Bill Alston

Tufts Days

A Prof’s Priorities

When he arrived at Tufts, Bill Alston, E67, G80, says he was “really majoring in football.” By the time he went for his master’s degree, he was more committed to mechanical engineering, the field that eventually led him to found his own engineering consulting firm in San Jose, California.

Juggling graduate courses with a full-time job as an engineer at Polaroid, Alston was often late for class. One day, as he hurried into the engineering building for his advanced thermodynamics class, someone grabbed his arm.

It was physics professor Allan Cormack, just back from the ceremony in Sweden where he had accepted the 1979 Nobel Prize in medicine, which he shared with the British electrical engineer Godfrey Hounsfield, for the invention of the CT scan.

“Bill! I’ve been hearing all about the work you’ve been doing and that paper you just published on non-Newtonian fluids,” Cormack said.

Dumbfounded, Alston replied, “Allan, didn’t you just get back from Stockholm?”

Cormack waved the question aside. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “but that was for something I did years ago. I want to talk about your work.” —Sarah Garrigan