Meet the Penn State deans: Justin Schwartz talks Cubs, 600-foot homers — and fictional faculty
As part of a collaborative effort with Penn State, which is releasing a monthly video on school deans and their perspectives and passions, the Centre Daily Times is continuing a lighthearted Q&A series that highlights a different dean every month in the hopes the local community gets to know them outside of the classroom.
Up next: Justin Schwartz, Harold and Inge Marcus Dean in the Penn State College of Engineering
Schwartz, who holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering from MIT, joined Penn State in 2017 after fruitful stints at both Florida State and N.C. State. He will soon also take on the role of interim Penn State executive vice president and provost, temporarily replacing Nick Jones, as a national search gets underway in the fall. Schwartz is officially set to take on the role Aug. 15.
As dean, Schwartz oversees more than 12,000 students, 500 faculty members and $250 million in annual expenditures. He has increased engineering’s tenure-line faculty by about 30% over four years and has helped grow the college’s endowments by about $50 million every year. He also helped launch the Engineering Equity Initiative; helped create the Law, Policy and Engineering Initiative; and helped establish the Global Building Network.
He also loves baseball and, because he grew up near Chicago, has been a longtime fan of MLB’s Chicago Cubs.
Centre Daily Times: Since you’re a big Cubs fan, let’s start off with an important two-part question here: Since your childhood, what’s been your most memorable Cubs game — whether on radio, TV or in-person — and who’s your favorite Cubs player of all-time?
Justin Schwartz: It’s hard to choose between three and four of the most memorable. So, for one, it was really pregame — not during the game — and it was in ‘77, when I went to a third of their home games. And keep in mind, the Cubs games at that point were all day games at home, and I had school until mid-June. So I went to almost every game when there was no school. And I got to get into the park before the park was open.
And so, once, I was in the dugout with one player pregame and in the clubhouse with one of the player’s kids — and I was just like, wow, what an experience. ... It’s a very different angle than when you’re in the stands and they’re on the field. It was interesting because I developed a deep passion for the game and the team, but also more of an appreciation that they’re just as much people as icons. Seeing someone you see on TV and the All-Star Game in the clubhouse, it’s just a different world.
CDT: I’m going to have to interject here: How’d you get behind the scenes like that as a 12-year-old? And what are some other memorable games or experiences?
Schwartz: So I was president of the Gene Clines fan club because ... by, the time I learned about fan clubs, he was the only one that didn’t have one (laughs). He was one of the Cubs players; he was a part-time starter, part-time bench player. He actually came up as a (Pittsburgh) Pirate. ... I was his fan club president — this is back around ‘77 or ‘78 — when things were a bit more relaxed back then. So the (fan) clubs would have members and you’d have like one game a year where you’d get in the park before it opened, and the player would come out and talk to you. So, this one year he arrived and actually had his son with him, which wasn’t typical, so he invited me in and so I was in there sort of running around wreaking havoc in Wrigley Field before the park opened. ... I can’t not say him as my favorite player because of the personal connection.
So that would be one game. I don’t know if the word “Bartman” means anything to you (editor’s note: Steve Bartman is an infamous Cubs fan who accidentally interfered with a foul ball during a 2003 postseason game, inadvertently helping send the Cubs to a meltdown/loss) — well, I was at that game. So that’s not my favorite, but it’s memorable. That was surreal. Leaving that stadium, you’ve never seen 40,000 people so quiet in your life. People were just sort of wandering around outside the stadium, like in shock. Even the taxis were quiet.
Another really memorable one was in September of ‘84, watching on TV as an undergraduate when they clinched the division. The ‘84 team went on to lose in the playoffs also, but it was like the first time in my lifetime that the playoffs were even possible. And then, of course, there’s Game 7 of the World Series (in 2016) that went 10 innings, waking my son up — and it’s hard to top that one.
