Your postdoc lasted HOW long?
This is the fifth of a series of articles on my adventures and misadventures from my way-too-long 24 years in academia. See the first article here.
After completing my less than stellar PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Davis (UCD), my options for post-PhD employment were limited. Further limiting my options was the fact that my then-wife Shirley (name changed for privacy) had just completed her master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at UCD and had gotten accepted into University of California, Berkeley’s (UCB) PhD program in Electrical Engineering.
Armed with the knowledge that Shirley and I would be in Northern California for the next few years, I took a trip to UCB to see if there might be postdoctoral employment options. I don’t recall exactly how I came to sit down with Professors Richard Muller and Richard White, who headed up the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC) within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), located in Cory Hall. However, that conversation led me to secure a postdoc position within their research group.
In large part, my vast teaching experience won me that job. It turned out in the fall of 1989 Professor Muller was slated to teach the junior/senior-level electronic-circuit devices course for which he had written the popular textbook. He was also slated to travel extensively that fall and would miss roughly half of the lectures. So, he figured I would be valuable as his substitute even though it wasn’t clear how much I’d contribute to the BSAC research group.
The teaching part of my new position turned out very well. The students in the electronic-circuit devices course preferred my more structured teaching style to Professor Muller’s. My lecture style involved writing a lot on the chalkboard, including lots of examples, so that my students would have a coherent companion to the textbook from which to refer later. I got that style from my mentor Mr. Wilson.
Professor Muller on the other hand was very good at talking about all the latest advances in electronic devices. He was, after all, a leading researcher in electronic devices, so naturally when he got in front of a class of smart UCB undergrads, he’d want to talk about the fun stuff he and his colleagues were working on.
At about 5 pm one day during that fall semester, Shirley and I started to leave the EECS building (Cory Hall) for the day. We took the very sturdy concrete steps down three flights to the main level. When we walked outside something strange was going on. We heard multiple car alarms as we started to walk the couple of blocks to where our car was parked. There seemed to be a lot of people out and about. We knew something was up, but just had no idea what it was.
When we arrived at our apartment complex just a few miles away, we again saw a lot of people standing around outside, including the apartment complex manager. We asked him what was up, and he said there had just been a massive earthquake! Just about as he said that, there was a strong aftershock that we clearly felt.
It turned out we didn’t feel the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake at all that struck exactly as we were walking down the stairwell of Cory Hall. The next day, when I told Professor Muller that I didn’t feel the earthquake, he accused me of sleeping in my office! He said he dove under his desk when the earthquake struck. The picture below from the neighboring city of Oakland shows clearly how powerful and tragic that earthquake was.
After one year with the BSAC research group I decided it wasn’t really for me. In large part that was because to really conduct much research I’d have to spend a significant amount of my time gowned up in a semiconductor manufacturing clean room. A clean room is a manufacturing environment in which the number of impurities of any kind in the air must be extremely low to avoid negatively impacting the manufacturing process. Being in such an artificial environment without any opportunity for my body to breathe just didn’t appeal to me.
I once again looked around for postdoc opportunities with the EECS department at UCB. This time I discovered a group that was conducting research on low-density glow discharge plasmas for integrated circuit manufacturing. The principal researcher with this group was the distinguished Professor Mike Lieberman. This time, my background in semiconductor transport and overall physics background was a better fit. Additionally, Lieberman’s lab was not in a clean room. It was a huge room with several large cylindrical vessels and tubes that housed the plasmas, along with the associated gas lines and electronics, for the various experiments this group was conducting.
My initial assignment as the new postdoc in this group was the assist the machinists and lab technician with the construction of a new plasma experiment for investigating a technology called Plasma-Immersion Ion Implantation (PIII). I had fun helping to finish build out this experimental apparatus and to see it go operational. I also got the opportunity to take some of the first diagnostic measurements of the plasma properties in the PIII vessel via Langmuir probes.
After the PIII setup was operational, another postdoc started conducting experiments with ion implantation of semiconductor wafers. This freed me up to start doing some analytical modeling of the plasmas. Good success with the modeling led to a collaboration with Professor David Graves in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Graves’ group had an interest in creating simulations based on fluid dynamics for the low-density plasmas.
The 1990s was a time in which the national labs, whose focus had traditionally been around defense and energy, were scrambling to shift some of their focus toward research to boost advances in commercial technologies, as funding for traditional areas was being squeezed. This fact led to a further collaboration on creating fluid dynamics simulations with plasma physicist Dr. Peter Vitello of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
Around this time, I neared the three-year mark as a postdoc in the EECS Department at UCB. Shirley was only midway through her PhD program at that point (more on that later) so I was settling in for a long stay at UCB. However, it turns out three years is already longer than postdocs traditionally last. One to two years is typical. In fact, UCB told me three years was the maximum length I could hold a postdoc.
What did I do next? Through an arrangement with Professor Graves, I quit my postdoc in the EECS department on my three-year postdoc anniversary. The very next day I started a new postdoc with Professor Graves in the Chemical Engineering Department!
I would end up spending the next two and half years in this second postdoc. For a significant part of that time I spent two days a week at LLNL working with Dr. Vitello. What came out of that work, after I had moved on to another position, was INDUCT95, a computer-aided-design software program used by the micro-electronics industry, which received a R&D 100 Award from Research & Development Magazine as one of the most technologically important developments in 1998.
I had already made history once at UCB during my days as a grad student in the physics department. My combined five and half years of postdoc research set another record that I hope for the sake of future researchers will never be broken.
