Michael Lim, Physicist, Mentor, Traveler

 

92-172 Michael Lim

SPEAKERS

Kim Goyette, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:00

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report, conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m very pleased to welcome Kim Goyette to the show. Now we’re going to do something a little different in this episode, Kim’s husband and our classmate Michael Lim passed away three weeks ago when we’re recording this today, and so this episode we’re not going to focus necessarily solely on Kim’s journey, but we’re going to talk about Michael’s journey and Michael and Kim’s journey since graduation, and so Kim, welcome to the show.

 

Kim Goyette  00:44

Thank you,

 

Will Bachman  00:45

and thank you for your willingness, and to be share this very intimate story that is so fresh of you and Michael, and tell us about your journey together since graduation, and I’ll preface it just for listeners that I’m optimistic that Kim will agree to have a separate episode where we can focus really on her story. Today’s episode will be mostly talking about Michael and also Michael and Kim’s story together. So, Kim, over to you. Tell us a little bit about, you know, how you and Michael met, and about your joint store journey since, since Harvard.

 

Kim Goyette  01:29

Thank you. And I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to reflect and to talk. It was important to Michael and I both to, to have his experience be told. So, um we started out at dorm crew. So our first experience, we were both in dorm crew together. We met after our dorm crew experience in Lionel Hall, where we lived for our first year. We were Lionel folks. He lived two floors down, and we became friends really early on. He was delightful to have that dorm experience with people you love and people you trust, and he was certainly one of those. He was a physics major early on, very dedicated, a good student, but also kind of quirky, like to play frisbee and have fun, and we didn’t really start dating until sophomore year. It was one of those sort of tentative, does he like me, doesn’t he like me? Are there other people? I’m sure lots of people are familiar with that, but we began dating sophomore year, and there was a lot of sort of back and forth in that dating relationship. Were we dating now? Were we not dating? But through our Harvard experience, we wound up graduating and dating, the resolution of that was that we wound up being a couple by the end of our Harvard years. We were a couple, but not not ready to fully be committed without exploring our separate interests, so Michael went off to graduate school at the University of Michigan. He started graduate school in physics, and I went off to graduate school in sociology to Tulane University. So we went our separate ways, thinking that we would see what happens, we would see how our relationship fared when we were apart, and we did okay, but we decided that being together was better than being apart. So, after many visits to New Orleans and several visits to Michigan, I reapplied to graduate school, and we wound up both at Michigan, so we had a wonderful five years together at the University of Michigan, where I got my PhD in sociology, and he finished up his PhD in physics. It was lovely being in Ann Arbor four months out of the year, and not so lovely seven months out of the year, but I think that helped us finish our degrees. After that, again, we sort of tried to figure out our futures together. I got a job at Temple University and moved to Philadelphia. Michael became a postdoc at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Washington, or right outside of Washington, in Gaithersburg, he was a postdoc under Nobel Prize winner Bill Phillips, and he, it was wonderful experience for him. Bill Phillips is an incredibly generous and wonderful mentor. So, Michael had a wonderful two years at NIST. While I started my career at Temple, in the meantime we got married, and that was wonderful too. We got married outside of Washington, and determined that we would figure out a way to plan our careers together. We would, we would finally find a city where we would both be together. We didn’t do that before we had our first child, so we had our son when we were both in separate positions, so we’re trying to figure out a way to live together so that we could both enjoy our son, and so Michael moved to Philadelphia after he finished his NIST postdoc, and began a postdoc at Bryn Mawr College. So he did a postdoc at Bryn Mawr for two years and spent a lot of time raising our son at that point. And then after his postdoc at Bryn Mawr, he became physics professor at Rowan University in New Jersey, in Glassboro, New Jersey. Michael’s career at Rowan was amazing. Rowan is a place where many first-generation students get their, their first exposures to physics, first exposures to physics labs, and it was a place where Michael really got to shape the trajectories of so many students who went there, first-generation students, a lot of them. He opened his lab to lots of students, he built a lab and did experiments directly with students, but he also started a program of where he would take students to Singapore over the summer, so in all this time he had established relationship with lab in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, and we had spent a sabbatical year in Singapore.

 

Kim Goyette  07:00

He had a great experience in Singapore, so he brought students there summer after summer through an NSF grant that was a summer research experience for students internationally, and he brought students who had never traveled before, which he brought students who had never been on a plane before. What and it was a great experience for him, for the students, for us who got to go with him over many of the summers. So that really was a highlight, I think, of his career. Tell

 

Will Bachman  07:36

me a story about it. Sounds like you were going as well, and see, maybe you got to know some of the students. Tell me a story about one of the students, maybe one of the students who hadn’t, you know, been exposed to international travel in the past.

