched that McKittrick had flown the animal more than
2,500 miles to bring it to him. “It meant a lot to me.” He and McKittrick had become friends since he
earned his PhD in her lab. They both shared a battle with chronic health
issues. McKittrick became a role model for him, he said.
A thoughtful mentor
McKittrick believed in her students, said Keisuke
Matsushita, who has been working in her lab as a Ph.D. student for four years. She
was always encouraging—even through the 17 drafts of his first paper as first
author. During his Ph.D. qualifying exam, one of the committee members pointed
out that Matsushita had a lot of work to do in the last year of his Ph.D. “He
can do it,” McKittrick said without hesitation.
McKittrick had high expectations of her students but she
also gave them a lot of freedom. One of her Ph.D. students, Isaac Cabrera, for
example, supervises a team of 20 undergraduate students as part of an effort to
develop a process to make prostheses in developing countries without patients
needing to go to a clinic. The name of the McKittrick lab is printed in bold,
large font on project members’ T-shirts. “McKittrick gave me the freedom to
pursue the project, no other PI would have done that,” Cabrera said.
Students also remember fondly how McKittrick cared for her
dogs, two rescue Chihuahuas. Sean Garner was
interviewing for a spot in her lab when he noticed that one of the dogs was
tucked under her desk. “That’s what made me decide to work with her,” he said.
McKittrick is survived by her sisters Lisa Cleveland and
Marcia Hodulik, her niece and nephews Spencer Cleveland, Nichelle Hodulik, Reid
Cleveland, and Evan Hodulik, and beloved cousins. A celebration of life will be
held on Friday, Jan. 31, 2020, beginning at 4 p.m. at the UC San Diego Faculty Club.