Two things Dean Radin couldn’t get enough of during his six years at Illinois: Garcia’s pizza by the slice (“from the Flying Tomato Brothers,” he says) and, best of all, the tutelage of Dr. Klaus Witz.
Going on 40 years later, Radin (Ph.D. ’79/psychology, electrical engineering) still has vivid memories of how he came to meet the math professor who’d quickly become a mentor.
“By accident, I discovered that he was as interested in the nature of consciousness as I was. At the time, hardly anyone was seriously interested in experimentally studying consciousness,” Radin says from the Bay Area, where he’s the chief scientist at the Institute for Noetic Sciences and president of the Parapsychological Association.
“Most didn’t even imagine that it was something that could be studied.
“Klaus and I spent many hours talking about the nature and capacities of consciousness, as well as ways of rigorously studying those capacities. Those chats encouraged me to seriously pursue consciousness as a line of research.
“I’ve now spent the majority of my post-doctoral career doing just that, and despite having to carefully navigate through a controversial discipline — so controversial that even today it can still only be discussed openly in a handful of universities — I haven’t had any regrets.”
