UW Mars employees, Charlie Strauss and others

Exceptional Employees
J. E. Tillman

Charlie Strauss
Former summer employee
Lakeside High school
Seattle Washington

Most recently

From: charlie strauss
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 3:38 PM
To: Rachel
Subject: tillman scrapbook

Prof. Tillman, Jim,

you gave me my first job in research science. At the time I was senior in high school. I held two jobs that summer, one was working daytime for you programming computers for the noble mars meteorology mission. The other was at night selling magazine subscriptions as a member of the up-and-coming telephone solicitor industry. By day I earned minimum wage and by night...well I remember you saying it was more than a professor's salary when I told you. Apparently I did not learn from this experience as I am now a research scientist :-)

I don't think I ever did any work of which I was more proud. The work was challenging and success was thus satisfying. It was the first time I got to put together all my skills, and the first time I had to teach myself something new so I could accomplish something. At the end of the summer I was convinced I had utterly failed since by then I cold see how I could have done it over much better. I had decided to tell you I wanted to give back all the wages i had been paid because I had not earned them. Before I could you came in and told me how much I had accomplished and offered to put my name on the paper. Which was exactly the right word at the right time. And presumably why when you hear my voice on the phone, it's not asking if you are happy with your long distance service. Of course, I foolishly turned down your authorship offer, not appreciating that research is by its nature usually imperfect, and unfinished.

And really there could not have been a better preparation for my later years in graduate school. It was not the work specifically, but the aspect of being challenged by someone you respect. The work was not a defined chore as might be given to a lot of high schoolers, but mostly just a goal. You expected a lot for my age, gave me the right tools, but did not give me a road map a to how to do it. Thus I learned about guiding oneself and answering your own questions.

Over the years, our correspondence has been intermittent: I've tended to get in touch with you after each segment of my career, college, grad school, first "job", and other times when one looks back on the arc of ones life. Obviously, in the back of my mind was how in hindsight so many things traced back to my first experiences in science.

So I have a lot to thank you for. I'm sure there have been many more you have sent on their way too. And of course as I have my own students encountering their first research I try to challenge them yet make them succeed. It's a wonderful gift to pass along. For all the great science you have done, the heroic role you played in the Mars lander, and the discoveries you made, it may very well be your greatest impact is your work with school children. Of course, "retirement" from the U of W just means you now have more time to work on the next lander and the next school kid. Lucky you.

charlie strauss
Bioscience Division
Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In the linked Baker Laboratory CASP4 report below, Charlie Strauss's unprecedented breakthrough is described. "One of the most important unsolved problems in Molecular Biology is the protein folding problem, which can be stated simply as: given the sequence of amino acids of a protein, what is its three dimensional structure? What makes this problem so important is the fact that the structure of the protein determines its function." During the second half of a year long Sabatical with the Baker Lab, Charlie Strauss became interested in the problem and worked on improving the Baker Lab's software to compete in the CASP4 competition which calculates the structure of selected proteins: the calculations are later comparewd with structures determined by other techniques. At the bottom of the page is a plot of the "average score per target" where "(2 points for a largely correct prediction, 1 point for a somewhat correct prediction, 0 points otherwise)". Due to Charlie's efforts, the Baker Lab's score is 1.75. The highest other score is 0.85 and a rough average of the rest is 0.35!

Please see Strauss accomplishment at the Baker Lab

I believe the actual year was 1979 after his senior year at Lakeside when Charlie was writing software, and processing and plotting Viking Mission atmospheric pressure data; these data led to several of my discoveries about Martian Meteorology. (The software, after about 20 revisions and 18 years, is still in use.) At that time, my computer was the first of a new generation of Super-Mini computers, which handled dozens of users and ran programs far larger than the Academic Computer Center's CDC system.

To expedite processing, Charlie simultaneously used three terminals, each controlling a different stage of the process!

His Lakeside High School teacher recently said about him:

I think I heard a bit from Charlie the year before last and he continues to do impressive things...he was one of most exceptional students ever.

ith which I readily concur.

NOW FOR AN UPDATE

Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 10:52:17 -0700
From: charlie strauss
To: mars@atmos.washington.edu
Subject: science interns

Just a quick note. I was thinking a lot about you lately because I'm the process of trying to find some funding and work to have a high school summer student work at los alamos this summer. I've had graduate students before but never a high school student. I'm very excited because the kid is sharp and I'm personally more interested in encouraging him in science than anything I will get out of it. I feel like I will be giving him a start and I want it to be as good a one as I got from you. So your efforts with me are now passing on to another generation of (potential) scientists. Its a nice thing to think about, huh?

--
Charlie E. M. Strauss
Biosciences division
Los alamos National Laboratory

Other exceptional employees and volunteers

Many former and current employees have made major contributions to these Mars exploration initiatives and the school weather program. Some of them who are still contributing are:

former Computer Science graduate student Jeremy Jaech, now President and CEO of Visio, programmed and provided computer facility support during Viking Mission Operations at UW
former under graduate student Neal Johnson now a staff member, performed in many roles from programming to instrument testing
atmospheric scientist Dr. Harry Edmon, now director of the Departmental Computer Facility
David Warren, system programmer and parent/instigator of the Coe program
Fred Weller, instrument/systems developer, now retired, who developed key computer-Viking Meteorology System Interfaces and volunteered his time to develop the McClure School Research weather station system.
Volunteer George LeCompte who made major contributions to Viking, LFEM and Pathfinder in programming, heat transfer, and developing the Hank Moore resource for LFEM
Volunteer Dr. Donald Sandstrom who is making major contributions in program, software and Education resource development

Bill Guest, who revised and expanded Charlie Strauss's pressure plotting program, and played a major role in writing software and processing the Viking Meteorology record, the only climate record from the surface of another planet
Keith Bankston and Charles Egerton