 This is Anna Adamek in Vancouver, August 29th, 2017. Hello. Could you give me your name and tell me where you were born? My name is James Douglas Boyd, and I was born in Timmins, Ontario. Could you talk a bit about your childhood? What were your interests like when you were a child? My childhood. Well, it started in Timmins, but we moved shortly thereafter to Toronto and later to a small-town font hill in the Niagara Peninsula, so my childhood stretched over those places. I want to say a little bit, why did we move from Timmins to Toronto? My mother died when we were very young, so it was a forced move, and my father relocated. And I and my sister were placed and lived with for a number of years an aunt and uncle, my father's unmarried brother and sister. So my childhood was interesting, a bit non-conventional in that respect. And I bring all this up because it essentially provided exceptional freedom and independence for me. My aunt and uncle were very dutiful, but I had a rather privileged or exceptional childhood. Up to about age 12 when my father remarried and we moved to Niagara and it was maybe more conventional. Anyhow, to answer your question about what did I do as a child, I suppose all the ordinary things that people did at that time, the 1940s, but it was certainly different from today, in that everyone had exceptional freedom, children, to make their own fun and create their own fun. So in Toronto, we ran around nearby parks and then got farther away to High Park and so on. No television, etc. Me specifically, I took great interest and had opportunity to take things apart and people would say, oh, this is characteristic of future engineers. So there was that, but I must point out I wasn't very good at putting things back together again or to build things, so I certainly didn't have that skill. I took piano lessons, so there was that discipline at a stamp collection. I was sent to or went to a summer camp in Muskoka for most of those years and that was a very strong experience. I learned outdoor skills and I loved for the outdoors and so on. Was anyone within your family interested in science or encouraged you to? Oh, I didn't say. My father was a metallurgical engineer, I guess it's in my genes to a degree. What was his name? John. John Boyd. And so he certainly did all the right things to encourage me. I was given chemistry sets and building sets and microscope and things like that. And eventually, after my father remarried, I think by this time he had decided that I was succeeding well in school and so this sort of encouragement, I think he backed off a bit and I sensed or I recall he decided, like maybe a lot of young people at that age needed more encouragement to know what's going on in the world, I recall he encouraged or tried to encourage me to read his time magazine and the claims and so on. But yes, I had that encouragement. Could you tell me about your education? I want to point out that I feel I benefited greatly by the excellent public education system available in Ontario. So as I say, I went to public school in Toronto. I went to high school in this smaller, essentially rural area in Niagara Peninsula. But in retrospect, the quality of education was excellent. The teachers were excellent. Maybe good students got the better teachers but I have nothing but high regard for that experience. So in high school, I guess gravitated toward the physical sciences and maths rather than biology and chemistry, possibly because it was more precise and had a right answer. And the other university? You're probably not surprised. My father, as I said, was a metallurgical engineering. Can I just... So how about the university? So from what I've just said, you're probably not surprised, perhaps I did not say, my father was a graduate of the University of Toronto. So it's probably not surprising that I went to University of Toronto and took engineering. I took enrolled in engineering physics probably because it advertised as an elite program and you required somewhat higher grades for admission and this appealed. It also was a little less confining maybe than other engineering programs. The possibilities were more broader and more open-ended. So that's where I went. That was the program. It was challenging. I don't think I thought a lot about what I was going to do subsequently. One other very important influence though. So my father worked for this small steel company in Niagara Peninsula in Welland and this company, despite its smaller size, was very progressive in the sense it offered scholarships, a few university scholarships to children of employees. What was the name of the company? The company was Atlas Steels and I believe it still exists in some forms, reduced in size, but it has been struggling with a lot of steel companies, but it's still there. But as I said, it was very enlightened in its policies at the time and it had a great influence on me. Firstly, I got the benefit of this scholarship but it included employment at the steel company. So I worked as a student employee for four summers and I would say this had a significant influence on my interest and thinking. First of all, seeing this industrial plant and the activities, they really developed my interest in metallurgy, both from the industrial production but also the details of the metallurgy, what the metallurgists did there. As a student, what did you do? Well, they were very wise and at each summer, I and the other students were assigned to a different area. So I think the first summer and the last summer I was attached to a metallurgist and followed him around and maybe in the later years I could actually do some useful things. By other times, I was assigned to other engineering areas, design areas and repair, more mechanically engineering. This helped me decide I liked the metallurgy part better than the mechanical engineer. So that really is what directed me towards metallurgy The engineering physics program had a physical metallurgy option which I opted for in the final two years. But the choice to continue to grad school and PhD and so on that came toward the end of undergraduate years as it does with most people. But the one event that I recall is I attended a lecture by a visiting scientist from NASA, the