Perseverance pushes Puskas to Charles Goodyear Medal

BEACHWOOD, Ohio—Judit Puskas took a bit of a circuitous route to becoming the first female recipient of the ACS Rubber Division's Charles Goodyear Medal, the most prestigious honor given by the technical association.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, her career has had stops in her native country, Canada and two previous stints at the University of Akron before landing back at the school for a third time in 2004. She currently is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and in 2014 was named the Joseph M. Gingo Chair at the university.

Along the way, Puskas has seen that politics can play a disruptive role both in industry and academia, and she hasn't shied away from standing up for herself when facing the discrimination and obstacles scores of females have faced in her profession.

And if that isn't enough intrigue, she and her husband—Gabor Kaszas, who retired last year from Goodyear—at one point had to deal with a request from their home government to engage in industrial espionage, a situation that altered their career paths.

When the Rubber Division honored her during its spring meeting in Beachwood, it cited her work on a variety of polymer and elastomer research that has ranged from working to find a replacement to natural rubber to her current work looking at the integration of breast reconstruction and cancer research.

In between, she has received more than a handful of awards, been published in more than 370 publications, been the inventor or co-inventor of 31 U.S. patents and applications, chaired a number of international conferences, and raised millions in grants, funding and licensing fees that have benefited the institutions where she has taught and performed research.

But that's just a brief snippet of the journey that brought her the Charles Goodyear Medal, and there's no sign that she's looking to slow down.

Educated in a Communist state

Puskas was born in Hungary after World War II, when the Eastern European country still was a Communist nation, a situation that lasted until the revolutions of 1989. The one good thing about Communism, she said, was that women were declared to be equal, meaning they had to work but also had access to advanced educational opportunities.

She was involved in gymnastics and choir, and also enjoyed drawing and painting, but it was at the eighth grade level that her future was steered toward science. Much like the German educational system, it was at this point where teachers helped decide a student's aptitude.

"They streamline people, so those who are intellectual have a chance to go to high school and university," Puskas said during an interview at the Rubber Division event in Beachwood.

She was a straight-A student at the time, but also had other diverse interests. When her mother talked to the art teacher, she was told that Puskas was very good, but that it was difficult to make a living as an artist.

Her chemistry teacher was a university professor who participated in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and was demoted from her professorship to teach in an elementary school. She picked Puskas out, giving her special problems to work on.

When her mother told the chemistry teacher about her daughter's interest in art, the teacher replied: "Nonsense. She is going into chemistry."

And Puskas did like chemistry and found it challenging. She went to a famous school in Hungary that was a combination of high school and training to be a chemical technician. "What is interesting is that it was such a good school, I got a job offer after my graduation that had a higher salary than after my university graduation," Puskas said.

From there it was onto the Technical University of Budapest, where they accepted 200 students into chemical engineering and 20 into the university of the sciences. "I was very pragmatic, so I thought I had a better chance to go for the 200," she said.

Puskas also found an early example how males often got preferential treatment, even in a system where females were declared to be equal. She said in the entrance exam for the chemical engineering program, the girls outperformed the boys in math, physics and chemistry. She said the university didn't want more than half the class to be female, so it lowered the acceptance standards for the males. Still, her chemical engineering class was 40 percent females.

After the second year, students had to declare a major, with one being polymers, encompassing rubber and plastics. Again showing her pragmatism, she went to the dean's office and talked to the secretary. "I asked her, 'So which major gets the highest salary and the most job offers?' And she said, 'Polymers.' "

That made the decision for her, and she was joined by her boyfriend and future husband in the major. The five-year program ended with her getting the equivalent of a master's in organic and biochemical engineering in 1977.

But her first job following graduation was not related to polymers. "I went to work for the Industrial Research Institute for Electronics," Puskas said. "Our first job was to reverse-engineer the Intel 8080 chip. We did it, and it was a fabulous time."

First stint in Akron

When she and Kaszas first came to the University of Akron in 1980, it was her husband who was on scholarship, with Puskas along as a spouse. Not one to sit at home, she joined Kaszas at the lab, run by Joseph Kennedy, himself the 2008 Charles Goodyear Medalist. There also were several other Hungarian professors working on a joint program with the University of Akron.

A UA professor in chemical engineering offered Puskas a job, but Kennedy wanted her to stay in his lab, so he hired her instead.

