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a kick,” she says. “It was the only
job I would have taken in DC. I
wanted to be with the people in the
Air Force. I wanted to fly.” While
leading the Air Force, she picked up
another defining number: “I went
supersonic! And I pulled nine Gs.”
There are other important
firsts, too. She is often the first to
arrive at the department in the
morning. “When I get calls at 7
A.M., I don’t have to look at the
caller ID to know who it is,” says
Greitzer, who served as the associ-
ate head and then deputy head of
aero-astro for nearly a decade.
Those early-morning calls often
come because Widnall has solved
a difficult problem they were both
interested in—“usually in a way that
I would never have thought about,
because it’s a carom off this thing
to ricochet off that thing,” he says.
“She’s sort of a force of nature.”
Sometimes, he adds, she tells him
that he is the one who must do
the caroming. “And there’s usually
nothing I can say,” he says. “
Everything she says I should do, I think,
‘Oh, yes … I should.’”
And it’s likely she was the first
undergraduate advisor to take her
charges on an indoor skydiving trip
in a vertical wind tunnel. “While I
was hoping to see her get into the
wind tunnel, she did not do it,”
recalls one of her former advisees,
John Graham ’ 17, SM ’ 17. “But I’m
sure if she were younger she would
have hopped in, no doubt.”
The Widnall report
When Widnall was 17, her uncle,
who worked for a mining company,
gave her a chunk of uranium. She
made it the center of a project that
took first prize at her local science
fair in Tacoma. Her win drew the
attention of one of the fair’s judges,
who happened to be an MIT gradu-
ate. He suggested she go there too,
and offered to secure her a scholar-
ship. “I said, ‘Okay, where’s that?’”
she recalls. But she took his advice.
Going to MIT would shape the
course of her life—and her pres-
ence at the Institute would help to
reshape MIT as well.
“It’s a little hard to remember
how it all got started,” she says,
“[but] the contributions that I’ve
made to MIT in some of these policy
areas have been quite substantial.”
Widnall retrieves a thick booklet
from a desk drawer and plunks it
onto a table: “This is typical.” It’s
a copy of In the Public Interest, a
report generated by a faculty com-
mittee that she chaired in 2002,
which deals with restrictions on
research imposed by the federal
government after the September 11
attacks. “They didn’t want our
international students to be able
to take courses,” she explains. “And
Widnall returns
from a supersonic
flight on an F- 15
on her first day
on the job as
secretary of the
Air Force in 1993.
It was the only job I would have taken
in DC. I wanted to be with the people in
the Air Force. I wanted to fly.
“
”
