Robert B. Calhoun

Robert B. Calhoun

249 Elm St
Oberlin OH 44074-1503
440-774-8815
email: rob(at-sign)calhoun.net
you can also use my alum.mit account (user rcalhoun).

City Council

I am running for City Council in Oberlin. Here's my campaign web site.

Who I am and what I do

Employment

I am the director of software engineering for ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter develops and sells a gunshot location system that is sold to law enforcement.

Prior to that I worked for Qwerta, a materials research and consulting company, and for San Francisco Industrial Software.

Ph.D. Thesis Project

My Ph.D. is in Metallurgy, from the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. I studied the deformation behavior of silver chloride-glass composites under small applied tensile loads. Silver chloride was used as a model material; the goal was to better understand the deformation behavior of metal matrix composites, such as aluminum reinforced with silicon carbide particles. Such composite materials have superior stiffness, wear resistance, and high temperature properties when compared to unreinforced metals. One potential application for such materials is the brake rotor in a car; currently, these rotors are made with cast iron. Reinforced aluminum has better thermal conductivity and much lower mass, which would lead to an increase in the fuel economy of the auto.

Thesis stuff to look at:

Calhoun and Mortensen, Equilibrium Shape of Prismatic Dislocation Loops Under Uniform Stress Acta Materialia 47(8), pp. 2357-2365 (1999)
Thesis abstract.
A typical photograph from my work.
Download a Postscript version of my thesis. (35 MB!)

My project utilized the unusual light sensitivity of silver chloride to decorate dislocations with small particles of metallic silver. This allowed the dislocations to be imaged with an optical microscope instead of the transmission electron microscope usually used. The advantage of the technique was that I could image dislocations 25-35 microns deep within a sample, and make measurements on very large samples (1 cm²). (In contrast, the maximum sample thickness in TEM is around 1 micron.) The disadvantage of the technique was its low resolution and its technical difficulty. (For example, I had to work in a cleanroom under safelights. There, I looked like this.)

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Other Projects

I co-authored a book chapter about dislocations in MMCs and really am trying to finish up a couple of papers on that subject from grad school. (Really! I am going to finish them!)

Here are some links to some other random stuff on my web site:

My opinions on safety glasses.
How to fix the front bezel on a Power Macintosh 8500/9500.
The Scream-O-Lantern from Halloween 1999.
Did Al Gore invent the Internet? Here's something I wrote for a local newspaper.
They didn't publish it.

Personal

When I was young I lived at TEP.

I am the editor of the CF-WEB website.

I am married to Elizabeth L. Wilmer. Elizabeth teaches math at Oberlin College.

That's why we moved to Ohio.

OctoberlinFest Info