Happy Nice Mall

Abbie (Carlstein) Gregg ’74 remembers giving up on wearing lab gloves during her undergraduate research at MIT. At a time when college students were 15 to 1 more than women on campus, she wasn’t small enough to fit in. Even so, it was her first time meeting other women interested in engineering and technology – and she quickly found a job. in the Department of Metallurgy (now Materials Science and Engineering). Forty years later, Gregg built a career designing clean rooms and laboratories for semiconductor manufacturing and research around the world.

At MIT, Gregg was drawn to semiconductors. For his thesis, he and his collaborators sent semiconductor crystals into space at NASA’s Skylab to test the theory that gravity causes perturbations in crystal growth; they predicted this would lead to defects in circuit function as the chips became more complex. “We brought the crystals back to Earth and measured them, and they were indeed completely uniform,” he recalls; meanwhile, they had “all these irregularities” they had cultivated on Earth. Gregg would later revisit this work as a “thought experiment” for an aerospace company investigating device manufacturing in space.

After MIT, Gregg worked at Fairchild Semiconductor to improve his production. “I became interested in the built environment and optimizing both human factors and crop yields,” he says, through conversations with workers.

Gregg began designing semiconductor manufacturing plants, spending nearly 10 years as a “startup junkie” at different companies before founding Abbie Gregg, Inc. The company completed around 850 projects, primarily university, industry and government laboratories, before being acquired in 2019. AM Technical Solutions (where Gregg is currently chief technology officer). It strives to create safe, functional and aesthetically pleasing spaces with plenty of windows and natural light. “People don’t put windows in cleanrooms because they say, ‘We don’t want to look at an industrial landscape,'” Gregg says. “But if a clean room doesn’t look good, there’s something wrong with it; poorly planned or not maintained.”

One of Gregg’s favorite projects brought him back to where he started: MIT. He did the initial planning and design of the clean rooms and laboratories at MIT.nano, MIT’s new home for nanotechnology research. Shortly after it opened, he visited the campus for his 45th reunion in 2019. “I stopped and watched the recent graduates look at that building and show their families,” she recalls. “It was the most amazing feeling. It’s my legacy.”