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Keeping it light: Ron Steer credits family, music for supporting career in science

Distinguished Sask. researcher says career spanning slide rules to lasers has been a combination of luck and hard work.

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The beam that scans bar codes at the grocery checkout counter holds no particular wonder for most of us, but for Ron Steer it’s a reminder of the cutting-edge instruments he uses to study the effects of light.

“People don’t understand that lasers are actually extraordinary, versatile sources of light,” Steer said during a video call with Postmedia.

Steer, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Saskatchewan, has made a career of studying how light affects various compounds. The lasers he uses are built to capture phenomena that happen in far less than the blink of an eye.

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“We’ve got lasers now that will resolve a billionth of a millionth of a second — which is pretty fast,” he said with a laugh.

But before the lasers, Steer started out with a slide rule.

Dr. Ron Steer, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Saskatchewan, is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of photochemistry, which studies the effects of light.
Dr. Ron Steer, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Saskatchewan, is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of photochemistry, which studies the effects of light. Photo by Matt Smith /Saskatoon StarPhoenix

As one of the first pupils entering high school at Sheldon Williams Collegiate in Regina, which was a new school at the time, Steer was mainly focused on music. An avid singer and bassoon player, he actually thought about pursuing music further in university, he says.

That plan changed when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. The technological feat captured the world’s attention, and sparked a general interest in science that would carry Steer to Saskatoon and the University of Saskatchewan after high school.

At first, he enrolled in a general program including all of the scientific disciplines. He credits Ken McCallum, one of his first instructors at the U of S, with helping him pick a focus on chemistry.

“He was so impressive,” Steer says of McCallum’s lectures.

His love for research work was solidified in his second year of university, when he got a job working with grad students in McCallum’s research group.

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“And that caught me,” he says of the experience. “I mean, here we are, no longer knowing what the answers are, and being able to work out things that nobody really knew.”

Finally, chemistry just seemed to fit his personality better than biology or physics ever did, he says.

“Chemistry as a subject has something that appeals to me that might not appeal to many people, and that is it’s really super well-organized. You’ve got to be organized in order to kind of ‘get along’ in chemistry, and that suits me right down to the ground.”

Dr. Ron Steer in a laser laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan. Steer, a professor emeritus in chemistry, uses lasers to measure the effect of light on various compounds. Photo by David Stobbe
Dr. Ron Steer in a laser laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan. Steer, a professor emeritus in chemistry, uses lasers to measure the effect of light on various compounds. Photo by David Stobbe Photo by DAVID STOBBE /jpg

While chemistry was quickly becoming a focus of his undergraduate years, Steer still found time to keep up his passion for music.

After starting out singing in church, his high school music teacher initially pushed him to get more involved in performing.

By the time he reached the U of S, Steer had already been singing in various choirs and other ensembles. He joined the Greystone Singers while living in residence at the U of S, where he met Sheilagh, his wife of 57 years. The couple has been part of local choirs ever since, including the Saskatoon Chamber Singers and the Saskatoon Summer Players.

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A few chance occurrences led to Steer’s career focus on light.

In 1964, he was to begin graduate work building instruments for the Saskatchewan Linear Accelerator Lab, the predecessor of the Canadian Light Source.

The facility was slow to get up and running, leaving Steer with no work to do. He made a tough decision to switch projects and joined a U of S group focused on “studying the effect of light on things, rather than studying the effect of electrons on things, which is what would have been happening at the accelerator lab,” he says.

This led to post-doctoral work at a lab in California, studying how sunlight interacts with airborne pollutants to produce smog. Steer returned to a faculty position in Saskatoon in 1969, after being hired by his mentor Ken McCallum, who had risen to become head of the U of S chemistry department.

The next piece of luck that would shape his career came in 1973. While studying the properties of thiophosgene, Steer and post-doctoral fellow Stuart Levine set up an experiment meant to check if one of their instruments was working properly.

Steer says he still recalls Levine coming in, holding a long chart readout in his hands, complaining that something was obviously wrong with the equipment.

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It turned out they observed the first recorded case of a particular form of fluorescence, which Steer defines as the process when a substance absorbs light, then re-emits it. The previously unseen phenomenon, dubbed “anti-Kasha fluorescence,” would go on to be a focus of his research for 40 years and counting.

While Steer’s work at the time was pure research, his findings ended up having applications decades later in the development of photovoltaic solar power cells.

“That’s the way fundamental research works,” he says. “You see something new, you publish it and say, ‘That’s interesting’ and later it turns out ‘Wow, this really could be of practical interest.’ ”

While luck played a part, Steer says getting established as a researcher also took an immense amount of work.

“I’d be putting in 80 hours a week in the lab and it would just be unbelievably gruelling,” he recalls.

He credits his “tolerant, talented” wife and kids for helping carry him through the tough stretches.

“The fact that we still managed to keep singing and to have music as a recreation was what kept me sane,” he says, adding “although some might say I’m not sane,” and bursting into a chuckle.

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Ron and Sheilagh Steer ahead of a Christmas choir performance. The two met while performing with the Greystone Singers at the University of Saskatchewan. (Photo courtesy of Ron Steer)
Ron and Sheilagh Steer ahead of a Christmas choir performance. The two met while performing with the Greystone Singers at the University of Saskatchewan. (Photo courtesy of Ron Steer)

Along with his research, Steer’s teaching has also been widely recognized. He won a U of S Master Teacher award in 1995, which he calls “very gratifying.”

Beyond awards, the greatest reward he’s got for being an educator has been ongoing contact and collaboration with former students, many of whom have gone on to “huge” careers around the country and across the globe, he says.

“Almost always these have been very rewarding on a personal level, to the see the students you have taught do so well.”

While his career also saw stints as a department head and a representative on the university council, Steer says he always had a bit of a hard time with the administrative side of an academic career.

“I’m just too impatient to be an administrator,” he says, adding that he prefers the lab because research “gives an immediate result. It’s not always the result you want and it’s not always the perfect result, but at least you know something day-by-day.”

Steer may not always have relished administrative work, but current U of S department of chemistry head Matthew Paige says it’s never showed in the 20 years they’ve been colleagues.

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“Basically, Ron is the gold standard in terms of what we compare ourselves to in terms of teaching, administration and research,” Paige says. “He’s really hit the trifecta for what a faculty member should be.”

Describing Steer as “a gentleman” in his interactions with fellow faculty members and students, Paige says he’s also unflappable when faced with the difficulties that can crop up in a lab.

“The frustrations of science tend to be where there’s a lot of really useful information,” Paige notes. “Just because an experiment fails or doesn’t work out particularly well doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of useful information you can extract from that, and I think Ron gets that.”

Although semi-retirement has meant he doesn’t have to lecture any more, Paige says Steer “still has the energy of a 20-year-old” when it comes to his ongoing research work and collaboration with scholars around the world.

And he’s still found a way to get himself in front of a classroom by teaching chemistry for Saskatoon Seniors Continued Learning. Steer says that audience is among the best he’s ever had.

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“Seniors are the greatest group of people to teach, because they are absolutely uninhibited when it comes to asking questions. It’s the most wonderful environment.”

Dr. Ron Steer (left) poses with his research group in a seminar room at the University of Saskatchewan in 2010. (Photo courtesy of Ron Steer)
Dr. Ron Steer (left) poses with his research group in a seminar room at the University of Saskatchewan in 2010. (Photo courtesy of Ron Steer)
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