The stint in Akron lasted 1½ years, and she said the couple wasn't exactly enthralled with the U.S. Having grown up in a cosmopolitan international city of Budapest, they faced a bit of culture shock when everything seemed to close at 8 p.m. Plus they were starting their family, with their oldest daughter born in October 1981.

So they went back to Hungary to continue work on their doctorates, with Puskas getting hers in 1985 in plastics and rubber technology. Her advisers included professors Ferenc Tudos and Tibor Kelen. During her studies she worked for the Central Research Institute for Plastics and Rubber.

They returned to UA in 1986, and again it was Kaszas who was the official hiree. Now they had two children, and Puskas would go in early to set up experiments, with her husband dropping off the kids in daycare. At noon, she picked up the kids, her husband came home, and the family had dinner around 6 p.m. Then Puskas went back to the school to continue working.

"A lot of people told me I couldn't work with my spouse, but we worked very well together," she said.

Fate sends family north

The family stayed in Akron until 1988, when they received an offer they had to refuse. Puskas said at this point officials inside the Hungarian government asked the couple to perform acts of industrial espionage. "I'm not naming names, but we were approached," she said. "The offer was, 'We are going to pay you, but you have to get information.'"

Puskas and Kaszas discussed the offer, and declined to participate. But that came with repercussions. Her father was interrogated by police in Hungary.

The couple also didn't realize they were in the U.S. on a special J-1 visa that couldn't be converted to an immigrant visa. "Our lawyer said you either have to go back to Hungary, which we couldn't do because of the situation, or you have to go to a third country," Puskas said.

That left Canada as the most plausible alternative, leading them to interview with Polysar Rubber Corp. in Sarnia, Ontario.

Puskas said she and her husband didn't confide at the time with Kennedy because they didn't want to put him in a tough position. They assumed he didn't know what the Hungarian officials had asked of them, and there were others from the nation still working at the university.

She's not sure whether anyone else had accepted the Hungarian offer to commit espionage, but she does have suspicions, because some people received gifts such as unexpected apartments upon returning home.

Time at Polysar

Puskas was at Polysar from 1989-96, and the operation actually had four different corporate names because of acquisitions. After Polysar, the names included Nova, Miles and Bayer, which itself became Lanxess.

Again, it was her husband who took the lead. "He told them if they didn't hire me, he wasn't going," Puskas said. "They really wanted him, so they reluctantly hired me."

Polysar was good for her in terms of professional development because she learned a lot, but the tenure wasn't without bumps. For one thing, all the management positions at the time were held by British executives. "My manager actually told me point blank (in 1989) that there are the haves and the have-nots," Puskas said.

As a post-doctoral employee, she was working on anti-polymerization in the laboratory. There also was a continuous polymerization plant in Texas, and there was a problem that had lagged on for 10 years related to Taktene-55 that resulted in a rubber compound turning canary yellow.

The Canadian and Texas factions had long argued about the issue, with the senior scientist in Canada saying they had never seen it, that the reactor in Texas must be dirty. Of course, they assigned the issue to Puskas, the new kid on the block.

"The first thing I did was a literature search," she said. "It turns out Polysar bought this process from Goodrich. I went back to the original patents, and there were indications what this yellow compound was."

She did experiments, demonstrating the yellow compound was forming. The senior scientist went ballistic, she said, complaining to her boss. "So my boss came and said, 'How dare you challenge a senior scientist,' " Puskas said. "But then somebody left a polymerization bottle overnight that they didn't terminate. And guess what? In the morning it was canary yellow. But it took time, and nobody realized it took time."

She developed online and off-line process control tools, she said, that are still in operation. She felt, "kind of vindicated," but said her boss still wanted her fired, saying she wasn't a team player. A human resource official, however, intervened, and instead she was sent to take a course on how to do teamwork.

When Bayer bought the rubber operations of Polysar, there was a cultural clash between the new German owners and the British executives. Eventually, Bayer replaced all the British managers with Germans. This worked out well for Puskas and her husband, she said, because Hungary was similar culturally to Germany.

Puskas eventually became head of global research for butyl technology and her husband a similar role for halobutyl. During her time, she helped develop a number of new technologies—bimodal butyl, one-step halobutyl, branched butyl, liquid carbon dioxide process—that resulted in patents. She also mentored younger colleagues, including 10 interns from Canadian industry.

