In Scholars Share, Frelsi interviews academics and researchers in Electrical Engineering on various research-related topics and their personal motivations, experiences, and views on life at large.
This time, with Professor Josep Jornet, the director of the Ultrabroadband Nanonetworking Laboratory, associate director of the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things, and a faculty member of the SMART Center at Northeastern Unviersity, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Interview transcript if your prefer to read:
Could you share a bit about your early life?
I'm originally from Tarragona, Spain, one hour south of Barcelona. That's where I was born. And I spend my time between this city and a small town closer to the mountains called Ascó. And that's how I grew up. I'm a very normal kid going to school, going to after-school activities, having a lot of friends, and enjoying life. I know that today, for example, here in the US, I look at what some of our students do, and by the time they get to college, they have already done so many things. Well, by the time I got to college, my summers had been enjoying life with my friends.
Then I went to Barcelona for college. I studied telecommunications engineering at the Universitat Politecnica de de Catalunya which is in Barcelona itself. We know that in Europe there are Erasmus and mobility programs. I was never really interested in those. I was happy staying in Barcelona, spending the weekends and summers back in my hometown, and that was about it. At the time, a transition from five to four-year programs was happening in Spain. I was in a five-year program. I could not just cut it short and make it four. They offered some of us to spend a total of six years and get both bachelor's and master's degrees. And I agreed to do that. One requirement was that during the sixth year, we had to be abroad because this was supposed to be an international program. Together with another classmate, we ended up coming to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.
While I was already an undergraduate researcher in Barcelona at the antennas lab, it was the first time I saw how exciting things could be when it comes to research. As someone who never really planned to be far from my home city, I realized that the opportunities were on this side of the Atlantic. From there, everything started. I decided to stay in this part of the US, went for a Ph.D. at Georgia Tech, and then decided I wanted to stay in academia. My parents were surprised when I told them I was planning to go to the US to finish my degree. They said, why, you never moved from your hometown? The reality is I moved to the US and decided to never move from here. To some extent, I'm not moving much, but I had one transition.
I would guess that you became interested in physics and engineering way before that exchange time. How did that happen?
That makes me think... I started studying for a bachelor's degree in telecommunications engineering in 2002 in Barcelona. At that time, telecommunications was a degree that you go for if you were good because it was supposed to open the doors to the most exciting opportunities. In the last 20 years, what has changed in our life? We have seen the cell phone revolution, we went from desktop computers to smart devices, added tablets, wearables... We have connectivity everywhere. So in 2002, which was the beginning, you could tell that something big was coming and I wanted to be part of that. I didn't want to be just a user of technologies or an early adopter and write blog posts about it. I wanted to contribute to the design of those things.
And these are the words that I remember writing into my application statements. Not just to get into the bachelor's program, but later on to get some of the scholarships to be able to come to the US. Being in telecommunications engineering I realized I liked the things closer to physics the most. Electronics, electromagnetism, and of course, we could add communications theory, and networking theory, topics close to physics. Even the title of my Ph.D. dissertation was Fundamentals of Electromagnetic Nano Networks in the Terahertz Band. The first two, or three chapters are about physics. We're talking about new materials to develop antennas, and the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with different types of elements in the air, in buildings, or anywhere. There was always a connection to physics. And am I happy with my engineering degree? Absolutely. If I had to study anything else, it would probably have been physics.
However, I still prefer engineering because it connects physics to reality. To an actual application. And that's also what I try to tell my students. It's great to have huge discoveries and write papers in Nature and Science. But if we cannot connect them to society, what's the point of it? It's just to boost your ego, but how can you improve the society we live in? I think engineering is that sweet spot connecting physics with society and that's what I like.
Was there a clear point or event in your life where you told yourself that physics and engineering is something you want to do? Or was it more of a gradual growth of interest?
I had friends who always knew what they wanted to be and they went for it. I know it's not typical, but I usually went with the flow. I started telecommunications engineering because I saw potential. After all, it was a fairly popular degree supposedly opening many doors. When I started college, I never thought I would go to graduate school. I never thought I would have a master's, let alone a Ph.D. degree. But then an opportunity to get a master's degree spending one extra year appeared. I thought, okay, let's do that. When I was in my fourth year I took courses on microwaves and in particular antennas with Professor Lluis Jofre at UPC Barcelona. He was one of the key contributors to the Barcelona antennas lab and he reached out to some of us who did quite well in his class. He was interested in having undergraduate researchers, so why don't you work with me, he said. He talked to a couple of us and suddenly four of us were working with him. And my very first work was on ultra-wideband antennas. This was 2005 and 2006.
Ultra Wideband (UWB) is a technology that was already academically popular at the time. In the military even longer and commercially only the last few years. UWB is behind many of the indoor localization systems. We were working on these as students already in 2006 which was very exciting. So the first one who brought me into research was Professor Lluis Jofre. When the opportunity to come to the US appeared it was interesting. We were able to go to MIT thanks to the director of the telecommunications school in Barcelona who had done her Ph.D. with professor Milica Stojanovic. Both of them were at Northeastern University at the time, which is where I am now. So through this personal connection, two students from Barcelona could access the most prestigious engineering institute in the world. That's how we came to Boston with my friend Patricia. Here we worked on a different topic - underwater acoustic networks. Still related to physics, but not electromagnetism. Quite different in fact - mechanical, or acoustic waves.
