You see him walking around campus, rolling his briefcase, greeting students. He looks like a typical substitute teacher on Any Campus, U.S.A.

What you might not see behind Dr. Gary Greenberg’s snappy blazer and soft sweater is a photographer, multimedia company owner, inventor of the 3D microscope, photographer of NASA moon sand, and scientist and author about sand microscopy around the world.

So, how did he end up here?

An art-filled start

“A lot of my interest in science happened during the 8th grade when I was about 13 years old,” Dr. Greenberg said when we sat down for this interview.

Around that age, Dr. Greenberg’s father had gone to Japan to purchase a microscope for a doctor, and while he was there, he got one for his son as well to give to him for his 13th birthday.

Dr. Greenberg’s grandfather was interested in science and philosophy and was also an inventor. In fact, he was the inventor of a common tea bag we use today.

His grandfather gave him a “two-volume set of all the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and all of his drawings.”

Dr. Greenberg was actually surrounded by the arts. He said his mother was a musician and “big into art. …We had two grand pianos in my living room, and my sister was into music, and my brothers were into art.”

Scientific study

He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, and majored in physiological psychology.

“ I was working in brain research, … the physiological basis of behavior,” he explained.

After graduating, Dr. Greenberg’s grandfather came to visit, this visit being one of Dr. Greenberg’s last memories of him.

“ But he came down, and he says, ‘Well, now that you’ve graduated, what are you going to do with your life?’”

Dr. Greenberg felt “kind of embarrassed” because he’d spent four years at UCLA studying the sciences but realized he’d also “ been really interested in photography.”

His grandfather said, “ Gary, I bet you’re going to show people things they’ve never seen before.”

Environmental Communications

“And that’s what happened in my life,” Dr. Greenberg told me. “When I came across photography, it was unbelievably empowering because I was never great at, like, drawing or painting or any of that, but photography allowed me to share what I could see, share with people what, how I saw the world, and so it really changed [me].”

Dr. Greenberg became a filmmaker and photographer, eventually opening a big multimedia company with his brother.

“ We made films and slides and videotapes of art and architecture and environment, and I did that for a long time.”

At this time, the war in Vietnam was also happening. Since he was taking classes in microscopy at the University of Southern California, he wan’t drafted, and while in school for the second time, he started getting interested in photography through the microscope.

He started doing jobs for famous scientists with his company, Environmental Communications. He said they “ sold films and slides and videotapes to colleges, universities, and libraries all over the world. … And after doing this for a while, one of these scientists asked me if I wanted to get a Ph.D. and become a scientist.”

This meant that he had to shift from photography to biology.

“ Biology was fascinating to me because in biology, especially in the microscope, you can see living cells.”

In those days, he said, people did not know as much about how cells really worked, “ so it seemed like, it just was fascinating to see life in front of my eyes.”

Even bigger changes were in store next.

A doctor emerges

Dr. Greenberg shared that in one month, he “ got married, had a child, and moved to London and started a Ph.D. program.”

By now, he was 33 years old.

After getting a Ph.D. from University College London, he said that it is required to do post-doctoral research to be considered a “full scientist,” so he did that. He came back to the U. S. and started using microscopes to research birth defects and the immune system.

When Dr. Greenberg studied what was happening with live embryos, he came across a problem.

“ I realized that I couldn’t see what I was trying to see, and I had the best microscopes available to me.”

An invention is born

Dr. Greenberg, with his background in photography, realized that  lighting was a huge problem because microscopes light their subjects with just one light straight on. He knew that different light aspects were needed to get the best picture or image.

In normal photography, “ You would have key light, fill light, back light, spot light,” he said.

In the field of science at that time, there were not any microscopes that used that kind of lighting, so he started developing microscopes that used up to eight different lights from different angles.

This increased the resolution, depth and contrast and eventually led to a 3D image.

“ Now normally, if you light something straight on, it’s all flat, and if you bring in light from the side, it creates highlights and shadows, and all of a sudden you can see stuff that wasn’t there,” he explained.

