Three Years Well Spent
Martin Webster | TLT President's Report July 2015
How a short trip to the U.S. turned into a 26-year (and counting) journey with STLE.
STLE has shown me that, rather than saying no, there are significant rewards to saying yes.
LAST YEAR OUR IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT DR. MAUREEN HUNTER used the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken to help illustrate her STLE journey. While I do not have a suitable poetic reference, I would like to share my own journey, which has been intertwined with my professional growth and personal life.
Like Maureen’s, my journey started in 1989, although it involved crossing the Atlantic Ocean. After completing my graduate studies and spending four years in the industry in the U.K., I was offered my dream job to become a member of the scientific staff at Mobil’s Princeton, N.J.-based, Central Research Laboratory. The decision to leave our native England was not taken lightly by my new wife Janet and me. After much discussion we agreed that it would be a wonderful adventure and decided to try it for three years after which we would consider whether to make it a permanent move.
Once settled in the U.S. I found myself working on a broad range of lubrication and tribology-related problems. My then boss, friend and mentor Dr. Andrew Jackson encouraged me to attend the ASME/STLE International Joint Tribology Conference in the fall of 1989. It was my first U.S. conference, and I was thrilled to interact with the great names in tribology whose work I studied during my graduate years.
Afterward I was determined to make attending STLE’s national meetings part of my yearly calendar. I quickly found myself presenting my own work, organizing and chairing sessions and eventually chairing technical committees. Without realizing it, I had come to value active participation at these large meetings, and it has been a rare year in which I have missed either the International Joint Tribology Conference, recently replaced by the STLE Tribology Frontiers Conference, or the annual meeting.
I also began attending my local section meetings. This expanded my network and appreciation of topics outside of my immediate research interests. The regularly organized trips to local industries and interactions with additive suppliers proved invaluable when I was asked to take on a new position at Mobil in lubricant product development.
Some of my colleagues have expressed surprise at my enthusiastic involvement in the more routine STLE activities, even suggesting that I learn how to say no. An example is the 10 years I served as STLE’s index editor on the Editorial & Publications Committee. This required me to compile the yearly index of articles published in our Tribology Transactions peer-reviewed journal and Lubrication Engineering magazine, TLT’s predecessor. This consumed a significant amount of my free time in October and November as I tried to speed read all the papers to identify key words and subsequently assemble the index.
Of course, today online keyword searches deliver results in a fraction of a second, rendering my old indexing system obsolete. Yet, I would not change my time investment one bit because each year I obtained a good snapshot of emerging trends and who was leading them. My experience has been that, rather than saying no, there are significant rewards to saying yes.
I now find myself embarking on a new STLE adventure as I look forward to serving as your president. I consider myself fortunate to continue working with the best group of volunteer leaders of any professional society and a highly talented staff at our headquarters. I also look forward to meeting and interacting with many of you as I visit local sections.
Our journey since 1989 has passed in the blink of an eye. In that time warp we call life, we find ourselves blessed with two wonderful and fully grown sons who speak fluent New Jersey, interesting and rewarding careers and for me an ever-increasing group of STLE friends and colleagues. To us it feels like we are still waiting for that initial three-year contract we had with ourselves to expire. All I can say is that it has been three years well spent.
Thinking again about Maureen’s poetic reference all those years back, perhaps I, too, benefited from taking the road less traveled.
Martin Webster is a senior research associate for ExxonMobil Research and Engineering in Annandale, N.J. You can reach him at martin.n.webster@exxonmobil.com.