IMOD Researcher Profile

I was born in a little town on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, called Williamstown, very close to the beach! My family moved to the U.S. in the early 1960s. We moved from a nice sunny beach in Williamstown in February to a very snowy Syracuse, New York. It was something of a shock!

I always wanted to be a researcher. I don’t think I ever thought about anything else. As far back as I can remember, I was always interested in some sort of science, something math oriented. I really enjoyed math classes going through school. Science was always more interesting to me than English and History. I had a really great high school chemistry teacher, which was one of the reasons I chose this path. In talking about her career, my high school chemistry teacher had started to go down the path of getting a PhD, but she stopped with a Masters, likely because at the time, with starting a family, it was somewhat challenging to get a PhD. There were limited options. She had a real passion for the subject and brought a lot of excitement to the class.

My degrees were in chemistry and when I started looking for a more permanent position, I was interested in i research based opportunities, but I didn’t want anything to do with academia at the time. My work had been more in physical synthetic organic research, general esoteric design and synthesis of molecular structures that didn’t really have an application or much use. I wanted to move into a space that had more of an application focus. I had an interview at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, they made me an offer and it really felt like a good fit. The rest is history!

Bell labs was a really interesting space with regards to team science. The way just about everybody operated there was through collaboration. No one had large research groups. Everyone was looking at ways in which we could work together to broaden the impact of what we do. It was really easy to meet people and find out more about what they were exploring. You could just strike up a conversation over lunch or coffee and just decide to do some experiments together. It was a great way to uncover new directions and new paths. As a result of my Bell Labs experience, the whole multidisciplinary thing is embedded in how I think.

You had chemists working with chemical engineers, working with a materials scientist and a device engineer and an optical engineer. You could explore how all those pieces came together to create something new – it was really exciting.

Some of my early work on materials related to silicon manufacturing where there was an interest in developing new polymers for imaging circuit patterns that would operate in the UV. That project led to an interaction bringing together some of my chemistry and photochemistry background to design some new molecular structures. The challenge was that I had never seen a polymer at that point. I thought, “ok, I can learn to do polymerization”. I worked with some polymer folks, some chemical engineers, and then some folks who needed new materials in their efforts to design some new advanced lithographic tools. All together, that resulted in some really interesting work. We identified some new chemistry that could be effective at particular wavelengths, and we thought it would be effective for this application. One thing I learned was that the chemistry is just piece of the puzzle. Another big thing is how you process the material once you have it – that is what really determines how it actually behaves.

That intersection of different disciplines led to a lot of new collaborations in a very productive space. Just having the right people and the right tools to investigate and explore the problem accelerated everything. That is one of the exciting things about being part of a community like IMOD, it is fostering a similar approach in bringing people together. It is harder since we are not all in the same location, but we can still get that same sense and the approach of trying to do more than any one individual could.

Bell Labs was absolutely fantastic, for the longest time. In the early 2000s there was the telecom bust, and this really hit budgets across the board and things became more and more challenging, year after year. I was in management at that stage, my job mainly became working with people helping them to figure out what they were going to do next. At some point I then had to figure out what I wanted to do next. One of the key things I had really enjoyed was working with younger colleagues, guiding people and helping them to be successful, and that drew me to an academic environment, ultimately deciding to join Georgia Tech. These kind of decisions are always tough, and there is never a good time. My two youngest children are twins, and when I decided to make the move they were halfway through their Junior year in high school. I had a long distance commute for a time, it would not have been popular to move them!

When I moved to Georgia Tech I chose to explore the organic polymer and semiconductor space. It was one of the areas that had really intrigued me at Bell Labs. At the time there was a large push to design new molecular structures, new polymer structures, but there were not many people looking at how you actually process these to get a reproducible organization of the structure. This led me down the path of building a collaborative program that coupled materials chemistry with process engineering. Thinking about how you process these materials really is super important if you want to get a reproducible film and a reproducible device. This was a program that no one team would be able to do, and I am really enjoying exploring the research at this collaborative intersection.

I think we will have opportunities to create much more cost effective and much less energy intensive, in terms of processing, devices that could be produced on a large scale that are much lighter weight and could be conformable and flexible. These advances could really allow for many more applications than we currently have. The top two priorities are to produce these devices in a much more sustainable way, reducing energy and material costs, and making them much more affordable. If we could produce things essentially roll to roll, or the same way that newspapers used to get printed, versus high vacuum fabrication facilities that cost multiple tens of billions of dollars, that would be huge. You could even consider the idea of refurbishing all of the decommissioned newspaper printers! It would be a great way to contribute to building back a manufacturing oriented economy.

I’d say that there are a lot of different opportunities. Interact with as many people with different backgrounds, different areas of expertise, as you can. Learn from them. Learn about different perspectives, and how these can help you understand more about what you do, because this will give you insight into what may be important to try and do.

Gardening. It is great to get outside and get in the dirt! Particularly on a Sunday morning, when it is nice and quiet. I also enjoy listening to music. At some point I need to get back to actually playing the piano. It’s been a little while since I have played seriously, but I do enjoy it and it is a wonderful way to escape. I like to keep my hands busy, I enjoy doing needlepoint. I wouldn’t call myself artistic, but it is a really enjoyable creative outlet.