Return to academia

Despite the successes, she decided in 1996 that industrial work wasn't for her, instead wanting to return to an academic environment.

She saw a report in a Canadian newspaper that the nation was having trouble finding female engineering professors. Figuring she had a pretty good track record, she sent her curriculum vitae to all 40 Canadian universities. "I got 40 negative answers," Puskas said. "I still have the letters."

But she found out there was a program in Canada for industrial research chairs, where if industry contributed the government matched it. She approached her boss, and asked that Bayer contribute her salary that, when combined with the government funding, would total $300,000 a year.

Puskas then went back to the University of Western Ontario with a proposition. "I said, 'I'm bringing $300,000 a year for five years. Do you have a position for me?' And they did."

At first she was a bit reluctant, because the school didn't offer tenure. She sought advice from Kennedy, her mentor from the University of Akron. He told her not to worry, that if she did good work they'd keep her. And after two years, she earned tenure.

Puskas stayed at the University of Western Ontario until 2004, when Kennedy urged her to bring her industrial chair to UA. She told him the funding wouldn't include the Canadian matching grant. It turned out, though, the Bayer head of research at the time was a UA alumnus, so he was delighted to have Puskas take her work to his alma mater.

She discussed the proposal with Frank Kelley, at the time dean of the UA College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering. After contracts were signed, she took over what would then be called the Lanxess Industrial Chair, with the name change coming a day after she began her third stint at UA.

Things went well there while Kelley was at the helm. Then he retired, the college had an interim dean for two years and a new dean finally put in place. She again found that politics in a university setting can be as bad or worse as those in industry.

UA was working on an Ohio Scholars Proposal that could bring in up to $20 million in funding. The new dean asked her to work on it, and she spent extra time writing the bulk of the technical part of the proposal and gathering letters of support from industry.

"So imagine when I heard it on the radio that there was a big announcement that the University of Akron was successful," Puskas said. "They got $8 million, the governor himself came and announced this in a big event, and I wasn't even invited."

She was livid. Having had to learn to defend herself in similar situations earlier in her career, she tends to go to the top. Puskas spoke with the university president, who said it must have been an oversight. But when she saw a copy of the proposal, she claimed her name had been deleted, though her work was prominent.

Puskas said she planned to leave the university, but her husband was working at Goodyear at the time. The university president came up with an alternate solution, which resulted in her transferring to her current position at the UA College of Engineering.

Crowning achievement

She has gathered her fair share of awards during her career. A sampling includes the 1999 Professional Engineers of Ontario (Canada) Medal in Research and Development; a 2000 Premier's Research Excellence Award; the 2004 Mercator Professorship Award from the DFG German Research Foundation; and the 2009 Chemistry of Thermoplastic Elastomers Award of the Rubber Division.

She raised more than $4 million for research in Canada, and more than $10 million overall since joining UA. And as co-inventor of the polymer used on the Taxus-brand coronary stent, she helped the university generate more than $5 million in license fees.

But Puskas calls being the first female recipient of the Charles Goodyear Medal as the crowning achievement.

"Literally I was screaming when I heard on the phone," she said, knowing that two of her mentors—Kennedy and Adel Halasa—had previously won the honor. "With this honor, I feel I am measuring up with these giants of the engineers."

Her future plans are to continue research at UA, finish some of her industrial contracts, and concentrate much of her time on two areas that she has researched for more than a decade: a new rubber in development for use as a wrapping for breast implants, and a polymer-based breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

That work has been ongoing in conjunction with the Cleveland Clinic. She was part of a team that in 2012 received a grant from the GE Healthymagination Cancer Challenge. Friends of hers also started up the Akron-based Breast Cancer Innovation Foundation as a non-profit to help fund the research.

Puskas also again will be chairing the Advanced Material in Healthcare Conference on Oct. 9, being held in conjunction with the Rubber Division's International Elastomer Conference.

And in an era where specialization often is coveted, Puskas defends the choice to study a wide variety of areas during her career. "There are people who are very good at that one narrow area, and they achieve greatness," she said. "But I think there should be tolerance for a wider variety of research areas. Because once I take a problem or a research area, I really dig down deep and I go into the details."