Biography | Craig Barrett — The Materials Degrees He Finished on This Farm

People treat Intel chiefs as products of the Santa Clara production floor.

Barrett's first credential was a materials-science doctorate on the Stanford farm, a few miles from the Peninsula towns where he grew up.

Craig R. Barrett was born on 29 August 1939 in San Francisco.

Most later career biographies keep that city as the birthplace.

A 2009 profile placed the childhood farther south, in San Carlos.

The pin that can be stood on is this campus.

He entered Stanford in 1957 on a scholarship and stayed for three degrees in materials science.

The department's own later lists give the bachelor's as 1961.

Career biographies usually close the doctorate in 1964, the year he left for a NATO fellowship in England.

The work lived in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Durand Building, on the engineering side of campus, is the house that still carries that department.

He joined the faculty after the fellowship, first as assistant professor, then associate professor, and remained until 1974.

In those years he published more than forty papers on how microstructure changes the properties of solids.

With William D. Nix and Alan S. Tetelman he wrote Principles of Engineering Materials, issued by Prentice-Hall in 1973.

The textbook outlasted his academic title.

The Hardy Gold Medal of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers came in 1969, while he was still a young faculty member.

Fairchild and then Intel were already pulling materials scientists out of these rooms and onto wafer lines.

The doctorate did not make him a chip designer.

It made him a man who could see a factory as a materials problem.

Photo: Robert Scoble, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Campus view: Tobias Kleinlercher, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.