 

Kim Goyette  07:50

Yes, so there was a student he brought who I think has done, has since made a career in physics, but the student was a little bit older, maybe mid 20s, who, before this, had been funding his Rowan education through driving a truck for a beer distributor for his in his family to go to college, hadn’t even crossed his mind that it would be possible to travel to Singapore and work in a lab, and he ate it up, like every experience was a wonderful experience. He loved the culture, and of course, the thing that every student should appreciate about Singapore is the food stalls.

 

Will Bachman  08:37

Oh, yeah,

 

Kim Goyette  08:38

you can get such cheap food. He had the same food stall every day, because he loved it so much, same chicken and rice food stall. So, yeah, it was just an incredible experience. The one, there’s another story of a student who he brought Singapore, has some nice hikes, you know, it’s so urban, but there are there are some places where you can hike, and you can look at the monitor lizards and the monkeys. And he called me one day, I was not on the trip with him at this time, he called me and he said, I’m not sure what I should do. A monkey bit my student turns out light bite, and the Singaporean medical establishment is perfectly capable of handling monkey bites, but, but with some shots, so yeah, so he had some, he had a lot of fun, and certainly I don’t think many Rowan students would have entered their education expecting they might go someplace and be bitten by a monkey. There he was. So, yeah, so this was a wonderful experience. He continued working in his lab. He was doing some exciting things with.. I’m going to get this wrong, but low frequency. Magnetic detection, so he had a really exciting project in his lab as he was diagnosed with cancer the year before that. Two years before his diagnosis, we had had the opportunity to live in Rome for a semester, because Temple runs a campus at Rome, so he was able to teach online and accompany me to Rome, and probably had one of the best semesters of his life. He ate and biked and ran through the streets of Rome very happily for that semester, so we were delighted that we had also taken time to have this experience that was not for his career, was not really for my career either, it was, it was just a fun experience that came our way, and it was probably one of the best six months of our lives, it was just fabulous, and then two years later he was diagnosed with with pancreatic cancer.

 

Will Bachman  11:05

How did that happen? When, when, how long ago was that?

 

Kim Goyette  11:09

It was almost exactly a year ago, from diagnosis to the time he died was almost exactly a year. It was an incredibly busy year, because it, pancreatic cancer, is so hard to treat that it requires almost immediately that you start looking for a clinical trial. He was diagnosed at stage four, so we knew that we needed to be proactive in trying to find the treatment that he needed.

 

Will Bachman  11:53

Was there was it just like a routine checkup, or how did he

 

Kim Goyette  11:57

know he became. he had gastrointestinal troubles. He became nauseous. He had trouble eating, and then finally he got jaundiced. And at the time he was jaundiced, we knew that it was – it must be something fairly serious. He went to the emergency room, and that’s when they found the tumor at the head of his pancreas.

 

Will Bachman  12:18

Okay.

 

Kim Goyette  12:19

Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  12:21

So, tell me the story of this past year.

 

Kim Goyette  12:24

So, this past year he started.. well, we started looking for different opinions immediately. Both of us were naive and had no experience with pancreatic cancer at all, so but we sought opinions locally. We sought opinions in New York, in Baltimore, in Boston. We tried to find as many different oncologists as possible. We started looking at clinical trials immediately, but found that the process initially of getting into clinical trials took a long time. We were getting quite nervous, so we began chemotherapy at the advice of most oncologists, who said, you know, treating aggressively right away is good, so he began a chemotherapy regime that was supposed to be very difficult, but would maybe halt the disease progression, or even shrink it a little bit. He did that for several months, and then had some complications, had potentially had an infection, went to the emergency room and was rescanned, and they found that the disease had progressed. So we started another, a different chemotherapy regime, but at that point we were fairly sure that we needed to move to clinical trials, so he had a number of different clinical trials set up, one we were one was an immunotherapy that we were particularly excited about, that essentially would target one of the mutations that he had, and then the immunotherapy drug would kill the cells that had that mutation right before he was scheduled to have his blood drawn to have the drug manufactured from his blood cells, they paused the trial, so we frantically looked for other trials, one other trial was at the National Cancer Institute, very similar trial and immunotherapy, and the day before he was screened for that trial, the government shut down. So then again we had to look for another clinical trial. We wound up finding a clinical trial after many waiting lists. So we found a clinical trial in Fairfax, Virginia, that was a targeted drug for his mutation, and he started that trial in November of last year. The drug worked for two cycles, so for a good 12 weeks he was, the tumors were shrinking, things were going well. He was stable. The problem with these targeted drugs is that eventually the cancer mutates in such a way that it works its way around them, and that is, in fact, what happened. Maybe he didn’t get as much time as other people would have gotten, I think his cancer was quite aggressive, so the cancer mutated and began to grow again. He started on another chemotherapy regime right after that to try to help that progression, but by then he had had a lot of damage to his liver, was not tolerating the chemotherapy, and in April of this past year, he was, he was on hospice. He started hospice, and we started to prepare for his death. So that was his cancer journey.