US Space Agency. And so this was 1960. This was the height of the space race when the US and the USSR were competing to put vehicles into space but made me to get to the moon. And this scientist from NASA came and gave this visiting lecture which I attended and I came away from that saying this is what I want to do. I want to be a scientist like him. So that was on my way to a PhD. I went to University of Cambridge in England. Why? I was well advised by a professor, a very important mentor of my life, Professor Bill Weingard at the University of Toronto. So when I discussed with him my interest in a PhD he was no hesitation to say you must go to the metallurgy department at the University of Cambridge. Why? Thinking about it, he felt and knew this was the best in the world, in the western world and he certainly assisted me and that's where I went. So you would say he was one of your most memorable supervisors? Yes, for sure. Could you tell me more about him? About him? He was very wise of course and very direct. He had great success subsequently. In his life he eventually became president of the University of Guelph. He was a member of parliament from Guelph, I believe federal parliament for a number of years. So an outstanding person but certainly one of the people that stand out in my curriculum. Who do you consider your mentors? Well, I expect there have been many. Like everyone, they were outstanding teachers in high school but at university the person that stands out in my mind is Professor Bill Weingard who was the meeting professor with the engineering physics program and in particular the metallurgy department at the University of Toronto. And for me, he was the person that with no hesitation recommended and directed me toward Cambridge University for a PhD and postgraduate work. Simply because in his mind it was the best place in the world at the time. So after you finished university where did you start your teaching career or did you first work in the industry? Yes, so my line is that I have worked in industry government research labs and university and in that order. So I completed my PhD in Cambridge so my wife and I had our first child at that time and had a number of choices as one does at that stage. But I worked first with a private research company and a research lab in the United States Patel Memorial Institute it was called at the time in Columbus, Ohio and I subsequently moved to Ottawa and worked for a government research lab which is now can met it was called something else at the time and subsequently the Queens. Do you remember anything about your first day at work in the US? I remember, well that would be my first day of real employment I remember arriving there but nothing particular I think it's just the ordinary of field forms and so on. As a Canadian and this laboratory at the time much of the work is government supported and there was quite a strict certainly to me coming into this for the first time security system and so as a Canadian I was described I was a foreign national and had to wear a special colored bed so I can remember having a good idea of getting that. And what were your responsibilities at work? Well I was... First day then at Columbus? Yes, well I was a research scientist as was to be all my life I guess at the university teaching becomes another responsibility so at this time much of the work that was at this lab it was obviously a metallurgical group that's where I was there but was related to was supported by the US government through various agencies military, NASA topic energy and so on and so I was working I was hired to work on a contract supported by NASA had to do some components for the space mission the Apollo mission eventually to go to the moon but for me it was a metallurgical problem on titanium alloys so I got to learn about titanium alloys and did things there but by virtue of living and working there I like to think I learned it was part of my education and experience of life private contract research lab we had to think very seriously about income where the money was coming from and it was our wife and I actually children experience of living in the United States this was the 1960s during the Vietnam War it was a very interesting time to be there and have political discussions over here with people and so on so when did you move back to Canada and why did you choose to come back 1972 and I could be glad and say oh the opportunity arose and I went but now I was more conscious than that and I will say it was my wife that was encouraging me to look for a position in Canada she felt maybe more strong than I did our wonderful experience in the US we perhaps should return home our children were coming of the age to begin school and so on and so forth so maybe that's what got it going and I started looking for a position and something came up that was the idea what was the culture like then it met comparing to a private industry in the US um different I guess the camp met it was more, it was a government laboratory and it was more structured in a civil service sort of way I guess and that was the director and sub directors and groups and so on apart from that research labs and research are very similar wherever you are so what you're doing and how you're doing it the equipment and so on is quite similar I suppose the main difference would be though now that I think of it as I said a moment ago at Battelle the laboratory in the US the work was all funded by research contracts and so the scientist really the first responsibility was to obtain enough contracts to support your operation so you had that responsibility as always sometimes you were well funded and other times you weren't and maybe had to go camp at physical metallurgy research labs at the time that was not a concern maybe it was a concern for the director of the lab but for the researchers the budget was there and so on so that would be that would be the main difference ultimately you chose to study it why? I'm not sure can I go back to Camman a little bit and just say a bit about the work there because it certainly had an impact on me so I told you about what prompted me us to look for this position but I found out when I arrived there that it was a remarkable decision