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Ralph J. Cicerone '65

Atmospheric Scientist Heads National Academy of Sciences

(First published in Technology Review, Dec. 2005/Jan. 2006)

Ralph J. Cicerone '65

Ralph Cicerone was a bit unprepared when he arrived at MIT as an undergraduate in 1961. His public high school didn't offer calculus or a full course in physics. He'd never even taken a final exam. As the first in his family to attend college, Cicerone was just hoping to escape the chronic unemployment that plagued his small, western Pennsylvania town.

In July 2005, Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist whose groundbreaking research in global climate change was recognized on the citation for the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize in chemistry, left his post as chancellor at the University of California, Irvine, to become president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Cicerone also chairs the National Research Council, a NAS agency that engages in science and engineering research for the government and the public.

With his new job, Cicerone and his wife, Carol, now live in Washington, D.C. Their daughter Sara, 30, received a PhD in structural engineering last year from the University of California, San Diego.

At MIT, however, Cicerone did not get off to a promising start. Early on, a faculty member suggested he drop electrical engineering and choose a less difficult major. "A professor told me that I wasn't going to be able to succeed in this particular curriculum, and I should take something easier," Cicerone recalls. "He didn't think I was well enough prepared, and I wasn't."

Another student might have been crushed. Cicerone took it as a challenge. He immersed himself in his studies, realizing in the process that learning was his vocation—not just a way to find a job.

As a senior, Cicerone crowned his MIT experience with a year of intense research into plasma physics—and he captained the varsity baseball team. Then at the University of Illinois, he earned master's and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and physics. Later, as a faculty member at the University of Michigan, Cicerone and Richard Stolarski showed that free chlorine atoms could decompose ozone catalytically.

"I got involved in a hot, new field where almost anything you would learn was a discovery," he remembers. "It got me very excited about using science and learning new science—pure science—then applying that science to human enterprise."