 

Will Bachman  16:18

I’m so sorry.

 

Kim Goyette  16:19

Thank you.

 

Will Bachman  16:21

Can you tell me a bit about the kinds of conversations that you had, or anything that you’re willing to share? I don’t think many of us can. I think it’s hard to put yourself in the position that you’ve been in and know how one would react to it, and whatever you’re willing to share about, you know, what it was like for the two of you going through this.

 

Kim Goyette  16:50

Yeah, so for him, I’ll speak for him first. He approached the year with an equanimity that was quite remarkable to me. He always said he never wanted to get too high or too low. He liked to approach it pretty calmly, but I think what was interesting about his approach to his disease, and to his eventual death was sort of rooted in his scientific perspective. He very much saw himself and the world in terms of natural laws, natural processes, the elements that make us up, and so I marveled at the fact that he never raged, he never said why me, and a couple of times people asked him, Why don’t, why don’t you say why me, why are you not more angry about this, and he said it’s the natural laws that govern me and the world, and the world I study, govern my cancer. Why not me? These, these are natural processes. And so it was quite, yeah, it was quite the right word, reassuring, I suppose, to hear him talk about the processes that way, the things that make him up, that make the world up, that make us all up, part of him or part of his cancer. He very much saw the disease as just part of what nature does, and yeah, it was, it was pretty remarkable to hear him think like that. He also said that he lived his life taking advantage of the opportunities that he had at the time, like he never said no to something he wanted to do, he never deferred something till later. The year that we spent in Singapore, we had a seven year old and a one year old, and I remember our friends saying, “You’re crazy, why are you taking a one year old to Singapore, and you know nothing about it, and it never occurred to us to not do it. The semester he took in Rome, he took some, you know, his, his online classes, and took time off of his lab. He never regretted that, that was an opportunity that he seized, and at the end of his life, he said he had no regrets. He lived the life he wanted to live. He, the only regret is that he couldn’t live more of the same, so it, it’s a really comforting, reassuring thing to know that he felt lucky, and he felt grateful for what he had, and only wished he’d had. More time for it, so

 

Will Bachman  20:03

what are some of the things that Michael was proudest of in his life?

 

Kim Goyette  20:06

He has kids, very clearly, his kids, and he was grateful. So, my, my kids now are 25 and 19, and so he got to watch them. He said that he was so grateful for the year he had the cancer that he had that year, because he got to watch them each start paths, become independent in ways that he hadn’t seen before, and it gave him the reassurance that he knew that they would make their independent lives. So he was very proud of his kids. Apart from that, he was very proud of the work he’d done at Rowan, primarily the mentoring of his students, the students that he took into his lab, they, the careers that they were able to launch were amazing, and Rowan is a place, you know, it’s a public institution, it is a place that has a mission to serve students who would be first-generation students. We usually were local, and he had more than more than a few students wrote back and said, “If it weren’t for the time that I spent in your lab, I wouldn’t have this career, it’s amazing. It really, the time he spent with those students was so special, and I know that that he was so proud of each of them. It was just so clear in talking to him how proud he was of each student who made their way through his lab, and really from not knowing what physics was, or not knowing what a physics career looked like, would go on to graduate school, would go on to professorships, would go on to these fabulous industry positions that they couldn’t have imagined before. So, yeah, it was clear to me that he was, he was very proud of the work he did there,

 

Will Bachman  22:02

outside of work, what was Michael into? Sounds like he really loved you and his kids, and liked to travel, but tell us a little bit about outside of physics. What was he? How did he spend his time?

