My name is Dileep Singh and a friend and colleague of Jules. I first met Jules when I joined Argonne as a post doc about 20 years ago. I had heard about him while in graduate school for his fundamental work on high temperature deformation behavior of oxide and carbide ceramics and their relationships to defect chemistry. He was a fellow of the American Ceramic Society and an associate editor of the Applied Physics Letters and the Journal of the American Ceramic Society. Clearly, he was somebody I looked up to. In the beginning, I interacted with Jules only on a few occasions to use some equipment in his lab.

I came to know Jules much better after I returned to Argonne from a brief stint in industry. In fact, it was Jules who was instrumental in my return, and thereafter, I started to work closely with him on several projects. It was a start of a nine-year collaboration in which I learned so much about and from Jules not only as a scientist, but also as a person.

As a scientist, Jules was a brilliant experimentalist, creative, meticulous, highly organized, persistent, passionate, and very careful in what he did. Jules’ scientific career at Argonne spanned over 44 years in three Argonne divisions Materials Science, Energy Technology, and Energy Systems. He made notable contributions to the field of materials science, to name a few, in high temperature mechanical behavior, diffusion in ceramics, composites, superconductors, and recently, in the area of nanofluids, and thermoelectrics.

Jules was highly respected by his peers and he collaborated with scientists at Argonne as well as from around the world. He was very productive and published over 300 papers and supervised 10 Ph. D. students and numerous post docs. Jules was routinely invited to make presentations at international conferences. Jules served as a technical program manager at DOE at both Basic Energy Sciences and Vehicle Technologies offices. He was very active with the Engineering Conferences International and served on its board. For several years he taught an evening course in ceramics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Past several years, he was leading the thermal management group in the Energy Systems division at Argonne. I often wondered how he found the time and energy to do all these things.

One thing that struck me right away about Jules was his ability to tackle scientific problems that ranged from those basic in nature to the applied ones. He was extremely excited and gratified when plastic deformation of ceramics, an area in which he conducted a lot of basic work, was used to fabricate an oxygen sensor device. He was proud for the R&D 100 award he received for it and for the several patents on the technology.

There are lots of interesting stories about the creep deformation test equipment in his lab in room DL-106A in bldg. 212, where Jules spent a significant part of his career experimenting. I believe that the test facility was put together by Jules and his colleagues back in mid-seventies. Over the years, I would guess over 30-40 graduate students, post docs, etc., must have used it, numerous quality publications came out of it, and as far as I know a couple of marriages resulted among its users as well.

Those of us who have used the deformation test equipment know that Jules himself used to train everyone. He would always joke that he loved studying creep deformation of materials because after you start the experiment you have 4-5 hours to yourself before you need to come back to get a single datum. And, he would kid that, if needed, one could do the experiment at slower strain rates!

I spent many a days and nights doing experiments with him in the lab, especially when we were using the APS to study grain rotation during deformation. Not only were the experiments very long and non-trivial, but there was always one issue or the other that would come up and be problematic. So, at the start of an experiment, Jules had this habit of saying…”Dileep, can you please say a nice Indian prayer before we get going? At some point I had to tell him, Jules, I am running out of any new Indian prayers!

Not only a great scientist, Jules was a fantastic engineer. He would prefer to build test equipment, rather than buy something off the shelf. He loved to design complex experimental set-ups and patiently tinker with them till they worked perfectly. Only recently, he helped design and build an apparatus to study erosion of materials from nanofluids. One talent that he was very proud of, and I’m not sure if many people know about, was his proficiency at welding platinum wires to make thermocouples. So any time, a thermocouple would break we would have to call him in the lab. He would arrive in the lab, refer to himself as the “maestro”—and would fix the thermocouple. Jules would love to go in the lab and work. Even to his last day at work, I am told he came in the lab to find out where things were with some experiments.

Jules had the knack to reach out and help others. He was always very thoughtful of others and cared. I recall, about 6-7 years ago, we were attending a conference in Italy. Since he was one of the conference organizers he got a fairly spacious hotel room. Jules reached the conference location before me, and since he knew I was coming with my family, on his own accord, he went and got our rooms switched so that we got the bigger room. That was so typical of Jules, always thinking about others.

One of the key traits that Jules possessed was his special sense of humor. He always made everyone comfortable around him, from his program sponsors to the summer interns who worked with him. Once he published a conference paper with the author’s listed as Singh, Singh, Singh, Singh and Routbort. For couple of weeks he went around telling everyone.

As expected in a research group, we did have our share of disagreements. Jules had a very interesting way of telling you when he did not agree with you…by simply saying, “is that so?” He was truly a gentleman and treated everyone with respect. He was always fair and objective.

Jules loved to travel and he made it a point to show us the pictures from all the exotic locations he visited. Once he even went mountain climbing in Nepal. After each trip, he would prepare a slide show, with background music and all, mind you the music had to be classical only or maybe Miles Davis, and he would invite us to the conference room during lunch to watch it. Only a few weeks back he showed us the pictures from his trip to the Galapagos Islands that Anja and he visited over Christmas break. In addition to the far away places, he made his annual trip to Napa Valley as well.

Over the past several years, Jules and I had a tradition of sorts to go for coffee to the cafeteria in the morning (when I arrived at work, since Jules got in before 6 am!) or have lunch together. It was during these times, he would talk about his family, especially, his grand kids, how they were doing in school, taking part in plays, music recitals, gymnastics, and even what Christmas gifts he got for his grandkids. He was always looking forward to going to New York and Texas.

I think many of us will agree with me that Jules was a colleague, mentor, teacher, friend, critic, and a cheerleader. I feel privileged to have known him and to have been associated with him.

I know I will miss him.