When Gerrit Kroesen explains his profession to primary school children, he describes himself as “a teacher of lightning and thunder”.
On his visit to Instituto Superior Técnico, the professor and researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) didn’t talk about these phenomena, but he did give an IST Distinguished Lecture titled “Plasmas in the semiconductor industry: modern trends, opportunities and diversity”. The event took place at the Congress Centre, Alameda campus, on 15th December and focused on the semiconductor industry’s challenges and the Kroesen’s experience in trying to promote gender diversity as the Dean of Applied Physics at TU/e.
On the subject of plasmas and semiconductors, he outlined the history of the industry, referring to the chip acts – when the United States of America and the European Union honed strategy to maintain their competitiveness in the semiconductor market. Comparing the success of these initiatives in the 1980s with more recent chip acts (taking the opportunity to criticise the fact that the word ‘plasma’ doesn’t appear in the European document), Gerrit Kroesen characterised the ‘state of the art’, pointing out that one of the biggest problems in the plasma area is the lack of skilled labour.
In the second part of the Distinguished Lecture, Gerrit Kroesen shared some experiences when he was Dean of Applied Physics at TU/e. With regard to combating inequality in the hiring of men and women, he argued that “‘publish and pray’ doesn’t work” – advertising the search for candidates in a cold, formal and distant way won’t solve the gender gap. He emphasised the need to make a “more personal” contact with candidates, including messages “from people in a position of authority” in the selection process, to encourage those who might apply for the position. The aim is to prevent that those with the necessary skills will not refrain from applying.
A text including a fictitious research career position was distributed to the audience. Analysing the text together with the audience, Kroesen highlighted the good and bad practices (the ‘dos & don’ts’), tearing out phrases that he considered restrictive, such as “it is desirable that your research is relevant to the regional context of the faculty” or “international publications and success in acquiring external funding are expected”.
Gerrit Kroesen, from his interest in science to his relationship with Técnico
“I grew up with analog technology”, says Gerrit Kroesen in an interview before the Distinguished Lecture. “In my teenage years, I used to take apart watches and I quickly realised that I preferred the sciences”. Gerrit Kroesen’s best grades were in mathematics, physics and chemistry, with a particular predilection for the latter – “I had my own laboratory in a hovel at the back of the house, with hundreds of little flasks, Erlenmeyer flasks and different chemicals”, he adds.
However, when the time came to decide what to study, the decision was different: “In 1977, when you studied chemistry, you were studying for unemployment. There was a huge abundance of chemists at the time. “After visiting Open Days at a few universities, I ended up choosing Physics in Eindhoven,” explains the researcher. “My first experience with ‘real physics’ was during my first year as a student, in 1977, when I did a project in the plasma physics group. So, I started very early in that area and never left it.”
The biggest difference between then and now? “Research is no longer motivated by curiosity alone. It has become research with social relevance”. Looking at his current work, Kroesen says “almost everything [the plasma physics group does] is relevant to society. There’s always an application that brings long-term results, five or ten years later”.
The relationship with Técnico came out the following year. “My first visit was in 1978. Every year, our students’ union organised an excursion for its members. That year, we came to Lisbon and, by coincidence, one of the destinations was the group of lasers and plasmas at Técnico”. “It was Carlos Matos Ferreira‘s team”, added Luís Lemos Alves, a professor at Técnico who participated in the conversation, referring to the former president of Técnico, whom Kroesen would later meet at scientific conferences in the field.
As for the current scenario, the professor commented “the main task of universities should be to train workers. If we look at industry, plasma technology is ‘exploding’ in many ways. This gigantic industry – because we’re talking about tens of thousands of people and billions of euros on a global scale – needs trained plasma physicists”. Kroesen went on to talk about one of the topics he would address a few minutes later during the Distinguished Lecture, the aforementioned chip acts: “Forty years ago, the industry’s main question was ‘give us technology’, and that’s what the universities focussed on. The question the industry is asking now is ‘give us people’, and we’re still not answering that sufficiently. I have the feeling that we also have to change our focus a bit – not only trying to do the necessary research, but also training people properly. Anyone in the Netherlands who have studied plasma physics is ‘sucked’ into the industry – even the worst students!” [laughs].
Gender diversity in plasma physics
Regarding the second part of the Distinguished Lecture, the speaker addressed gender diversity in his research area. He recalled an initiative from mid-2010, when TU/e proposed hiring six new team members – only women. “When I started looking around for female candidates, I quickly realised that there were very few. At the time, we had two female professors out of a total of sixteen in the department”. He wasn’t pleased with it. “I thought ‘this is absurd! In France, the participation of women in Physics is 35 per cent, in terms of staff and students. I started to ask myself why this is so and I couldn’t find any justification other than the fact that there is already a basis, a culture that ‘studying physics is not just for boys’.”
The solution to this problem doesn’t seem easy or quick to implement – “I think the biggest obstacle lies in recruitment and in getting the female candidates who may exist to actually apply. This is where things fail in almost every place I know.” The professor also mentioned a ‘cultural issue’. “You also need a change of culture, which isn’t going to happen in ten years – it’s something that takes a whole generation or even more. It could take 40 years (assuming a generation is 20 years or so). We have to create a stimulus”.
One of the things I did in our department was to organise a meeting with some alumnae and ask them ‘what can we do, as a department, to improve the welcoming of female students’. I was surprised by some of the answers: “discouraging recruitment activities exclusively focussed on girls”, giving preference instead to women on staff having more ‘exposure’. “Make sure that the secondary school students who visit us see female teachers walking around” and “make sure that the people who will give them lectures are women”. Someone also put forward the idea ‘laugh more! Kroesen explained that the alumna called for reducing formalities and relaxing atmosphere within the department.
In 2015, at the time of the meeting, 5 per cent of those hired by the team were women. In September 2022, seven years after the meeting, the number had risen to 30 per cent. “The curious thing is that the measures adopted are things we [men] never think about. We need the perspective of the target group. It takes time, but it can be done. I know of other places where these numbers have also risen by a few percentage points to 15 or 20 per cent – they have all kinds of measures, but they’ve forgotten the first step I mentioned, the recruitment”.
Even with these results – which he referred to during the Distinguished Lecture as an indicator of success – the professor admits that it still “takes a bit of luck” to “find the right mechanisms”.
