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Chief Technology Officer |
Q:
What is your job title?
A: Chief Technology Officer at PhotonEx Corporation.
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Q:
Can you give a brief description of your job, specifying what you do
each day.
A: My biggest responsibility at PhotonEx is to make sure that the
equipment we build works. We build optical communications
equipment. Optical communications equipment is used to carry
data all over the United States and the world. The data carried
by our equipment might be messages between computers or phone calls
between people. For example, have you ever wondered how you can
hear someone on the phone who may be speaking to you from hundreds of
miles away? When you speak into the phone, your voice is
detected and turned into an electronic signal. That electronic
signal is then digitized, or turned into a code of on and off
signals. These on and off signals then travel as electrical
signals over wires or through the air, or as optical or light signals
over optical fiber to the person on the other end of the phone
call. At that point, the on and off signals are decoded and
used to drive the speaker in your phone so that you hear an audio
signal coming out of the phone headset. Computers talk to each
other through a similar set of on and off coded signals. My
company builds equipment that carries these on and off signals across
the country.
My other jobs at PhotonEx including working with lawyers to patent
and protect our inventions. I also manage a group of engineers
who are developing the next product that we will build. I am
also responsible for putting together presentations to explain to
people who might be interested in buying our equipment how it works
and why it is better than other equipment that is available in the
marketplace.
Some days, if I'm lucky and my schedule is not too hectic, I get to
work in the laboratory at our company. That is my favorite part
of the job.
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Q:
What have you been working on or teaching lately?
A: At PhotonEx, we are trying to improve the optical communication
systems that carry light signals across the country. We can
improve them in a number of ways, and I am currently working on the
following projects: The first is to make the optical
communications systems faster, so that more signals can be carried on
a single fiber. The faster we can turn the light signals on and
off, the more data we can transport. Right now, most optical
communication systems carry the equivalent of 156,250 phone
conversations, but we are working on systems that are four times
faster (625,000 phone conversations). We are also working on a
system that can carry 40 different colors of light at the same time,
so that a single fiber will be able to carry 25 million phone
conversations simultaneously. Plus, we are working to
make these signals travel over longer distances before they have to
be converted to electronics and cleaned up.
In most of these cases, we are inventing whole new techniques.
I think we are successful because we have a really talented team of
people who work well together and who won't stop working on a problem
until it is solved. That is a very important characteristic for
a scientist.
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Q:
What most interest you in your job?
A: I like to do things that most people think are impossible.
For example, a lot of people are afraid to tackle a hard problem so
they say it is impossible or impractical. People used to say
those sorts of things about being able to put a man on the moon for
instance. But most problems are not impossible to solve, they
are just very difficult to solve, and that is an important
difference. Usually a very talented team of people is needed to
solve the problem. I like to work with a team of very smart and
very enthusiastic people to build communication systems that are the
best in the world.
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Q:
What do you like the least about your job?
A: The part of my job that I dislike is that it is very time
consuming and requires me to spend a lot of time away from my
family. I wish I could have my very interesting job and all the
time I want with my family, but that is a very difficult balance.
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Q:
What has your career path been?
A: When I went to Wellesley College, I wanted to be a politician and
make the world a better place. My first semester, I took a
class in physics in order to fill my science requirement, and I
really loved that class. We had fun lab courses and lots of
opportunities to solve problems and learn new things. I decided
to become a scientist instead of a politician. As a result of
that change in interest while I was in college, I think it is good to
go to college with an open mind and to go someplace where you will
learn lots of different subjects-because it's hard to know ahead of
time which ones you will really like.
After graduating from college with a degree in Physics, I went to
work at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. At Bell Labs I got to
work with some of the world experts in optical communications.
It was a great job and it made me realize that I wanted to be able to
lead my own scientific research projects. In order to do that,
I needed more education, so I left Bell Labs and went back to school
to get a graduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
or MIT. It took me 6 years to get my Ph.D., after which I went
to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA. At Lincoln
Laboratory I worked on optical communications research issues
important to the United States government and military. After 6
years at Lincoln Laboratory, I decided to leave research and start a
company with two colleagues of mine. We wanted to take what we
had learned in our research careers and develop a product that we
could sell to the marketplace. The business we started is
called PhotonEx, and we are still working on it today.
