By Emma Stanton, Staff Writer
Dr. Ronald Lasky is a Woodstock resident, Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College, Senior Technologist of Indium Corporation, father, husband, and frequent blogger. His research interests include process optimization and electronic assembly, amongst other technical engineering ventures.
For the past twenty years, Lasky has written a technological engineering blog called “The Adventures of Patty and the Professor: Solving the world’s electronics assembly productivity and quality challenges.” While his blog is rooted in mathematics, Patty and the Professor go on strange and silly adventures, as Lasky takes readers through various milestones in his character’s lives. “I am not Patty, nor am I the Professor,” Lasky told the Standard. “I just enjoy pulling from my life and the world around me, to bring brevity and accessibility to the world of science.”
Lasky takes a similar approach to teaching at Dartmouth, where he has been a professor for more than twenty years. “I really enjoy taking my students out to lunch. Sometimes only one student will join me, other times there’s half a dozen — usually when I offer to take them to Simon Pearce,” Lasky joked. “It’s just a way for me to deepen the connection with my students. I like learning about their lives, their interests, and in turn, I open the floor up for them to ask me questions, personally and professionally. I think it’s becoming rare to share a meal with students, but ever since I started teaching back in 2002, I’ve extended an invitation, and I always will.”
Lasky currently rotates between teaching six different courses, ranging from topics such as Intermediate Thermodynamics to Statistical Methods in Engineering. His relationship with Dartmouth began when his eldest daughter attended as an undergraduate student. Over the years, he became close with the Engineering program, writing and collaborating with various professors and graduate students before eventually joining the teaching staff. What started as a part-time job — commuting from Massachusetts to Hanover each week for an entire semester — grew into a full-time professorship and a relocation to Woodstock in 2007. “We initially thought of moving to Hanover, but quickly found the housing market a bit difficult to navigate. My eldest daughter helped us find our home in Woodstock, and we have been here ever since.” Lasky is an active member of his community, walking from his home to the village, grabbing lunch or iced tea at the Woodstock Inn, befriending the service staff, and quizzing them on various cultural literacy questions he always has on hand.
“The cultural literacy questions started with one of my neighbors. We would go out to dinner every Saturday night, and I had the fun idea to think of questions most people should know. It’s amazing now to ask my students, or strangers I meet, and realize how many gaps there are in education today.” Lasky said the question he is most astonished that people do not know the answer to is: Who wrote “A Christmas Carol?”
“It’s been so interesting to see the progression of education over the past twenty years. I’m not sure where we are progressing, but I hope students will continue to be curious about the world around them. I know I will be. I think that’s what my cultural literacy quiz is to me — a way of remaining curious and connected to the world and the people around me. I probably have over a thousand questions stock-piled at this point!”
Lasky grew up in Binghamton, N.Y., to two blue-collar parents. “My dad was Slovak, my mother British, and right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, my parents did the most egregious act they could — they got married. At the time, it was impossible for a Slovakian man to marry a British girl, and cuisine became a major sticking point in the marriage. However, when my mother learned how to cook Slavic cuisine perfectly, she quickly won my dad’s family over.”
He continued, “My parents loved each other, and they loved and supported me, but they didn’t really know how to help me. I was always interested in math and science, even from a very young age. It was difficult, though, my parents never read a book, and I didn’t grow up in an academic household. Initially, I thought my path towards higher education would be at West Point, where I could simultaneously pursue STEM and my love of physical fitness. I started community college before being accepted and heading to basic training, but the first few months really broke me — the physicality, the hazing — it left no room for my studies, which is really what I wanted to pursue. I returned to community college before being the first student from Binghamton Community College to transfer to Cornell University, where I received my master’s and eventually my PhD in Materials Science and Engineering.”
Lasky worked at IBM as a Senior Engineer for twenty-six years, throughout pursuing both degrees and through the birth of his three children. Frequently moving between Binghamton and Ithaca, while he and his wife pursued their respective degrees, made family a core center for Lasky. “I could have been more than middle management at IBM, but I refused to work on the weekends. I was unreachable on Sundays, as that was time spent with my family. We were and still are incredibly close. They mean everything to me.”
Lasky’s three children, Jennifer, Jessica, and Jonathan, have led successful careers in and out of academia, following in their father’s footsteps to pursue an Ivy League education and a life led by faith and curiosity. His eldest, Jennifer, works as an interior designer and architectural consultant; Jessica is an associate professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and has been described by her father as “the junior version of Dr. Fauci;” and his youngest, Jonathan, currently works as a cataloguer at the Yale Library after studying theology and a variety of languages in Rome.
“I could not be more pleased with the life I built for myself,” Lasky said. “To live in such a picturesque and relaxing town, to do meaningful work, to come home to a beautiful family — I feel eternally blessed.”
Dr. Lasky can be found most weekends at the bar at The Woodstock Inn, sipping his favorite libation — a glass of sweetened iced tea — quizzing the local staff, and reading his favorite newspaper.
‘Notable Neighbor’ is a series of articles about ordinary people in our community who do some pretty extraordinary things.
