Randy Cygan is a Centennial Fellow of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and he served as a member of the department’s advisory board from 2012 to 2019. He has been a valued alumni mentor to our undergraduate students seeking career guidance. Cygan received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry with a minor in geology in 1977 from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He first caught the geology bug during his high school years by traveling with family and friends throughout the Midwest, but it grew into a serious avocation during a lab assistantship with Gus Koster van Groos at UIC. Cygan’s exposure to the high-pressure synthesis of minerals led him to graduate studies at the world’s center for experimental petrology. At Penn State he earned his master’s degree in 1980 followed by a doctorate in 1983, both in geochemistry and mineralogy.
While working on high-temperature crystal zoning profiles in metapelites, he discovered the experimental and intellectual resources offered by collaborations with faculty in the Materials Research Laboratory. He credits professors like Carlo Pantano, Rustum Roy, and Will White with teaching him that the interface between geochemistry and materials science offers a wealth of exploration opportunities.
“The materials connection played off how Penn State geochemistry evolved in the 1950s and 60s, and I wanted to keep that bridge going,” Cygan said. “It really directed me to where I wanted to go in my professional career.”
As a graduate student, Cygan worked on problems that were highly unconventional at the time. However, thanks to efforts like his, they are now part of the mineralogical canon. He developed an impedance spectroscopy system to measure the dielectric response of forsterite at high temperatures and he also was an early user of the ion microprobe, which enabled him to measure trace element profiles with high spatial resolution in minerals that have very slow cation diffusion rates, such as garnet.
Cygan joined the Geochemistry Department at Sandia National Laboratories in 1983, where he worked for thirty-two years, interrupted by a two-year tenure on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1987-88. Cygan is probably best known for the sophistication of his computational simulations of mineral structures and reaction interfaces (see illustration). His wide-ranging publications include investigations of mineral equilibria, chemical kinetics, surface chemistry of minerals, adsorption and dissolution of minerals, shock metamorphism, structure and transport properties of battery materials, and molecular modeling of minerals and geochemical processes. Cygan has published extensively in various geological, chemical, and materials science journals and received numerous honors. In addition to many awards for excellence received from Sandia, he is an Honorary Distinguished Alumnus of the Penn State Materials Research Laboratory, a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America, and in 2010 he received the Brindley Lecture Award from the Clay Minerals Society.
Cygan is married to Donna Skeels and has two adult daughters, Kate and Nora. Although he recently “retired” from Sandia, he continues to publish papers, attend conferences, and devote time as a mentor to graduate students and research scientists. He holds an adjunct position at Texas A&M University and serves on many university and government advisory boards and committees. In his free time, he enjoys bicycling with friends, hiking in the mountains near his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and traveling with Donna, especially to visit their daughters in Chicago and Denver. He has great memories of Penn State, and he is especially proud to have co-founded in 1980 the Geohabs team playing in the Nittany Hockey League.
As Department Head Andy Nyblade observes, “Randy’s contributions to the department through his service on the Alumni Advisory Board are gratefully appreciated. It is amazing that Randy has made time to serve and advise the department while he was engaged in such a highly-productive research career. We hope that despite cycling off the advisory board, he continues to offer his creative insights for the department’s future.”