April 6, 2022

photo of gregory rodin

To Gregory Rodin, intuition is everything. The newly retired Professor Emeritus of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin and a core faculty member at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, is an expert in the field of computational micromechanics. Like any computational scientist, Rodin capitalizes on computational power to simulate and study the infinitesimal units that combine to form heterogeneous materials—a process that allows for a deeper understanding of those materials—which range from atomistic to geological in scale. But he also relies heavily on his own intuition.

Because without it, he says, you don't know the next step.

“There are some people whose intuition is so amazing that they don't need any math. They simply have, as a good old colleague of mine used to say, a direct line to God,” said Rodin admiringly. 

What Rodin does fits nicely with his personality. It's some combination of soft and hard science, and he has always enjoyed that balance.

“I certainly found that in my field you could, on one hand, rely on some rigor and, on the other hand, on a lot of intuition.”

Rodin believes strongly in the power of the iterative process that has laced his successful career as a researcher and professor: the acquisition and application of self-knowledge. 

He is acutely aware that everyone’s wiring is different, so it’s very important for each of us to figure ours out and how to exploit it to the max. Life, therefore is a constant learning process.

In his early thirties, Rodin discovered that, for all practical purposes, he couldn’t read.

“I have a very hard time processing information. But if I’ve been in a meeting with 15 people for an hour, I can reproduce virtually verbatim what everybody said. As I say, everybody’s wiring is different.”

Clearly, for Rodin, the scientific process is a way of life. This mindset—alongside his awareness of and appreciation for intellectual diversity—helped him in his over 36 years as a professor at UT Austin. 

“I taught somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand students,” said Rodin. “There were quite a few As and of course quite a few Fs. As someone once put it to me, I help some people figure out what they really like and some people to figure out what they really don’t like. I’m good with both,” he chuckled. 

Now that Rodin has retired, he has more time to spend with his wife and their two cats, Muki and Blue, and to further pursue his research. 

“Now that I’m retired, my research works at full speed. About a year ago, I reconnected with my high school classmate who is a biologist and we decided to write a paper together,” said Rodin. “Her husband—also a biologist—has joined along with a third biologist fellow from Germany.”

“We are studying stable populations of red algae, which there is a lot of mystery about. It kind of appears and disappears spontaneously and nobody knows why. It’s puzzling. When it disappears, it has a major negative impact on the coastline ecosystem. I’ve already obtained several results after solving some equations, and the biologists are very excited because some of my results are very much in agreement with what they have observed.” 

“Advances in disciplines like computational science and mathematics have made a real exploration of biology possible for the first time,” enthused Rodin. “This is the glorious future.”