Making a Difference in the Peace Corps
Mammography Pioneer Sees Eye to Eye with Patients
Innovative Lectures Engage Students’ Interest
Challenging Conventional Wisdom
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Barbara Kanegsberg '67 |
There's cleaning, and then there's critical cleaning. The first is what you do you with the dishes after dinner. The second is what Barbara Kanegsberg '67 does with manufactured products that need to be as pristine as possible in order to function properly: things such as automotive parts, bearings, computer hardware, electronic storage media, implantable hips, motion picture film and precision optics.
"How clean is clean?" she asks. "It's a series of sticky problems, and cleaning depends on the form and function of the product.
"Manufactured objects have specific shapes, and they are made of certain materials," Kanegsberg explains. "To function properly, the surfaces of objects must have the appropriate surface quality and attributes. There are high-performance requirements for many manufactured objects, and those requirements depend on critical cleaning of the surfaces. During the same timeframe that surfaces became more important, manufactured objects themselves became smaller and smaller. The trend continues, and nanodevices are essentially entirely surfaces. As things get smaller and smaller and more critical in terms of usage, there can't be any bits of dirt trapped in the nooks and crannies."
A Rachel Carson aficionado who entered Bryn Mawr College intending to major in English, Kanegsberg was persuaded to switch her major to biology after Professor L. Joe Berry observed her "initial, unfortunate, gastric-related response while observing a dissection of a mouse. Dr. Berry felt that anyone with such an extreme response probably had respect for life and really should be a biologist."
The Freon Lady
After graduating from Bryn Mawr, Kanegsberg earned an M.S. in biochemistry at Rutgers University . During her early career, she worked at BioScience Laboratories developing blood tests in Van Nuys, Calif., and later joined a materials and processes lab at the former defense contractor Litton Industries. Working in Litton's Guidance and Control Systems Division in Woodland Hills, Calif., she was assigned to head a committee charged with reducing the use of Freon and chlorofluorocarbons the company used as cleaning solvents.
Kanegsberg's work in this area took off, and she spearheaded CFC reduction at dozens of Litton's divisions worldwide. She became known as "the Freon Lady," making countless contacts in the industry and at the Environmental Protection Agency, which awarded her a 1996 Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award for her accomplishments in commercial and military process implementation and in regulatory policy research.
Kanegsberg hung out her own shingle in 1994, launching a consultancy named BFK Solutions in Pacific Palisades, Calif., to advise companies on how to replace banned CFC cleaning solvents. As president of BFK, she led the firm's expansion to include the use of all cleaning and other industrial processes that affect the properties of surfaces of manufactured items. Kanegsberg also formed the nonprofit Surface Quality Resource Center to conduct education and outreach among companies and communities impacted by industrial activities, and to foster the development of profitable but environmentally friendly cleaning processes.
Commerce and Environmentalism
Much of Kanegsberg's efforts are devoted to bridging the gap between commerce and environmentalism. As a Bryn Mawr student in the '60s, she held the not uncommon viewpoint that corporate America was bad and environmentalists were good, but with time, growth and experience has come what she terms a more "pragmatic" outlook.
"I have observed that environmentalists, including those in government, are not immune to fostering their own agenda, sometimes at the expense of other aspects of the environment and of worker safety," she says. "On the other hand, many in industry take a voluntary, holistic approach to worker safety and to the environment. I am convinced that we will never achieve true sustainability if industry and environmentalists remain polarized."
In addition to her consulting work, Kanegsberg shares her expertise through publishing. She served as the editor-in-chief of 2001's Handbook for Critical Cleaning, to which she contributed several chapters, and her work has been featured dozens of times in cleaning and contamination-control publications. Kanegsberg also writes a regular column for Controlled Environments Magazine on surface characterization, contamination detection and contamination control for life science, microelectronic and other critical applications.
"I do love language," says Kanegsberg. " I don't expect that Oprah will say, 'Isn't that wonderful, Barbara,' but it's great to be able to communicate things that people will understand. I've seen too many people in the technical arena who feel that technical knowledge is a substitute for communicating effectively. If you know the secret of the universe and you don't tell anybody, you've been at least a little bit selfish and a little bit less than functional as a scientist."
Among her Bryn Mawr influences, Kanegsberg fondly recalls organic chemist Ernst Berliner, W. Alton Jones Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, whose use of humor in lectures inspired her to include levity in her presentations. She also continues to practice what she learned four decades ago in Professor Berry's biological ethics class. "Every day," says Kanegsberg, "I consider the potential positive and negative consequences of my work."
Kanegsberg says it took her some time — at least 20 years — to fully appreciate her Bryn Mawr experience.
"I learned to think critically, creatively and logically," she notes. "The balance of science and arts has allowed me to think independently, to write creatively, to communicate reasonably clearly, and to solve my clients' problems in a manner that actually helps them."
Call it clean living.
Tom Durso writes about science, health care and business for a variety of publications, including the Philadelphia Business Journal and Family Business magazine.