for this lab this government metallurgy lab in Ottawa that they were in the process or I just hired something like seven or eight new scientists I was one all to work on pipeline steel so at this time 1972 there was a big plan for an Arctic gas pipeline and some wise person in this government lab decided they would build up a group of metallurgists expertise and strength in this area both to assist the Canadian steel companies that were manufacturing steel to make the pipe and also to support the regulatory so it was an amazing time of all these new people starting this work new equipment it was ideal for a young research scientist to sort of come in with all these facilities begin to do research on steel so this is really where I started my research in steel and that's what I've been doing ever since ever since and that's of course a very important part of the Canadian history well I think so and well people have looked at outcomes of this and so on but you can imagine with this number of people now at the same time the Canadian universities there were a number of people and research groups starting and growing in the same area and so not so many years later Canada I think to say were world leaders but they certainly were doing well yes I think they were with the world leaders in research on line pipe steel and steels related to that type of product UBC McMaster McGill it was a very special time in Canadian metallurgy I think to point at a bit of history if you're not aware so I think it was 1985 and there was a Canadian Steel Research Association this is an industrial based research association for steel companies which does not exist anymore but organized by this group and a man John Mackay at Stelco there was a it was like a two week visit to Japan but a seminar with the Japanese Iron and Steel Association of all these Canadian researchers at the University and industrial people so it showed what a strength in this area Canada had at the time what were the main challenges 1970s early 1980s when it comes to steel production what were the challenges you were working on technical challenges I guess most metallurgical materials used in structural applications structural applications you are trying to develop materials or improve materials that you increase the strength you increase or maintain the resistance to fracture or other failures happening and the cost must be a consideration especially if you are steel company producing it so it was dealing with those challenges which are the standard you could read the same thing in the textbook but it was a one of these special times for a number of reasons one there was revolutionary advances in the steel production technology this was not my area of expertise per se but how you made the steel and cast it and there were a number of these professors and universities in Canada that I referred to that were experts in this area and their research was addressing these problems what I and others were involved with was more the downstream processing hot rolling and heat treating but predominantly hot rolling so there was a significant change I don't want to overuse the word revolutionary but it was in the steels themselves so they are called micro alloyed steels so there are new steels the idea had been developed maybe 10 years earlier so this was ideal for this pipeline product and all these people that were working and this was more what I and others were working on is how to process, how to roll these micro alloyed steels control the microstructures you had to study the microstructures to improve the problems you could be a bit long winded I did want to hear about that you also work on metal matrix composite materials could you tell me more about that research well, a little bit this was I started and did this when I first moved to Queens but in fact it was a relatively short lived area of my research Alcan I believe it was still Alcan at the time had a technology for manufacturing these aluminum base or aluminum matrix metal matrix composites and so it was it was sort of natural for me to start up and others research in this area the materials were readily available from Alcan but I really the work that I did was really using these materials as a model material to study the fracture behavior of materials in general with a soft matrix and hard particles in it so it was relatively short lived I don't have a lot more to say about it so now going back to your academic career, why did you choose academia versus industry ultimately yes again and maybe this is just me by nature but it was not a planned long term plan that after so many years here I would move there the opportunity arose I was approached and for various reasons it was that time when our children were going off to university so it was appropriate or whatever and so I moved I accepted it was a new challenge it was exciting again thinking about it maybe not so many years later I realized that I had treated this well structured life at CanMet where I had access to really all of the facilities and equipment and pilot scale equipment what we call where you can meet relatively large amounts of steel they had furnaces you could make whatever composition you wanted and ways to roll out the study of the microscopes and many technicians and so on so I traded that for the much I'm going to say smaller scale research at a university less equipment no technicians to speak of but many enthusiastic grad students all be at temporary it's a different the world needs both types so when you work for CanMet you of course had a relationship with academia too through your colleagues when you work at Queens what was the relationship like with industry and with government organizations okay I'll many of these questions you're posing to me I get to them eventually but I say something first I'm going to do the same here so when I was at CanMet I in retrospect I think I felt when I thought about it that I mean we were doing a lot of work in this area that I've talked about we studied it we gave presentations at conferences and wrote papers and published and so on but I think I had the feeling that I wasn't really drilling down deeply into the mechanisms of what was going on you know that level of research and I probably