Utilizing different angles brought more discoveries.

“When you bring in light from the side, it looks like you’ve tilted the specimen, and when you bring it in from the other side, it looks like you’ve tilted the specimen the other way,” he said.

This observation led to the next step in his work.

“So, then I had to figure out, how could you bring one tilted angle to one eye, and the other tilted angle to the other eye? Then you’d see it in 3D. So that was the challenge, figuring out how to do that.”

I said this sounded significant.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because nobody else was doing this, it was just like one invention after the other. All based on these how-to-do 3D, how to make, you can look at these things from different angles, you can light from different angles, you can move the light and rotate it and make 3D movies out of it,” he said, the excitement still in his eyes as he spoke about it.

Before Dr. Greenberg resigned from USC, he found an investor who believed in what he was doing, “ and we formed a company that started making these microscopes, and I started developing microscopes, getting 19 patents.”

He did this with his company, Edge Scientific Instrument Corporation, for many years, working in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Boston, and Philadelphia.

The next leg

When the microscope business was winding down, Dr. Greenberg went back to L.A. to take care of his mother.

“ She died at 93, and I turned 60, and I figured it’s time to change my life,” he said.

Dr. Greenberg had been coming to Hawaiʻi since 1958, “back before it was a state,” and years later, that change came when he retired to Maui and brought with him his big 3D microscope.

He lived with friends that he knew from Venice, who lived in Haʻikū at the time. One of his friends was a teacher at St. Anthony School. She said that he should get a job substitute teaching at Kamehameha Schools.

Dr. Greenberg interviewed with Dr. Paul Prevenas, who was one of the principals at the time.

“ I got all dressed up in a suit and a tie and interviewed with him, you know? And he said nobody wears a suit and tie in Hawaiʻi.”

That’s how, 25 years ago, Dr. Greenberg was hired.

He said he is happy and that being a substitute teacher “so enriched my life here, to be part of the home.”

Living here, surrounded by different cultures, gives him an experience none of his other friends have.

“And, it’s such a beautiful culture, there’s so much about it. It’s all about nature, and I’m all about nature, so you know, hand-in-hand, right?”

“The Secrets of Sand”

Noticing how many flowers and how much sand is available on Maui, he started taking pictures of them with his microscope.

Known as the sub who shows those ultra-magnified pictures of sand in class, Dr. Greenberg is always ready to talk about what it means to him.

“ The message is how beautiful just something ordinary is in this world.”

Dr. Greenberg has documented his findings in his books, The Secrets of Sand: A Journey into the Amazing Microscopic World of Sand and A Grain of Sand: Nature’s Secret Wonder.

NASA found out about him and reached out.

“ And this is in, I think 2008 maybe, they brought the moon sand with them, and I photographed it, and I got some extraordinarily beautiful new pictures of moon sand that no one had ever seen, and we wrote scientific papers together, we went to meetings, and then, I found out about the astronomy place.”

He became a research affiliate with the Institue for Astronomy, a research center under the University of Hawaiʻi system. The physical building is located right above the KS Maui campus.

He thinks it’s “interesting” how “basically taking pictures of sand” led to that relationship with the institute, but it’s all connected in his mind.

ʻĀina connections

“There’s nothing more important in Hawaiian culture than astronomy,” he said, referring to the navigation skills that Hawaiians used since originally migrating and traveling to Hawaiʻi.

“ Here are the best astronomers in the world, and Hawaiʻi still has the biggest, baddest telescopes in the world, anywhere.”

Dr. Greenberg said that, beyond astronomy, he sees science everywhere in Hawaiian culture “ if you look at the Kumulipo and how things arose from nature and how they developed from nature and how that’s the first mention of evolution anywhere, way before Westerners ever came up with the idea of evolution.”

Dr. Greenberg has spent his life “trying to show people what nature is about, … whether it’s the astronomy or the biology, … I’m trying to show people the beauty of nature. That’s what Hawaiʻi is all about.”