His Own Path
How did the kid who had never thought about college become a distinguished professor? Not by taking the straight path.
Joe Francisco was a junior in high school in Beaumont, Texas and wasn't planning on going to college. It wasn't that he objected to it; he simply hadn't thought about it. Ever.
"I was clueless . I hadn't planned for it," says Francisco, now the William E. Moore Distinguished Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Science and Chemistry. But his plans changed.
"One afternoon after Sunday dinner, I went outside. And there was a man standing there with a map, so I went over to see if I could help him find what he was looking for," he says. Francisco walked him to his destination a few miles away. The man was mathematician Richard Price, who asked the teenager about his interests and told him to think about college.
"You hear about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was being in the right place at the right time and all the goodness that comes of that. I often wonder what would have happened if I'd stopped at the refrigerator," Francisco says.
But financing college was going to be a problem for his family. In another serendipitous moment, Tom Edgar, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, called and offered Francisco the opportunity of a lifetime: If Francisco wanted to start at U.T. that summer, Edgar would find the financial support to make it happen. Francisco enrolled there shortly after graduation.
Francisco didn't know exactly where U.T. was, but it was in Texas, and he liked that. There were more than 350 students in his first chemistry class, and he liked that, too. "I thought I could be lost in the numbers. Unlike a lot of kids, I never wanted to be known." It didn't work out that way.
"One day I picked up my exam and my professor said he wanted to talk to me. I thought, 'I can't have done that badly.' But he took me into his lab and showed me an x-ray spectrometer. It was fascinating. You never know from a textbook how they find the structure of the chemicals you read about," he says. "And then my professor asked me if I wanted to do undergraduate research - as a freshman!"
Francisco solved his first crystal structure in his first lab experience and learned to love it. He realized then that he could be happy with a career in research. During graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francisco met an Australian chemist who invited him to spend six months in Australia following up on his research. "He was working on a theory that explained my results from the lab," Francisco says.
Spending half a year in Australia was gutsy for someone who had never set foot outside the United States. He wasn't sure what to think when his Australian colleagues suggested he look outside the U.S. for his post-doc work. They reasoned that in addition to the post-doc work, it would expose him to more of the world. Francisco received three offers and ultimately chose Cambridge University. "I met people from around the world. We'd talk through science over tea, generating ideas and discussing what the important things to do were," he says. These discussions also made him think about what he considered important problems. He would soon be an assistant professor somewhere - what problems did he want to work on? In what way did he want to contribute? At the time, atmospheric chemistry was a fairly unusual area, and Francisco saw others struggling to understand how to judge this interdisciplinary field. He joined the faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, which he says was the perfect place for him to start his career. "It was a chance to forge your own uniqueness. You could pick your area. They didn't care what you did as long as you were good."
"At the time, not everyone knew the full chemical consequences of chlorofluorocarbon (CFCs) chemicals. No one fully understood the complete picture, and that's what we felt our lab could provide," he says. Chlorofluorocarbons break down into two compounds in the atmosphere, chlorine and a carbon halogen fragment. Francisco's team mapped the path of the lessresearched compound, the carbon halogen fragment, developing a new class of fluorinated radicals. This work provided new avenues for further experiments by other scientists; it also laid the foundation for understanding the chemical consequences of new materials that were being considered as replacements for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
Currently, his research group is tackling the role clouds play on chemistry in the atmosphere. "I used to be able to go on a plane and say, 'Oh, look at the nice clouds.' Now I look out the window and say, 'Look at all the fantastic chemistry going on there in those clouds.'"
As a professor and researcher, Francisco hopes to do for other students what his mentors did for him. "I like teaching the freshman classes," he says. "It's the opportunity to stimulate young minds and pull young chemists into a lab and give them the same opportunity I was given."
This spring, when Francisco learned that he would be inducted as a distinguished professor, he requested that it be named for William E. Moore, the first African American to earn a PhD in chemistry from Purdue. "I just feel strongly that we have to do more to honor our African American pioneers," Francisco says. "I view Dr. Moore as an important pioneer. Having this professorship named after him honors his achievement."
Congratulating Francisco on the honor, a colleague told him, "You did it, and you did it your way." Francisco laughs. "I didn't take the straight shot," he admits. But his path took him to places that the 17-year-old boy from Beaumont never would have dreamed of.