got this thinking by listening to my colleagues in universities and what they were doing in their presentations and so on so that may have been part of the reason to say okay maybe I should move to the academic side and try that and I guess thinking about it now that was accurate in that the work that I am one does at university even though it was in the same field essentially with students and post-doctoral researchers you certainly did study the more fundamental aspects as you're expected to that's what I do what is the innovation or set of innovations that you are the most proud of or research that you think had the biggest impact well I've been accused of over-modesty you know so please don't be modest they say it's well deserved yes well so what was my area of research I've described it in general in the processing microstructure properties of steel but you know what did I and my colleagues and students and so on really really do well we we used laboratory simulations to simulate the processing that occurs in steel mill so this is done on a relatively small scale but to be able to control the conditions of temperature and deformation of your material in particular composition and then to study in detail using state-of-the-art microscopes and to relate this to the mechanical properties so I I think to characterize my research briefly I did that but usually or maybe always in conjunction with the steel company with an industry that was going to use this particular material and so on so basically there would be a particular problem or particular situation to be addressed there was an area of possibility of advance and what we would do in the laboratory was to do laboratory simulation experiments and microstructure and so so you asked about you know what am I most proud of I guess I'm proud of the overall outcome of all of that but to give you you know an example of a success story so it was a post-doctor researcher Elena Paralloma and she has had an interesting story so she came from Ukraine I had obtained this research grant to do this research with one of the steel companies can I name the steel company yes absolutely and so I needed a lead researcher so I've been trying to find any things that always had to be done relatively quickly or it was late or whatever and you know I heard from one of my colleagues that so this was just after the Soviet Union was dissolving it was just after the Chernobyl disaster the reactor in Ukraine and I heard from a colleague that not sure who did it may be in the steel companies but a group of people brought over a group of scientists engineers from Ukraine to see about employment in Canada and so on and one of these people my colleague knew that I was looking for someone and said oh you know you should contact this group you might find someone so by the time all of this happened the group was heading back to Ukraine but anyhow I managed to find that Atlanta I didn't know at the time was in Ottawa I was at Kingston she was due to return to Ukraine the next day and I drove up to Ottawa and managed to talk to her in a hotel lobby and while the rest is history as they say that she came and worked with me and you know I quickly found out that she was a superb scientist and knew what she was doing and the way she went but the project she worked on with Stelco was one of these ideal situations so I would hold it as a textbook for university industry interaction so she worked closely with the engineer in a strip mail that was responsible for processing and wanted to improve what they were doing and she carried out laboratory experiments to simulate this and got some very interesting results published to a few papers that were very well received so this is a highlight that stands out in my mind most other things I did were very similar but this but she well I mentioned Chernobyl why I subsequently found out so she was a single mother she had a daughter of 7 years old something at the time and she was very concerned about her daughter living in Ukraine because of the fallout from the radio I could follow anyhow and she obviously was concerned about her future long term employment so while she was doing all this wonderful work with me she was looking around applying for jobs and she obtained a faculty position in Australia so she went to university there she's since moved but long story short she has become a surprising research star in Australia in the world of steel research so that's a great story that's a success definitely the daughter was just married a year ago yes so what was the most dysfunctional project well I won't go on at length but what I just said was an example of wonderful successful project the way it should work there was another project not so many years later also with a steel company also Stelco and this was different steel online pipe steel it had all the makings that we had university industry and CAMMET was involved as well so textbook in that regard but for some reason as the project progressed over two or three years things just weren't working communications were bad among the various groups the industrial partners Stelco seemed to be changing their mind and so on and it we were working on plate steel and so this was to improve their processing for their plate mill where they manufactured the plate and just as the project was ending three years to make it normal term I found out they were closing their plate mill so it's sort of a textbook disaster story that well I learned subsequently that Stelco was in serious financial problems and not shortly thereafter we were taken over by US Steel so it was really a case of me us running this research project with the company when the company had serious problems and things were that I didn't really know about and I was wondering what was going on with this research project and that's my disaster story you are an editor of the Canadian Metallurgical Quarter what are your goals for this publication well my goals is as a concerned citizen now I guess but directly involved so as you know I'm sure the Canadian Metallurgical Quarter will be the CNFQ is the Journal of Metsock or it is the Metsock Journal I feel it's a peer reviewed journal that publishes work across the spectrum of the Metsock