David Holt MIT tenure denial and Episcopalian ministry

Tom mentions that David Holt — Backofen's collaborator on the M-value plots in this section — was hired as an assistant professor at MIT, didn't get tenure, and "went off to become an Episcopalian minister." Used as biographical color for the figure he's discussing.

This work was done by David Holt and Backofen. Holt was hired as an assistant professor to work with Backofen, and he taught me part of Backofen's course with Backofen. He didn't get tenure at MIT, went off to become an Episcopalian minister as I remember. He used to do metallurgical consulting on the side. I don't know what happened to him since then. I think there's some relationship — Carl Thompson's wife's sister is married to Dave Holt or something. Anyway, here are your M values, stress, and these are M values as a function of strain rate around 10⁻³. You start getting things above five, and when you get above five on your M value, you're getting useful superplasticity. Looking at the grain sizes here, you're seeing 1.7 to 7.7 microns. Any grain size less than 10 micron is a very fine grain material. Most commercial alloys are in the 25-micron range, just because of the heating values and the way they're formed.