DARE TO BE DIFFERENT - PAT DOMENICO SHOWED US HOW!

Many of us have learned valuable lessons of life and science from Pat Domenico. He inspired his colleagues to keep firmly focused on a science agenda by avoiding the distractions of administration and mundane jobs. He often summed up this advice as "never lead, never join, never follow and don't even talk to me about it". Pat also led by example through his science. As one might expect, his work was sometimes fundamental, sometimes practical, and usually out of sync with the dominant research themes of the time. When the major trend was to develop ever-powerful numerical models, he and his students used simple analytical approaches to create powerful new ideas. Pat always believed that a single scientist could make an important difference through the force of great, or at least interesting ideas. Our talk here will recall some of Pat's important work in heat and mass transport and analyze in detail some of the extrinsic ideas from his career. We will examine questions about the proactive role that an individual scientist can play in guiding his or her career and some factors that contribute to success. For example, data mining techniques applied to a large body of papers in Water Resources Research can be used to trace the evolution of important research strands. Citation data point to the reward that can come by being at the forefront of new research themes. We have collected complete citation information for every paper ever published in Water Resources Research. Development of research themes is to be discovered from these papers by classification scheme and citation analysis. Interestingly, simply creating a new theme is no likely guarantee of success. Some themes begin and flourish, like multiphase flow. Other themes like stochastic hydrology begin but seem not to develop fully. Preliminary data suggest that early papers of new themes attract most attention with their later work losing visibility. Is important to be different? You betcha, and Pat Domenico showed us how.