mineral processing hydro-pyrometallurgy physical metallurgy and so on it is in a difficult or challenging situation and that it competes head on with monthly international journals in the field of their oldest fields that I just mentioned so you know you asked me what is my view or the goal of the CNFQ I would say survival it's doing well it's always been strongly supported by Metsock as an organization but by the people and the researchers that submit their work so I'm optimistic I think it's doing well it's published by a multinational publisher now Taylor and Francis in there that's a positive thing so I look forward to many years I look forward to reading it for many years I do what are your thoughts on innovation culture in Canada in the past and today this is an interesting thing well I was going to say for me but for everyone I expect so we all read here the topic innovation is much more prevalent now I think that it ever was and I suppose everyone has an opinion which is probably a good thing I'm going to say I think it's a bit overblown I think in this I mean certainly we live and die or succeed or not in the long run based on innovation being able to improve and ultimately raise their standard of living and so on the question is how you do that and no one is quite clear and therefore it was great controversy so my feel is that trying to concentrate on innovation and even the word but the process which to me means oh we have to create an environment we have to give people that they will think in a way out of the box and so on and so forth these things are important but I feel we should just back off a bit and think about how all of the great innovations have come about that have got us to where we are now and I think most of them come about now they require someone to suddenly say oh maybe we should try this we've never tried before but I think that situation normally arises while people are doing I know say normal engineering things or the engineering process in other words they're designed using what is your current knowledge and expertise looking at what are the ways we can advance incrementally and experimenting trying out these now as long as you have enough people doing that then every once in a while somebody will shoot at them so I guess my concern is that people are trying to make the quantum leap at the same time fewer people are doing this base development and I'm concerned about that. I think I agree with you these were very interesting thoughts we very much appreciate that Do you see any change in the way that academic teaching is done now and throughout your career? Well my career was a second half career of teaching but nevertheless absolutely in very relatively recently in the past five or ten years maybe even five years at a time I must say that I have ceased to teach full time but nevertheless the advances in electronic technology and teaching technology or communication technology and so on have changed how teaching is done in universities it can be tremendously online courses artificial intelligence labs computer assisted visual aspects in lectures and so on but I feel all of these technologies are just tremendous assists to help good teachers teach better good teachers will learn how to take advantage of these things and use them so I think that's all for a plus it's probably led to on the average larger class sizes especially in the first and second year my experience is just with engineering programs but nevertheless I think overall it will improve the educational experience and accomplish things because it's really these are really tools used by good teachers you are an academic you work with industry you work with the government so what would you say to a young student of metallurgy today what advice would you give them I'm going to have a short answer for but possibly because that's the most challenging question we have here and it really relates back to what I was saying about Professor Bill Weingart when he was advising me and that is and I say this often to students who are thinking of graduate studies and are looking where should I graduate studies find the number one expert in the world that is in your field or topic of interest and communicate, establish a relationship go and work with him or her it's an excellent advice as a historian of technology I would be really interested in knowing what you consider events that we must study that we must remember in the history of metallurgy in the development of metallurgy in Canada either successes or failures so I'm going to cop out an old expression on that I guess I have not spent enough time yet researching the history myself to know the things that have happened within my career and I well there are many things I didn't use the term Sputnik in our discussion but that had an important time but that wasn't a Canadian per se I'm going to refer you to this document that was produced three or four years ago on the 50th anniversary of the Metsoft where a number of people put together and we all contributed to it now that was looking at the past 50 years but that certainly covers that in terms of the highlights if I have any other ideas of significant things that have not been discovered by the historians I will email you what are you proudest of in your life in my life in my life I will say what you can expect is my family my wife my two daughters and now their families grandchildren I mean this is a very human thing but I must say since you asked that's the number one thing in my life neither of our two daughters went anywhere near engineering but I take that as a sense of their independence their intelligence and so on watching with interest our grandchildren as they are approaching their university their decisions but anyhow my wife has been incredibly supportive to me through all of the things that we've been talking about here the move from Ottawa to Kingston I went to Queens created some difficulty for her she had a very good job in Ottawa and so on and so forth that was not an issue what am I proud of in my work we've talked about what sort of things I did I guess just being able to participate in that and do it I enjoyed it is there anything guys you would like to add I can't think of anything thank you