EUGENE–Todd Blevins is a young man who's hard to categorize, and even more difficult to track down at the University of Oregon campus.

One day, he's researching the intricate properties of conductive plastics in a chemistry lab. The next day, he's acting in a play.

Today, Blevins is in Berlin, working on a thesis about a German author.

But for the McMinnville native and UO senior, stepping outside the boundaries of the classroom is what learning is all about.

"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education," he says, quoting Mark Twain.

His schoolwork, however, is what has brought attention to the 1995 McMinnville High graduate. The son of Marcia Blevins, 1683 Bonnie Jean Place, McMinnville, he is a double major in chemistry and German literature and an honors student in the university's Robert D. Clark Honors College.

Last year, Blevins won a Bowerman Scholarship, named in honor of the late UO track coach Bill Bowerman, and a Goldwater Scholarship, a national award given to several hundred students in the United States each year who show future promise in science. He was chosen for a combination of work he's done in class and in the lab, particularly his research efforts under chemistry Professor Mark Lonergan in the cutting-edge field of conductive plastics.

Blevins is working with a group of researchers at the UO who hope someday to help create a computer on a credit card--a plastic computer that's flexible and tough. The special plastics they are investigating are called conjugated polymers, a class of materials that have applications in microelectronics.

Their research involves spin-coating a black-looking plastic material at very high speeds onto an electrical conductor, causing the polymer to be flattened to roughly one-millionth of an inch in thickness. Then, using a state-of-the-art imaging device, they watch how electrons move between the thin polymer film and the conductor.

"What we're trying to find out is how well the film conducts electricity. The question is special to research with conducting polymers, since most plastics and biological polymers are insulators," Blevins says.

To the extent that plastics and biological polymers conduct electricity, Blevins adds, you can make electrical components out of them. Already, scientists are working on very thin prototype flat-panel displays for cell phones and computer screens that use a fraction of the space and battery power of current designs.

While Blevins' studies remain grounded in math and science, he's given himself room to branch out intellectually.

This year, he has put his scientific research on hold while he finishes writing his honor's thesis about a German author, Jurgen Fuchs, who died last year. Fuchs was a dissident from East Germany in the 1970s who analyzed and wrote about the socialist government's secret police and how its members physically tortured enemies of the state.

"What he [Fuchs] revealed was that East Germany wasn't just a hard line socialist state but a dictatorship that controlled public discourse and kept people from speaking out," Blevins said.

Blevins' research in Germany is being done independently in cooperation with Humboldt University, one of the oldest in Berlin, where he shares an apartment with a native student off-campus. Because he is able to speak German fluently, Blevins has no trouble getting around and is taking full advantage of Berlin's rich artistic and cultural scenery.

"Berlin is a city of museums," he says. "The arts and theater are so well-supported in Germany. The government heavily subsidizes the arts, and students benefit especially. I bought two fifth-row tickets to a first-run play, called 'Die Brecht-Akten (The Brecht Files).' The tickets were $5 apiece. The play is about Bertold Brecht's confrontations with McCarthyism in the '50s in the U.S."

Though he's having a good time in Germany, Blevins is looking forward to coming back to the states in April to start spring term, not only to get back into the lab but also to enjoy the UO campus atmosphere.

"One of the things I really like about the UO is the amount of interaction students have from different disciplines. A lot of different majors seem to be supported by other faculty, so if you major in chemistry, for example, you'll spend a lot of time in the mathematics department, or you'll have a language requirement that will bring you into Friendly Hall, and so on. I've moved quite freely between majors and that's one of the great things about the UO. Making connections is really important, and it's easy to do on this campus," he says.

Blevins recalls that he originally came to the UO with the ambition of studying journalism, largely from his experience working as an intern at The News-Register while in high school. But in the back of his mind, he says, he was thinking science.

"I owe a great deal to Chris Chennell, my senior year biology teacher. He was a big influence on me," Blevins said. "Mr. Chennel was the type of teacher who could share his enthusiasm for the intricate workings of nature just by daydreaming in front of the class. I remember him saying once, 'Wouldn't it be amazing if humans had chlorophyll, and we just had to lift our arms toward the sun to harvest energy.'

"His class was highly experiential," Blevins recalls of his senior biology class. "We would spend a week working in a local stream, testing the water quality and examining organisms. We raised fruit flies in class for experiments with genetics. Some of what we did was beyond the level of my first biology class at the UO."

Blevins' interest in science extends to a concern for the environment, for which he credits his father, a retired educator living in Eugene, with instilling in him at an early age. He says that he and his father, Bill, often go hiking together on Eugene's Spencer Butte or in more isolated parts of Oregon.

"We share the belief that humans tend to over-compensate for their basic material needs by building wastefully large homes and buying fuel-inefficient vehicles, refusing to support public transportation and generally isolating themselves from their natural surroundings," he says.

Together with several other UO students, Blevins helped put together a wetland education project last spring that took some Eugene middle school science students on a day trip to Willow Creek, a marsh that abuts Hyundai Semiconductor's chip plant in west Eugene. Blevins says the money for the project came from fines the company had to pay the state of Oregon a few years back for damages to the Willow Creek sub-basin during construction of the plant.

Despite Blevins' wide-ranging academic pursuits and interests--or perhaps because of them, he admits that he's still uncertain about his future.

After graduation in June, he plans to take a one-year hiatus to do some travelling in Europe and have time to think carefully about his next move. He wants to attend graduate school, preferably in a big city like New York or Chicago, and then after that, who knows?

"I want to be an educator and writer in the most general sense," he says.

There is little doubt that whatever Blevins decides to do, he will make the most of his opportunities. At age 23, he's already gotten a lot out of life.

"I think Todd is special because he takes advantage of his educational opportunities," Professor Lonergan, one of his many UO advisers, says. "He's tried to make the most of everything the university has to offer. He really enjoys learning, exploring and taking his studies outside the classroom to experience life first-hand."

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