James M. Joyce . . . From sputniks to stomachs
Biographical sketch of Jim Joyce. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.The citation for this article is: "James M. Joyce . . . From sputniks to stomachs," Pieces of Eight, September 15, 1989.
Editor's Note: On october 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, a man-made earth satellite that measured 22 inches in diameter and weighed 184 pounds. Moscow said that the feat was the result of years of study and research on the part of Soviet scientists. In a few weeks, the USSR launched a second sputnik, six times as big, weighing half a ton and carrying a dog. Six months later the U.S. Congress created the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and voted $900 million to aid science education.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world's first man-made earth satellite, the news electrified science and math education in the United States. The space race was on. Twelve years later the United States put men on the moon and for three decades science, math and high-tech engineering flourished in U.S. classrooms and laboratories.
"Maybe," says James M. (Jim) Joyce, newly-installed chair of the ECU faculty, "We need another sputnik, or something like that. We're declining again in the sciences and engineering."
Mankind's race for scientific discovery and achievement isn't over, whether it be probing the awesome vastness of space or measuring tiny electrical impulses in the human stomach.
Jim Joyce, physics professor and member of the ECU faculty for 19 years, knows about both sputniks and stomachs. Sputnik I and II helped propel him to serious studies of science and math while still in high school. And his most recent research -- somewhat exotic for a nuclear physicist -- involves studying how electrical charges stimulate function of the stomach.
Exhortation To Science
Joyce recalls that after Sputnik, the government sent representatives to exhort and encourage high school students to choose scientific careers. He began applying himself to algebra and calculus, the slide rule and logarithm tables and studies of electrons, protons and neutrons. As an undergraduate at LaSalle College, he chose physics as his major because LaSalle had no engineering school. "I'm glad I did," he says. He also had a magna cum laude minor in math in LaSalle.
In graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, Joyce earned a master's degree in physics and the PhD in nuclear physics. Then he came south as a research associate at UNC-Chapel Hill and at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL). He stayed there three years before being recruited by the physics department at ECU which wanted to help build an accelerator laboratory to study properties of atomic particles.
"I took it as a wonderful opportunity," Joyce says about coming to East Carolina. "It was very interesting and challenging to be able to create something -- a laboratory -- where there had been nothing.
And he says, "I appreciated the attention" received from the ECU scientific community and university administration, including warm, personal notes from the chancellor. He is proud of ECU's progress and accomplishments in academics, especially in the physics department.
"It's always been quite good," he says. "And, since the start of the accelerator lab and graduate programs, it is becoming really nationally known." Joyce teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in addition to his research and points out that the physics faculty produces "many more publications" than similar departments in other comprehensive universities. "And we're not many behind UNC-Chapel Hill," a major research university, he says.
The New Jersey-born Joyce met the former Mary Ellen Drain when they were in high school in New Castle, Delaware, and they were married while he was a graduate student at Penn. Parents of two daughters, they will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary next year, coinciding with their 20th year in Greenville.
"We're Southerners by choice," Joyce says.
In Faculty Senate
Succeeding the veteran Carl Adler in the Faculty Senate when Adler became departmental chair, Joyce served two terms as secretary before being elected chair for 1989-90 last April. In a previous year, he served as parliamentarian, and he has served on faculty committees for libraries and academic computing."We're continuing to try to get better computing services," Joyce says. "It's always a struggle, but I am proud of how far we have come."
He thinks that a better mascot for ECU than a Pirate would be "something -- I can't think of what -- that is always clawing and scratching." That's the way he thinks of ECU, "always fighting to improve and be better."
Pro-Disarmament
Joyce is among many nuclear physicists who abhor nuclear arms and the stockpiling of nuclear weapons. He is active in a group called Greenville Peacemakers which is committed to nuclear disarmament on religious grounds.He bowls in a city league with a team that includes fellow ECU physicists and calls itself Chain Reaction. He also plays tennis, does a little gardening and has a boat. "I'm boat broke," he says.
Exciting Research
Joyce is invovled in "exciting" research with medical school gastro-enterologist Dennis Sinar on how the stomach works. This month Joyce will deliver a research paper on electrical activity of the stomach before the International Motility Society in Gmunden, Austria, near Salzburg, and will miss the first Faculty Senate meeting of the academic year.Joyce's research involves detecting electrical signals in the stomach believed to control stomach functions in the same way that electrical impulses control the heart. Fundamentally, the studies involve how the stomach works and determining whether this knowledge might assist in clinical diagnosis of stomach diseases, and whether at sometime in the future, pacemakers might be used to settle a queasy stomach.
"It's somewhat more complicated than that," Joyce says. "But there will be tests on pacing the stomach."
