At 81, Thomas McGee, former professor of materials science and engineering, has decided to a step back from university life and into the world of entrepreneurship.

After nearly six-and-a-half decades of mastering the disciplines of engineering, the 81-year-old holder of nearly two dozen patents put in his last official day on campus Tuesday. Officially, it’s retirement, but for the career problem-solver who earned two undergraduate degrees and another two Ph.Ds from Iowa State, it’s just the latest step in the creative process.

At home, McGee will still be thinking about how to improve and implement his materials and techniques for repairing bones. Through his company, Osteoceramics Inc., he plans to continue the work that he said got him so interested in what he was doing that her didn’t retire.

McGee’s history with Iowa State started long before his work with bone replacement and modification. He first arrived in Ames in 1944 to take part in a Naval officer training program. He came intending to study chemical engineering, but when trying to register, he found out the Navy wasn’t interested in training chemical engineers. Already standing in the registrar’s office, he had to come up with a new major on the spot.

“They told me, ‘Oh, you can have five minutes to decide,'” McGee said.

He decided on mechanical engineering, but before McGee could complete his accelerated two-year program, World War II ended and the services called in their officers in training to quickly relieve wartime troops.

After less than a year in active service in the Navy, McGee was honorably discharged and returned to Ames to complete two undergraduate degrees in mechanical and chemical engineering. In 1948, he married his first wife with whom he had four children. In his second marriage, he had four step-children and in his current marriage he has two more step-children.

Before returning to school, McGee spent six years in industry, working with high-temperature materials before returning to academia. Finally though, McGee decided that to pursue his ideas in applied research he would need an advanced degree. That option became available when he was offered a teaching assistantship to return as a graduate student to Iowa State.

In 1956, McGee returned to Ames for what would be the rest of his academic career. He received his master’s and by 1963 he became an associate professor with his Ph.D. at just 40 years old.

McGee’s first sponsored research began when he was a master’s student. After being turned down on his initial request for military funding for his research, he learned that the Office of Naval Research was interested in ductile ceramics – ceramics that will stretch or bend rather than shatter.

The answer he found was in salt. Certain salt crystals are ductile but also transparent, which allowed McGee to observe their structure and movement in a stressed state called plastic deformation.

“It’s like a wrinkle in a rug,” McGee said. “You try to pull the whole rug across the floor; you might not be strong enough, but if you just pull the wrinkle along you can move it.”

His diverse work from developing high temperature materials for industry to novel ceramics for the military drew extensively on McGee’s ever-expanding technical background, but the work that would become his longest project pressed him to become expert in more fields than ever before.

While on a field trip with Phillip T. Pearson, former head of the college of veterinary medicine, McGee met a German scientist who was working on developing porcelain as a material to replace bones in humans. Intrigued by the work, but also the limitations of the material, McGee resolved to do better.

In 1967, he succeeded in formulating a new artificial bone material based on magnesium aluminate and calcium phosphate, which Pearson tested by implanting into a dog. The material proved as durable as existing bone replacements, but because of its aluminum phosphate content, it was accepted rather than rejected by the animal’s body, forming a stronger bond with existing bone.

To create the material and take full advantage of its applications, McGee educated himself extensively in the relevant knowledge of anatomy and biochemistry. He bought undergraduate textbooks and taught himself everything he needed to know to communicate with medical experts.

Interdisciplinary education and communication, he said, are extremely important to any field, especially engineering.

“What engineering is all about is not to divide and conquer, it is to simplify and utilize,” McGee said. “You have to understand the application and you also have to know the basic science. You can’t apply the basic science if you don’t understand it and you don’t know the directions to apply it and how to do it if you don’t understand the application.”

Everything McGee has learned, he shared with his students. Alumnus Curtis Olson, who received his Ph.D. from Iowa State in 1992, remembers how the professor would give “the most incredible answers” to any question posed and his extensive knowledge and respect inside and outside of his field.

“He was a real inspiration to learn more,” Olson said. “He has a passion and excitement at the same time.”

After creating the material, McGee enlisted the help of his students to develop numerous improvements and applications including creating a new glue for setting artificial bones, using his material to guide the growth of real bones, creating artificial teeth and eventually perhaps replacing bone humans and birds.

Currently, McGee’s ideas don’t have enough testing in animals to be considered for transfer into humans. Stanley Wagner, associate professor of veterinary clinical sciences, is currently the most active of several vet med faculty to help test McGee’s work. He praised McGee for his energy and fresh ideas as well as his ability to communicate equally well with vets and physicians as engineers.

“He is a dying breed of gentleman, and he is just always ready to work with people,” Wagner said. “He is really a role model for me in how to handle life.”

The next phase of McGee’s life won’t include daily trips to campus, direct teaching in class, or stacks of homework to grade, but his work won’t end while he still has ideas and applications to pursue. Sitting in his home recently contemplating the next phase of his career, McGee mused how the scientific and academic environments and priorities have changed over the course of his lifetime, but he said to him, the importance of learning and applying new knowledge has always been clear.

“An engineer needs to be a creative person,” McGee said.