Oral History: Richard M. White (2007)

A native of Denver, Colorado, Richard White earned his A.B. and A.M. degrees in Engineering Science and Applied Physics from Harvard University, followed by a Ph,D., also from Harvard, in 1956. He worked as a research scientist in the microwave division at GE labs in Palo Alto, CA, where he rediscovered the the photoacoustic effect (originally discovered by Alexander Graham Bell in 1880), before returning to academia in the 1960s in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California at Berkeley.

White received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968, and was made a fellow of the IEEE in 1972 "For Contributions to the discovery and applications of surface elastic waves." He received the IEEE's Cledo Brunetti Award in 1986 and became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994. He is currently a Professor Emeritus at Berkeley's Graduate School of Engineering.

In this interview he discusses his groundbreaking research in ultrasonics and surface elastic waves and his distinguished career as an educator.