“It’s been my home for 35 years,” Atkinson said. “I’ve found a niche that I like, and they send me a check every month.”

The senior academic specialist will be officially retiring from his position on Dec. 31, leaving behind friends, students and a job he has held for more than three decades.

“We feel here in our department that he’s had a very broad and long-reaching effect on many parts of the university,” said Tom Carter, an academic specialist in chemistry. “I go out with him to lunch every day — it’s so amazing to me how may people he knows on this campus.”

The student

Born July 10, 1941, Atkinson grew up in Houston, Texas, never anticipating a career in chemistry but was drawn to the subject in college.

“I did OK at it as a freshman,” he said. “It just appealed to me — it got more interesting in grad school and the post docs.”

After his graduation from high school in Bellaire, Texas in 1959, Atkinson spent the next three years as an employee of Wilson Oil and Gas Well Supply while earning his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He worked as a laboratory technician at California Institute of Technology during the summer following his graduation in 1963.

Atkinson went on to spend the summer of 1964 as a junior research assistant for the American Potash and Chemical Company and received his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 1970.

Following his postdoctoral assistantship, Atkinson began his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cincinnati, where he began working with computers. Specifically, he worked with the Raytheon 704 minicomputer, doing programming work and making it compatible for experimentation.

“Back 25 years ago, there were a lot of experiments that if a chemist wanted to do them, he had to do his own instrument design,” Carter said.

The father of two, daughter Alline and son Thomas, married wife Elizabeth in 1969.

Arriving in East Lansing

Atkinson began at the MSU Chemistry Department in September 1972, working as a postdoctorate fellow through 1975. He worked on an instrumentation consulting service and began work on an electronics instrumentation course.

His work began with building interfaces to use for experimentation. He took advantage of technological advancements in the 1980s, as more and more data was being entered into computers for analysis. Atkinson continued writing software and instructing people on how to best apply it. Once the software became widely available, Atkinson continued teaching the programs to students and faculty.

“I started out just helping people make use of computers in the lab setting,” he said.

With the evolution of computers to include personal and desktop models, the need to link them together within the department became evident. In 1985, Atkinson began working with the department to network the computers, using an Ethernet connection.

“We began to have collaboration taking place over the network,” Atkinson said.

Atkinson’s work has always involved the maintenance of the hardware in one form or another, adjusting to meet the demands and changes that arose, lending his knowledge to his colleagues, as well as graduate courses such as CEM 838, Computer-Based Scientific Instrumentation, which he has taught more than 40 times.

Matthew Gave first met Atkinson as a chemistry graduate student in 2003, when he took CEM 838.

“The amazing thing about him teaching that class is that he has been teaching that class since the material existed, and as long as computers have been in science, he has been teaching that class,” he said.

Gave said it was Atkinson’s stories from work in the field that kept students engaged and interested in the work at hand.

“His focus was that your get something out of the class,” Gave said. “He wanted you to be motivated to learn for you own edification primarily.”

Gave went on to work as a teacher’s assistant for the course and has shared Atkinson’s stories.

“I have enjoyed it immensely. Interacting with the students, mastery of the material. If you want to develop a real mastery of material, teach it,” he said. “If you are going to lecture, get it all straight in your mind. It’s my experience that if you really understand something, you can explain it to a 6 year old.”

The classes, too, continue to require modification as the technology changes.

Students are no longer as interested, he said, in writing the software. The challenge, for himself and all instructors, is to remember what it was like to be learning the material for the first time. While students used to build instruments for credit, they now study their construction as background information.

“It’s been immensely interesting — my job description has been absolutely the same for 35 years but the job hasn’t been,” he said, explaining that larger universities like MSU have the unique opportunities to pursue such advancements. “MSU has been very progressive — One of the hardest things is predicting where things are going, predicting the right technology, not picking a dead end, and we have. People have deep-seeded feelings about how things should go. Sometimes you just have to make a choice and go.”

Atkinson joined the Network Communications Committee, or NCC, in 1984, serving as chairman from 1984-94 and 1995-2004.

While on the committee, he was among those working with the university administration on a computer network for the entire campus. They research available options, making suggestions regarding everything from Ethernet to e-mail.

“I really enjoy working with people and developing documents, strategies and policies, and overall it’s been very rewarding,” Atkinson said.

Among his other committee work was the Computer and Communications Systems Advisory Committee, or CCSAC, on which he was a chairman from 1994-95 and remains a member.

After shifting through the department in various positions, Atkinson was selected as a academic specialist and finally a senior academic specialist. He will gain emeritus status as of Jan. 1, 2008. He served as chair of the Academic Specialist Advisory Committee, or ASAC, from 1995-96, helping to create a definition for the job title. He said an academic specialist is hired to fill a position created by a unit or department.

“Someone that has credentials not unlike a faculty member but the position is not the type (of person) to get tenure,” he said.

Academic specialists are kept on staff as long as they are needed and funding is available.

Leaving his mark

Atkinson has had several publications both through the university and otherwise, with much of his work funded by grants. He was honored with the Distinguished Academic Staff Award in February 2000 and the Science Specialist Award, presented by Sigma Xi, MSU Chapter, in 2001.

“Tom is one of the most likable persons I’ve ever met, I’ve never met a person who said they couldn’t stand Tom, and the students feel the same way about him,” Carter said.

Gave also will be graduating in December with his former instructor.

“His graduation party happens to be on my graduation date, so we are departing together,” he said. “ He is going to get some well-deserved time off. He certainly has earned his retirement.”

While the beginnings of his time at MSU kept him occupied within the department, Atkinson has branched out to explore the university. Having a strong interest in history, he currently is working on a history of the buildings within the chemistry department, beginning with the first laboratory in College Hall.

Living in Okemos, Atkinson will not be far from the university after his retirement on Dec. 31. And while he plans to travel with his wife to visit friends and family, he will continue to be around.

“I am going to miss it tremendously,” he said. “I have really enjoyed my life here, and I have immensely enjoyed the people.”