Abbie (Carlstein) Gregg ’74 remembers giving up on wearing lab gloves during her undergraduate research at MIT. There weren’t any small enough to fit her, at a time when undergraduate men outnumbered women on campus 15 to 1. Even so, it was the first time she’d met other women interested in engineering and technology—and she quickly found a home in the Metallurgy Department (now Materials Science and Engineering). Four decades later, Gregg has made a career designing clean rooms and labs for semiconductor manufacturing and research all over the world.
At MIT, Gregg was drawn to semiconductors. For her thesis, she and collaborators sent semiconductor crystals into space on NASA’s Skylab to test the theory that gravity causes non-uniformities in crystal growth, which they predicted would lead to defects in circuit function as chips became more complex. “We brought the crystals back to Earth and we measured them, and sure enough, they were completely uniform,” she recalls; meanwhile, those they’d grown on Earth “had all these non-uniformities.” Gregg would later revisit this work as a “thought experiment” for an aerospace company exploring device fabrication in space.
After MIT, Gregg worked at Fairchild Semiconductor on improving its manufacturing. Through discussions with workers, “I became interested in the built environment, and in optimizing both the human factors and the product yield,” she says.
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