Colin Daly
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Professor Colin Daly is a man of many passions. One is cricket, a game he played for many years and still follows. Another is anything mechanical, which led him to his profession. Now, after 38 years of educating mechanical engineering students, Daly will retire at the end of this year. As a child in Glasgow, Scotland, Daly gravitated to anything containing gears and bolts. The city’s steel and shipbuilding factories were an appropriate background for a 5-yearold boy to play with his Erector Set. “I’ve always enjoyed seeing how things work, taking things apart and putting them back together,” Daly says. “It was kind of a natural thing.” Naturally, he pursued his passion in college, receiving his bachelors in mechanical engineering from the University of Glasgow and his doctorate from the University of Strathclyde.
About the time Daly was looking for a postdoctoral fellowship, his supervisor met Dr. Robert Rushmer, who started the UW bioengineering program. “Rushmer was looking for an engineer to work with some people in an area I was working in,” Daly says. Six months later, the chair of Mechanical Engineering offered him a position, “and I’ve been at the UW ever since,” Daly adds with a grin. “It was that simple.”
Most of his research focused on biomechanics with an emphasis on the mechanical behavior of living tissues and their interaction with internal and external prosthetic devices. However, the project Daly considers as his greatest achievement was helping develop the 1992 Superconductor Super Collider in Texas.“Physicists usually build small particle detectors themselves, but this thing was so huge that the engineering required serious analysis and so that’s how I got involved,” Daly says. The particle detector was about 80 feet in diameter and weighed over 25,000 tons. To his great dismay, the project was halted when the federal government cut the funding. He then began consulting for CERN, which was developing a similar, though smaller, system in Geneva.
A sabbatical in Hong Kong, working with his former PhD supervisor, led Daly to Annie, the woman he would marry. “He was trying to get some new research going and asked if I could come out and help. Annie was working for him and the rest is history,” Daly says. Traveling is on Daly’s retirement “to do” list, but his true wish is time for just taking things as they come. “My attitude is: don’t make any detailed plans,” he laughs. “No major goals other than just enjoying the fact that I don’t have to get up in the morning to go somewhere.”
Daly has thoroughly enjoyed his years of teaching. “Probably the one thing that doesn’t change is the students,” he says. “Take the students from 1968 to now, and you wouldn’t know the difference. They’re still the same bright young people. And it’s good to see them doing very well and becoming successful.”
Reflecting back on his own career, Daly says, “I’ve been fortunate enough to have a successful, happy and generally healthy life. In many ways, I’ve just been at the right place at the right time.”