CDT: Let’s combine your love of baseball with your love of engineering for this next question. Let me preface this by saying I know you’re a nuclear engineer and this isn’t your area of expertise, but I feel as if you’re more qualified than most to answer it: In your educated opinion, is a 600-foot home run possible? That’s been the subject of a lot of debate.
Schwartz: Yeah, I would say it certainly is possible. I think there’s agreement on Mickey Mantle’s 550, right? I think, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, that’s the one that still shows up as the longest. Mickey Mantle never played in Coors Field (in Denver), right? So, in general, if you go to a higher altitude, balls carry farther. So you can imagine Coors Field with the wind blowing out, with the right humidity level and wrong pitcher.
The other thing that people say has changed over time is, of course, the ball is not the same year after year after year. You get the more “live ball” era. It’s certainly easy to envision.
And then, if you go one step further, you can say let’s not stick with the MLB bat restrictions. So MLB is all wooden bats, but that’s not true at every other level. So imagine taking someone with a high-tech aluminum bat, a ball from the live-ball era at Coors Field with the wind blowing out and a typical Cubs pitcher — let’s just say Cardinals (laughs) — it’s very possible.
That aspect isn’t my research area. But one thing I did look at years ago, early in my career, was what we called looking at performance limits. So we can take that performance-limit mindset, where everything is just as good as it can possibly be, and 600 feet is certainly doable.
CDT: That was a well thought-out answer, so I have high hopes for an engineering question that does center on your area of expertise. You helped establish a world record for the strongest, continuous magnetic field earlier in your career. It’s since been broken by one of your former students. Explain it to me like I’m 5 years old — why was your original record of 25 “Tesla” so important, and what kind of applications does something like this help with in the future?
Schwartz: So, thinking about magnetic fields in everyday life, everybody sort of remembers the Earth’s magnetic field, and that’s less than one gauss, which is just a different unit of measurement. And one Tesla is 10,000 gauss. So 25 Tesla is 250,000 gauss — so somewhere approaching on the order of about a million or so times higher magnetic field than the Earth’s field.
Now, where do you see magnetic fields in day-to-day life, in terms of technology? Probably the most common is an MRI. So, when you have an MRI, you were literally slid into a magnet and there’s a continuous magnetic field and then they use that to do things with your protons and measure your body’s responses to get images. So I have former students, for example, who did their Ph.D.s with me and have gone on to work for GE (General Electric), and they’ve helped design and build MRI magnets. Those are typically a few Tesla in magnetic field strength. ...
So where else would you see magnets? There’s a lot in the tech media now about how fusion reactors, or how there’s progress in fusion reactors, and all of that real progress now is built upon advances we’ve made in the last 30 years in developing superconducting materials and magnets — because those magnets are key to fusion reactors. Where else will you see them? If you follow basic science, you’ve heard of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, right? Everything to do with the Large Hadron Collider ... that’s magnets.
So the No. 1 use of superconducting technology is high-energy physics or MRI. It’s probably MRI at this point. So why was 25 Tesla important? A couple reasons. One, for years, we thought you’d never really get above 20 Tesla. ...
CDT: I’ll leave the follow-up questions to the engineering experts and move on to our last question, which is always our “weirdest.” If you could add one of the following fictional engineers to the Penn State faculty, who would it be and why? We’ve got Angus MacGyver (“MacGyver”), Q (“James Bond”), Tony Stark (“Iron Man”), Wayne Szalinski (“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”) or Mark Watney (“The Martian”).
Schwartz: In the true spirit of creative leadership, I keep coming back to how I want the head of R&D (Research & Development) for Star Wars or the head of R&D for Star Trek. But, if I had to choose from the list, it would be Q, because that’s who I’m most familiar with.
What he’s doing — and maybe this is true of all of them — he’s developing outcomes that are critical at critical times of need. So he’s not developing things like, oh, here’s a whimsical idea. It’s really going to have an impact right away. So that’s part of it. Another piece there is one of our core strengths at Penn State and at the college is Defense R&D. So Q’s on the intelligence side of Defense, but it’s still part of that national security element.