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Q:
Was there any person who inspired you to do what you're doing today?
A: There are a few people who have really inspired me to do what I
do. The first person is my mother, Maryanne Hall, because she
always believed in me and supported me. She taught me that I
could achieve whatever I set my mind to. Another person who
really inspired me was a college professor, Liz Marshall, who gave me
a summer job working in her laboratory. She taught me how much
fun research can be and also gave me an opportunity to publish my
first paper. At Bell Labs, I worked for a man named Bob Jopson,
and he was one of the smartest, hardest working people I have ever
known. Bob taught me to focus on tough problems and also how to
stay up all night. That skill came in pretty handy in graduate
school. Finally, I have been inspired by my MIT thesis advisor,
Erich Ippen, who is probably one of the most respected men in our
field. He is respected for his intellect, but also for his
modesty and his decency. He has given me a good example to
follow.
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Q:
What attracted you to this career when you were in high school?
A: In high school, I took lots of science classes and got good
grades, but I wasn't thinking about it as a career. However, I
do remember in one science class that the teacher told us that if we
held a gun in one hand and fired a bullet straight out from a gun,
and at the same time dropped a bullet from the same height with our
other hand, that they would hit the ground at the same time. I
refused to believe that both bullets would hit the ground at the same
time. So finally, the teacher told me he would give me an A if
I could prove he was wrong. So I put together a little gizmo
made from a block of wood, an elastic band and an old door lock, that
could shoot a ping pong ball and drop a ping pong ball at the same
time. Sure enough, every time, the two balls hit the ground at
the same time. The teacher was right! The reason is that
you can separate the motion of balls or bullets into the up-and-down
direction and the side-to-side direction and the side-to-side motion
does not affect at all the up-and-down motion. Since both
bullets or balls were falling from the same height, they would hit
the ground at the same time, even if one was traveling a great
distance side-to-side. I remember how exciting it was to
finally understand how that worked. There was something I
thought was impossible, and then I tried to build something to prove
it was impossible, but I was wrong. But the process I went
through to learn that was what I found I loved in my college physics
class and was the reason I decided to go into science. It's a
good lesson that you have a long time to find out what you're good at
and to choose a career.
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Q:
What careers in your field do you see as promising for the
future?
A: I think there will always be a need for good engineers.
Engineers are always improving our world, and experts from a variety
of different backgrounds will be needed. Right now there is a
lot of collaboration going on between engineers and medical
doctors. They are developing new tests and instruments to
diagnose and treat different medical problems, for example. If
you are interested in a field of science, my advise is to work hard
at it, and always try to surround yourself with good people, and
people you are proud to be associated with. There are lots of
interesting problems out there that need solving, and there always
will be. But if you can find people you enjoy working with, you
will feel like you have the best job in the world.
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Q:
What advice do you have for young women who want to work in your
field someday?
A: The first thing to remember is that success is 99% hard work, and
if you work hard at something, chances are you will be
successful. The second thing to remember is that you can do
anything you set your mind to. If you really love studying a
certain subject, or setting up experiments to see what is going to
happen, don't let anything or anybody discourage you. Everyone
has bad days, gets bad grades, makes mistakes and so on, but not
everyone can learn from their mistakes and turn them into
experience. If you can persevere through hard courses and
frustrating times when nothing seems to go right, chances are you
will be a great success. Remember to be honest and to treat
people as you would like to be treated and you will always be a
valued member of the team. The world is made up of 50% women
and 50% men, and until 50% of the engineers and scientists in this
world are women, we will be missing out on a lot of creativity,
talent and invention. History is filled with great stories of
scientists who worked hard, never gave up, and kept trying until they
found the answers they were looking for. If other people have
been able to do it, why not you?
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