Meet Past President of ASA, Dr. Lawrence Crum

Dr. Lawrence Crum, a member of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) since 1965, served as ASA Vice President from 1995-1996, and President from 1997-1998. He has received ASA’s awards for best magazine article on acoustics by a professional for “Sonoluminescence” (1995), the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal (2000), the Outstanding Mentor Award (2006), the Gold Medal (2013), and has served on numerous ASA committees[1].

Dr. Crum received all of his degrees from Ohio University: obtaining his B.S. in mathematics in 1963, M.S. in physics in 1965, and his Ph.D. in physics in 1967. He has spent most of his career in academia, a champion of physical and biomedical acoustics, playing an integral role in the creation of the National Center for Physical Acoustics at the University of Mississippi, and was the founder of the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound at the University of Washington. Despite his academic home base, his research has always had an application focus that has led to bettering our world. This is exemplified in his contributions to making lithotripsy a safer process, as well as his current pursuit to use hydrodynamic cavitation to disinfect and desalinate water. He also acquired funding to build the first portable dynastic ultrasound scanner, the Sonosite, which now has approximately 100,000 instruments in service.  Dr. Crum is married to Jane Crum, who once worked as Assistant Director of Research at the University of Mississippi. So the pursuit of research, in his words, “has always been a family business.”

We had the privilege to find out what influenced Dr. Crum and shaped him into who he is today.  We also learned about his experience as ASA president and share that here with you.

Tell us a little about your career path and journey to where you are now.

I grew up on a farm in a rural community in southeastern Ohio, in what can be called Appalachia. I had only three teachers in grade school and only 16 students in my high school graduating class.  I began my undergraduate career at the U. S. Naval Academy studying engineering, but I left the Academy before graduation and finished my degree at Ohio University in mathematics.

Finding a job with just a B.S. in mathematics proved difficult but I had always been interested in physics, so I went to the physics department at Ohio University and asked about the possibility of getting an assistantship for graduate school. My future advisor said I can give you a job tomorrow!  I became a graduate assistant and finished my PhD in physics in three and a half years. After a postdoc under Professor Frederick Vinton Hunt at Harvard in acoustics, I sought a job back at the Naval Academy where I could also coach fencing, a long-time passion of mine (I was NCAA champion in épée in 1963). I spent nine years at the Naval Academy as a faculty member in physics. After a while, I grew tired of teaching the same physics class year after year and started looking for a new job.

I knew some people at the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) and they invited me to take a job there.  While at “Ole Miss”, I obtained tenure, became Frederick A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Physics, and Director of the National Center for Physical Acoustics. But after 10 years, my wife and I were ready to leave Mississippi. I knew some people in Seattle, so I started looking there, but was met with some resistance coming from Mississippi.  Fortunately for me, the Applied Physics Lab (APL) at the University of Washington (UW) was a soft money lab, so if you could bring in money, you could do what you wanted to do.  I was able to win grants and secure funding, so we moved to Seattle where I finished my career.

At UW, I was principal physicist in the APL and a research professor of bioengineering and electrical engineering studying underwater acoustics. But the underwater acoustics program at APL is one of the best in the world and I found that everyone was better than me. I had an opportunity to do a consulting job in California with a group of people building a new device using high intensity focused ultrasound.  I thought this was a fantastic opportunity. So, I wrote some proposals to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); after being awarded substantial funding, I convinced our provost to establish a center at UW focused on this topic.  And as I said, if you had money, doors opened. So using the money I had secured from the NIH and DARPA, I established and became Director of the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound (CIMU) and was a part of this until my retirement. It was a very successful center, at one point having over 60 employees and 15 graduate students.  Several companies were established through collaboration with the center; I also started my own company (Ultrasound Technologies, Inc.), taking a partial leave from the UW for 5 years to run that before selling it and returning to UW for the remainder of my career.

What inspired you to run for ASA president?

I became a member of the ASA as a graduate student in 1965 and have attended nearly every national meeting since. The ASA was not only a professional home for me, but a community of colleagues that influenced and directed my professional career. When I was a graduate student at Ohio University my advisor, Bert Stumpf, told me that if you’re going to be an acoustician, you have to go where acousticians hang out and that was the Acoustical Society of America. I went to a meeting and I found it to be exciting and stimulating. I gave my first paper in physical acoustics and there were five people in that session who became Gold Medal winners and/or ASA president: Bruce Lindsay, Isadore Rudnick, Floyd Dunn, Murray Strasberg, and David Blackstock. All of them wanted to help me in my fledgling career, and I just found that to be wonderfully mentoring.  As an ASA member, I saw old fields mature and new fields emerge, allowing me to stay abreast of the scientific development of acoustics as a major discipline of science itself.  I was active in the affairs of the Society, volunteering for any and all committees that would have me. Thus, it was only natural that I wanted to serve the Society in any role that the members would have me.

What was the biggest challenge you have faced in your career? And as ASA president?

In order to achieve prominence in a scientific discipline, it is necessary to obtain funding to perform research of interest to oneself and to our general society as a whole. In many cases, one has to support graduate students and postdocs to undertake this research. I always had a large group of students and professional staff so it was necessary for me to raise several tens of millions of dollars over my career to support this research.  Accordingly, I faced the constant challenge of writing many proposals to a diverse set of funding agencies, and furthermore, ensuring that these proposals were of sufficient merit to be awarded funding.

As ASA President, we were faced with the growing trend that libraries were trying to reduce their journal subscriptions, including The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA), as the internet became a ready source of digital (and often free) information. This was a big problem for the ASA and it still is.  Historically, JASA’s profits have helped cover the costs of all the other losing cost centers of the Society.  But a decrease in journal subscriptions means that the Society has to find other ways to cover the costs of services provided to its members.  In addition, the ASA became THE acoustical society of the world and it was necessary to meet the needs of an international membership.  One of the ways I tried to do this was by offering electronic journal subscriptions to international members.  This worked for some time, but now with so many things available on the internet, including university-affiliated access to the journal, individual electronic memberships are not as important.

What was your biggest contribution to ASA as president?

As a successful researcher, I often attended meetings in acoustics in several foreign countries and so I proposed that the ASA meet jointly with the International Congress on Acoustics, which we hosted in Seattle of 1998, the year I served as president. Over 2,000 acousticians attended this meeting, making it at that time, the largest meeting of acousticians in the world.  I believe that this meeting introduced not only the world to the ASA, but also ASA members to the world. We have now become a very international society, and perhaps that meeting in some way paved a path toward our more active international involvement.

What surprised you most about being an ASA president?

The shortness of the term meant that it was extremely difficult to achieve anything of substance during one’s presidency. For example, when I was president-elect I wanted to jump start my presidency by giving a presentation about the ideas I had for my term.  But I was not able to do so and it really was not until six months into my presidency, at the first ASA meeting of my term, that I first shared my ideas.  By the time the next meeting came around I was finishing my term.  This does not allow very much time to accomplish anything. I have advocated for a longer presidential term but there are several valid reasons not to change a long-established tradition. For one, it is a prestigious role to be president.  If the term were longer, fewer people would have the chance to be president.