VT College of Science Magazine Annual 2014 | Page 20

some

Normal

for
is not
normal for others

F

or Nancy Ross, professor and head of the geosciences
department, normal was growing up in Blacksburg and ences and it was great because it encompassed so many areas – it
working a summer job at Shawnee Pool as a lifeguard. Nor- combined my love for biology and geology and even paleontology.
Something about how nature assembles atoms in such an orderly
mal was having a grandmother who was trained as a psyarrangement, and how we can describe it mathematically and see
chiatrist at Johns Hopkins in the 1930s. Normal was a father how it controls the symmetry and physical properties of material –
who was a professor at Virginia Tech and an expert in ichthy- it was fascinating and it resonated with me.”
ology (fish) and herpetology (snakes). Normal was having
the family bathtub turned into a refuge for critters rescued While attending the University of British Columbia for her master’s
in the field. Normal was having a mother who was a profes- degree, Ross realized her road went through a lab and not the field.
sor at Tech who specialized in the genetics of cockroaches. “The first graduate student I met had just returned from field work
and was wrapped in bandages,” she recalled. “He said he got mauled
Normal was imploring mom not to bring her work home.
Not much of what passed for normal for Ross would likely be considered normal by most people, but the eccentricity of it all caught the
attention of a young girl and turned it into a career.
“It would be normal to be rummaging around and finding interesting things hidden away in various drawers, like fossils,” she said. “It
was fascinating and I grew up to love this area as we traveled – not
by the normal means of using a map, but by looking at stream drainages or mountain chains. I had a very diverse and wonderful childhood, even when my father took me in the field to use me as a lab
rat to collect things.”
While Ross’ brother and sister went in a direction opposite of their
parents’ science, Ross found her calling in science relatively early.
“Growing up in Blacksburg next door to Virginia Tech was very different in those days,” she said. “I was a competitive swimmer in
my younger years and was working as a lifeguard, when one of the
women there who I knew, Nancy Gibbs, who was an avid swimmer,
encouraged her husband, Professor Jerry Gibbs [currently an Emeritus University Distinguished Professor], to hire me to do ‘something
more challenging.’ Well, he listened to his wife and took me on
board and instead of spending summer by the pool I came into this
very building [Derring Hall] on the fifth floor and did computer programming – back in the punch card days when you had to run data
on cards through a big IBM mainframe. I was also building crystal
models and little did I realize it was my future direction.”
When considering her undergraduate degree at Virginia Tech, Ross’
first choice was biology, but she had to ask herself an important
question first. “Do I want to be in the same department as my
dad? No, I didn’t. But Professor Gibbs had introduced me to geosci-

18

by a grizzly bear and that’s when I thought, ‘Hmm . . . a lab project
sounds better and better.’ It was the right career choice as I had an
opportunity to use computer programs to predict mineral properties at high pressure, forming the basis for future research.”

After earning a doctoral degree at Arizona State University, Ross
completed post-docs at Stony Brook in New York and with the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C., before moving to England
with her English husband and spending more than a decade at University College London as an assistant and associate professor.
“I was a small-town girl working in one of the biggest cities in the
world and I loved it,” she said. “But one day I received a call about an
opening here and I decided to explore that, and here I am, full circle
back to where I started.”
Since coming back to her
hometown in 2000, Ross has
established a crystallography
lab looking at materials and
what happens to them as the
pressure of the Earth squeezes
atoms together to create new
structures.
“It’s a fascinating example of
material science under extreme conditions that can
lead to new materials with
some interesting properties,”
she said. “So I see myself as a
material scientist who gets a
really big playground to study

WOMEN in SCIENCE

COLLEGE OF SCIENCE ANNUAL