As I alluded to earlier, Shirley and I had an apartment near Berkeley. This was actually not our primary residence. We had purchased a modest starter home in Davis, CA during the time I was finishing up my PhD at UCD and Shirley was finishing up her MS at UCD. During the first two years of Shirley’s PhD program at UCB, she was taking several classes and needed to be close to campus during the week to make sure she made it to class on time. We took refuge back in the quiet town of Davis, CA during our weekends those two years. Thereafter, we commuted to UCB five days a week for the last three years or so.
As it turned out, we had a famous neighbor just two doors down in our quiet Davis neighborhood. That neighbor was Dave Scott, one of the greatest triathletes of all time. Dave is most famous for winning the Ironman Triathlon Hawaii six times. By the time I met Dave, he was in the latter stage of his career, though he was still actively training. I recall chatting with him one day in the early afternoon. I believe he had already completed two legs of his daily training regimen (biking, swimming, and running) and was about to start his third. He told me he’d just finished his high-energy lunch of ten peaches!
During most all of the years I was married to Shirley, we were regular runners. We got up in the morning at least six days a week and ran anywhere from four to six miles. We had occasionally talked about the idea of running a marathon but had never actually pursued it.
Then one day in 1992, Shirley and I were in a local Davis running store and we saw a flyer for the San Francisco marathon. It was to be held in just one month.
If you know anything about marathons, you know that typically people spend several months training for them. Perhaps due to ignorance, we decided we could train within one month so we both signed up.
We immediately started extending our runs and within two weeks, we had completed a 20-mile practice run. Without a support team we had to be creative and stash water bottles along the route. With the ability to reach 20 miles within two weeks, we felt pretty good about our ability to run the marathon.
I will never forget that marathon. The race starts on the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, so the first part of the race consists of running on the bridge into downtown San Francisco.
Without much experience with road races, Shirley and I allowed ourselves to be swept up in the sea of runners and we found ourselves completing the first couple of miles about in a pace about one mile per hour faster than our normal pace. However, we felt good. In 1992, the race course left downtown via the very steep Hayes Street hill. It was so steep, we had to run in a zigzag path up the hill. Of course, that took something out of us.
The race continues to the south end of the city, then swings over to the coast so starting near mile 20 we were running with a view of the Pacific Ocean coastline.
Unfortunately, mile 20 is where I hit the proverbial wall that distance runners know all too well. I was just gassed and would have liked to stop. Shirley, on the other hand, was still full of energy and could have easily run the rest of the way. To her credit, she stayed with me as I alternated between walking and running slowly until we finally made it to the finish line in Golden Gate Park.
We had done it! Completed our first marathon in four hours and four minutes with only one month of training. It was an experience I’ll never forget and I’m glad I did it. However, I’ve never been motivated to run another one.
I sometimes like to say I should have three PhDs. The one I earned at UCD, the body of work of my postdoc(s) at UCB, which easily would have made a fine PhD thesis, and the work I did to drag Shirley to the finish line in completing her PhD in electrical engineering at UCB.
The dysfunction in our relationship started when we met. I was her physics teacher at Santa Rosa Junior College as I wrote about in part 3 of this series. So, we had a student-teacher relationship from the very beginning and in many ways it never changed. When she transferred to UCD as an undergrad to pursue a degree in physics, she took most of the same courses, taught by many of the same professors, as I’d had in the same curriculum several years prior. That kept the cycle going as I was always there to be her tutor. She was good enough to get through such a curriculum with my help, but physics theory wasn’t really her strong suit.
Ironically, when she pursued her master’s degree in electrical engineering at UCD, she was much more in her element. She took classes in microwave engineering that were very lab-intensive and did very well. She even improved upon one of the processes they were using.
She did her master’s research in optoelectronics. Again, it was lab work, and she demonstrated a real aptitude in the laboratory. Her thesis advisor, a very young and bright professor, was in alignment with me in seeing this aptitude. We felt strongly that she would have the most success continuing as an experimentalist as she moved into her PhD program at UCB. Unfortunately, that was not what she chose to pursue.
Instead, Shirley chose to pursue theoretical and computational quantum transport of electrons in semiconductors, which was the next generation of research and technology beyond what I had done for my PhD dissertation, i.e., semi-classical transport of electrons in semiconductors.
Her experience was somewhat akin to mine at UCD in my PhD program. Her PhD thesis advisor had experience in optoelectronics, but not in quantum transport. After foundering for some time, she sought the help of a solid-state physics professor, who in one meeting was able to provide some excellent detailed guidance. To implement what he had given her would require writing a very detailed FORTRAN program (the language used by most scientists back then). Unfortunately, Shirley didn’t have much programming experience, whereas I’d spent thousands of hours writing FORTRAN code during my PhD research and in the latter postdoc with Peter Vitello.
To once again pull Shirley along, I rolled up my sleeves and in one weekend did the finest programming I’ve probably done in my life. I wrote the entire FORTRAN program from start to finish, without any errors.
The results of that program turned out to form the basis for most of her dissertation results. That would have been fine if I hadn’t had to do more. Unfortunately, Shirley was not in a good frame of mind in those days and she wasn’t particularly good at writing. For that reason, much to my frustration, but to drag her along to complete her degree, I ended up writing over 80% of her dissertation.
That’s why I like to say I basically earned three PhDs. Unfortunately, the only one I had a piece of paper to show for it wasn’t from UCB. It was from UCD, and when it came to subsequently try to secure a faculty position, that made all the difference.
Read about my continuing academic journey and the transition I made to the business world via a move to American Samoa in the sixth and final article of this series.
