Being married to a university for 50 years is an occasion to celebrate, so the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MS&E) and students of Arthur Ruoff, the Class of 1912 Professor of Engineering, have organized a symposium to honor his golden anniversary, slated for Monday, Sept. 18, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., in the Statler Hotel Carrier Grand Ballroom.

Speakers at the symposium, which is devoted to several aspects of high-pressure physics, will include many of Ruoff's former students, now professors and industrial scientists, Cornell Professors Roald Hoffmann and Neil Ashcroft, and Ruoff's son Rodney Ruoff, the John Evans Professor of Nanoengineering at Northwestern University.

Arthur Ruoff has dedicated his career to the study of the effect of very high pressure on materials, including the making of metallic oxygen, xenon and sulfur. In 1990, by squeezing small samples between two diamond anvils, he reached a static pressure of 416 GigaPascals (GPa), becoming the first scientist to create a static pressure greater than at the center of the Earth, 361 GPa. Scientists had theorized that at such a pressure, hydrogen would become a metal and a superconductor, but in 1998 Ruoff disproved the theory, cracking several diamond anvils in the process. He later obtained a pressure of 560 GPa, the highest static pressure obtained to date.

After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Utah in 1955, Ruoff joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor of mechanics and materials. In 1965 he was a founding member of the new Department of MS&E and later served as its director (1978-88). On July 1 of this year he became professor emeritus, but he intends to continue his research. Although he says he will miss some aspects of teaching, "It will be great to have the time to travel to more meetings and get new ideas."

Among other awards, Ruoff received the Bridgman Medal for outstanding high pressure research from the Association Internationale pour l'Avancement de la Recherche et de la Technologie aux Hautes Pressions and the Westinghouse Award for Outstanding Teaching. He received a National Science Foundation Science Teacher Fellowship in 1962. He is the author of two books on materials science and developed an audio-tutorial course on introductory materials science, which has been used at 60 universities.