{"id":1805,"date":"2014-02-10T15:14:21","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T23:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/?p=1805"},"modified":"2014-02-18T09:53:08","modified_gmt":"2014-02-18T17:53:08","slug":"ken-hedberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/2014\/02\/10\/ken-hedberg\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Hedberg; OSU’s 94-Year-Old Enigmatic Researcher"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n \"Ken<\/a>\n
Ken Hedberg, a professor in the department of chemistry, moved into his office in the basement of Gilbert Hall in the early 1960s. (Photo by: Justin Quinn – Daily Barometer)<\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n

Originally printed in The Daily Barometer<\/a>, Wednesday, February 5, 2014 (used with permission)<\/p>\n

By:\u00a0Dacotah-Victoria Splichalova<\/strong><\/p>\n

Professor Ken Hedberg makes waves in his field after nearly 30 years in retirement.<\/em><\/p>\n

He tells everyone to \u201cjust call me Ken.\u201d<\/p>\n

Professor Ken Hedberg is an Oregon State University alumnus and the longest emeritus faculty researcher to continue researching after retirement for nearly 30 years.<\/p>\n

Hedberg was born in Portland on Feb. 2, 1920. His father only completed eighth grade, and his mother didn\u2019t continue her education after high school.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoth of my parents were incredibly smart,\u201d Hedberg said.<\/p>\n

When the Great Depression<\/a> hit, Hedberg\u2019s father lost his job, which put the family in financial straits.<\/p>\n

Hedberg recalls the lights being shut off in his home for periods of time; food rationing became a reality.<\/p>\n

This experience left a strong imprint on Hedberg.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father said to me in my early teens that with every dollar I made, he would match for my college education,\u201d Hedberg said, \u201cbut then how the depression hit us and with my father being out of work for such a long time \u2014 I knew that this promise would not come to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Readjusting through a series of moves across the state, Hedberg, his mother and his sister moved to Corvallis with the goal in mind for the Hedberg children to attend OSU, while Hedberg\u2019s father took a job working on the coast.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was so impressed by how my mother and my father came together to see what options they had in order to do the best for our family,\u201d Hedberg said.<\/p>\n

In order to meet this goal, Hedberg\u2019s mother ran a boarding house within their home.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a lot of work for my mother \u2014 the cooking the cleaning,\u201d Hedberg said. \u201cAlmost 75 years later, I wouldn\u2019t be seated here nor carrying out my research if my mother didn\u2019t work as hard as she did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graduating OSU in the 1940s, Hedberg attended graduate school at the California Institute of Technology<\/a> in Pasadena, Calif., where he first met Dr. Linus Pauling<\/a>, a fellow OSU graduate and head of the department of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n

For the young graduate student, Pauling took note of Hedberg\u2019s talents and intelligence and pushed Hedberg to pursue research that he was interested in. Pauling supported Hedberg by cultivating channels of opportunities and became a close, lifelong mentor and friend.<\/p>\n

Upon completing his Ph.D., Hedberg was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship<\/a> and Fulbright Scholar Program<\/a> within the same year carrying out his research in Oslo.<\/p>\n

Hedberg enjoyed exploring and seeing all the sites that the Norwegian culture offered him.<\/p>\n

One warm summer evening in Oslo, Hedberg, a lover of chamber music, booked a ticket to attend an outdoor performance.<\/p>\n

While waiting in line to pick up his ticket, Hedberg looked over to see a young woman, a woman researcher who worked with him in his new lab. She too was picking up her ticket for the show.<\/p>\n

They entered together.<\/p>\n

\u201cFollowing, we went to a famous restaurant called Blom,\u201d Hedberg said. \u201cWe had some snacks and munchies and walked our separate ways home.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the first evening of the rest of their lives.<\/p>\n

The couple married. Sixty years later, Lise and Ken Hedberg have two children \u2014 who respectively graduated from Stanford University and Harvard University \u2014 and four grandchildren.<\/p>\n

In the early years, Hedberg worked at Caltech. Yearning to leave the Southern California smog, Hedberg decided to return with his family to beautiful Oregon to carry out his research and teach chemistry at his alma mater in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Hedberg retired from OSU in 1986.<\/p>\n

Monday through Friday, Hedberg still arrives in the mornings to work on his research.<\/p>\n

Hedberg is considered a sort of phenomena in the chemistry department.<\/p>\n

He is an internationally recognized scientist and is one of the world\u2019s pioneers in the development of electron diffraction and the study of molecular structures and intramolecular dynamics.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Hedberg is the only researcher in OSU history to remain continuously funded, while being retired.<\/p>\n

\u201cKen\u2019s been retired \u2014 but not retired \u2014 for almost as long as I\u2019ve been here,\u201d said Phillip Watson, professor of chemistry at OSU.<\/p>\n

Working for free, Hedberg continues to conduct his research at OSU and make scientific advancements within his field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally printed in The Daily Barometer, Wednesday, February 5, 2014 (used with permission) By:\u00a0Dacotah-Victoria Splichalova Professor Ken Hedberg makes waves in his field after nearly 30 years in retirement. He tells everyone to \u201cjust call me Ken.\u201d Professor Ken Hedberg is an Oregon State University alumnus and the longest emeritus faculty researcher to continue researching… Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3656,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187099],"tags":[199179,111,199189,199188,187042,1764,523],"class_list":["post-1805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faculty-mentions","tag-dacotah-victoria-splichalova","tag-daily-barometer","tag-fulbright-program","tag-guggenheim-fellowship","tag-ken-hedberg","tag-linus-pauling","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3656"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1805"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1841,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805\/revisions\/1841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/erlenmeyer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}