 

Kim Goyette  22:14

Yeah, so travel was our thing, like travel was everything. We really spent a lot of time seeing new places and in a way, he was not a comfort traveler. We were sort of more like wander around travelers, like maybe we don’t know where we’re staying the next night type of travelers, which with kids is a little more difficult. But was still a whole bunch of fun. So we spent a lot of time traveling. While we were traveling, he loved to snorkel. He loved to body surf. If there was a body of water with a wave, that man was in it. He was body surfing all the time. He grew up in Hawaii, or he spent the first 11 years of his life in Hawaii. So I think that was where that love was really developed. He loved food. The man loved sampling all local cuisines. He never had a favorite food because he loved nearly all of them.

 

Will Bachman  23:06

In addition to Singapore and Italy that you’ve mentioned, what are some other highlight trips that you two had? So, because,

 

Kim Goyette  23:14

yeah, because we were in Singapore, Singapore is a great base to take all sorts of trips, so from Singapore, Australia, we did some snorkeling and some guided trips in the Great Barrier Reef, which is amazing, and we spent some time in the high, well, yeah, the Highland sort of areas of Australia, fabulous, Malaysia that Borneo part, the Malaysian part of Borneo, we spent some time on. I always joked that I never thought I’d be taking a two year old trekking in Borneo, but there we were, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. We spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia, Korea to do his heritage trip. His parents immigrated from Korea, Japan, so lots of Asia, and then a lot of European trips. He spent some time growing up in Vienna. He did his high school years in Vienna, so we revisited Vienna and Germany, and, and Prague, and you know, all sorts of places in Spain. So, yeah, traveling with him was just a delight, just a delight. He loved to ski. I did not. His ski trips were usually with friends who could ski much better than I did, but he loved skiing in Austria, and loved skiing in places in the US.

 

Will Bachman  24:50

What did Michael talk about in terms of his experience at Harvard? Were there classes or professors or activities? That he was engaged with there, that from your perspective continued to resonate with him, or that he would bring up, or that you think affected his life.

 

Kim Goyette  25:08

Yeah, so one really important experience for him was through Phillips Brooks House. He was a big brother, and he was a big brother to a boy, forget how old Odom was when he met him, maybe nine nine or 11, I can’t quite remember, but he maintained that relationship for at least a decade.

 

Will Bachman  25:33

Wow,

 

Kim Goyette  25:34

yeah, it was great, like he visited and he took Odom on weekends to various places around Boston and kept in touch with him and his family, so spent a good deal of time with his family, at least for 10 years, and that was that was really important and really special to him, classes he jokes about, oh, shoot, I’m going to get the name wrong, but he was naive, so he would just knock on professors’ doors, and he remembered one day he didn’t have a textbook. Maybe you know more about this. He didn’t have a textbook that Norm Ramsey had written. I think it was Norman Ramsey. Does that sound right?

 

Will Bachman  26:23

Yeah, it does. Yeah.

 

Kim Goyette  26:24

Okay, so he knocked on Norman Ramsey’s door and said, “Do you have to have a copy of your book? I need it for my class. He said he got the book, but he also got a strange look, like you should probably have this book and not be asking me for it. So he, I think, physics was really hard for him, and that’s why he decided to make a career in it. He felt really challenged. I know he spent many a night, meaning an overnight, doing problem sets, but by the end of his experience there, he felt like that was the hard thing to do, and darn it, that was what he was going to do. That’s what he was going to continue to do.

 

Will Bachman  27:08

What other stories stand out for you that illustrate? You mentioned that he’s kind of quirky in college that illustrate one or more of his quirks.

 

Kim Goyette  27:21

Oh, goodness. goodness, most of them involved nights after mornings after problem sets with long runs or breakfasts that were way too long, but most of them involved watching the sunrise after a full night of doing work, being exhausted and silly, playing frisbee or full

 

Will Bachman  27:49

night or problem sets.

 

Kim Goyette  27:51

Yes, is

 

Will Bachman  27:53

there for classmates who want to sign something or contribute? Have you at this point set up any sort of online kind of thing for Michael? Yeah,

 

Kim Goyette  28:07

there’s the Michael J. Lim Memorial Lab Scholarship at Rowan University, which is intended to go to a student who needs funds, who would otherwise be working, but who could use funding to work in a lab for a semester or more.

 

Will Bachman  28:27

Okay, well, we’ll include that link in the show notes.

 

Kim Goyette  28:31

That’s great. That would be fabulous,

 

Will Bachman  28:34

Kim. Thank you for joining today, and for sharing Michael’s story with

 

Kim Goyette  28:38

1. Of course, of course, it was very meaningful to me, and it’s important for me to share what I knew that was so special, so

 

Will Bachman  28:48

thank you,

 

Kim Goyette  28:49

thank you.