Oral History: Mike Glazer (2018)

Mike Glazer is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick. He was born on May 1st 1943. His PhD research between 1965 and 1968 was under the supervision of Kathleen Lonsdale at University College London, working on the crystallography of organic mixed crystals. In 1968-1969, he was a Fellow at Harvard University, and then from 1969 to 1976 he was at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. In 1976, he was appointed Lecturer in Physics at the Clarendon Laboratory Oxford and as an Official Fellow and Tutor at Jesus College Oxford. Mike Glazer's research has mainly been in understanding the relationship between physical properties of crystals and their structures. He is perhaps best known for his classification system for tilted octahedra in perovskites. He is also one of the co-founders of Oxford Cryosystems Ltd, which supplies the world market in low-temperature apparatus for crystallographers.

This interview covers Mike Glazer’s early life and education and how he became interested in crystallography at a very early age. It shows how he turned from being a very unpromising student at school, who failed most of his exams, into one of the world’s leading crystallographers. His work has given the world a highly-effective and widely-used notation system for describing octahedral tilting in perovskites, a cryogenic cooling system that is widely used in X-ray crystallography, especially for protein structure determination and a system for measuring optical birefringences to very high precision. The interview explains how he has made major contributions to our understanding of ferroelectric materials, their structures and phase transitions and the connections between crystal structure and physical properties. Along the way, there are many fascinating stories about well-known crystallographers, including Lawrence Bragg, Kathleen Lonsdale and Helen Megaw, and how Mike developed a very close relationship with Polish scientists during the 1980’s, a relationship that persists to this day.