However, I realized that there are many opportunities for research in the US and it is well-valued. Having a Ph.D. is required depending on the positions you want to get, as opposed to Spain at the time. There, you would only do a Ph.D. if you wanted to go to academia. At the time, I didn't know if I wanted to go to academia or not. I just knew that I wanted to continue doing research and if that meant a Ph.D., ok. Then we go for a Ph.D.
The program at MIT finished, so I went back to Spain and during that summer (2007) some of my professors in Barcelona told me: Josep, look, we know you're done and you're looking at options. Why don't you join a summer school here in Barcelona? It is led by an accomplished and famous professor Ian Akyildiz, who teaches on cognitive radio networks. It may be good that you see other topics before you decide what you want to do in the future. So I went to summer school which lasted three weeks in Barcelona. On the very first day, professor Akyildiz asked each of us to introduce ourselves. We were a small group, maybe 20 people. When it came to me, I explained that I completed my master's thesis at MIT with Professor Stojanovic. And he asked me: oh, does she still smoke so much? I said, yes, I assume you know her. Of course, he knew her, she was a good friend. After a few days, one of my professors in Barcelona said, look, you may want to talk to him. So I talked to Professor Akyildiz in his office and said he talked to my professors in Barcelona, to Professor Stojanovic at MIT, and knew I was on the market looking for options.
So he put one more option on my table - to study towards a Ph.D. with him at Georgia Tech. But forget about underwater acoustic networks, or about cognitive radio networks. It's going to be on a totally different topic, which he was starting - Nano Communication Networks. Since I didn't know much about it, he said: "Look, the first student who did her master's thesis on it is going to defend it in a couple of weeks. Come to her defense and see if you like what she presents." At that time, Nano Communication Networks meant networks of cells-like devices - living cells in your body communicating not with electromagnetic or acoustic signals, but by exchanging molecules. Again, this was something people had not been working on and there were so many ideas in Cristina's master thesis that I was amazed. Throwing in that he has been affiliated with Barcelona, so there could be a possibility to spend the summers there, you start adding things.
At the time, Georgia Tech's electrical and computer engineering program was among the top five in the US. Working on a very exciting topic with someone who has one of the highest impacts in terms of pioneering research, a very high number of citations, and recognitions, the opportunity was very nice and eventually, I said yes. If you asked about a turning point, I think that was it. I decided that I would do a Ph.D. in an advanced research group on a really crazy topic. When I joined the group and we started refining the topic, we realized that one of the new Ph.D. students in the group was already working on molecular communications. So Professor Akyildiz says: "Josep, every Ph.D. student should have a clear path. I don't want you to work on a topic another student is working on already. So we'll have to refine this. Take a course on nanoelectronics, molecular electronics, and carbon electronics, and try to see if we can find something there." This is how terahertz communication - the topic of my thesis - was born. My supervisor - professor Akyildiz was very persuasive in showing us that if we want to continue to be at the forefront of research and to some extent free, being in academia was the best thing we could do. That's why I quickly realized I'm doing a Ph.D. and I want to continue in academia.
You said you went with the flow. I guess that's the gist of your academic journey so far. Were there mentors, friends, or peers that have strongly influenced you?
I mentioned the student who was already working on molecular communications at Georgia Tech in the same group - now Professor Massimiliano Pierobon. To do a Ph.D. in a very advanced topic in a field where competition is everything, you need to have good support. And I always say that - I excelled in my Ph.D. because I had a support network. Not just the advisor, but the other lab members. So Massimiliano became a very close friend and we relied on each other. This is true with him and others, which is a message I always say. You work with your advisor, not for your advisor. Now, as a faculty, I get many emails from students saying I would like to work under you. What do you mean under you? That I'm sitting on top? That's not how research works. You need an advisor who works with you, which I have.
Then you need a support network. When you're abroad and your family is not around, your friends become family. And that's important - to pick the right friends. It's been ten years since I graduated from Georgia Tech and five of us still keep our Whatsapp group on. Pretty much every week something is going on despite all of us taking different paths. Some of us stayed in academia, others went to industry. But the connection is there. From time to time we meet at conferences and in the last five years, we met often for weddings. Those are friends who played a very important role at a time when you needed it. To be at the forefront of a field, working intensively, and making your work the main thing you do every day, you need a support network. And these people will stay with you forever. That's the nice thing.
What does it mean to be successful in life?
Very good question. To be successful means to find the thing that makes you happy and go for it. I like my research, proving things that people thought were impossible. I like discovering things I didn't know existed, or maybe no one knew existed. That makes me happy and what I'm looking for. The goal, however, should be not only doing something and keeping it to yourself. The goal is to do something, share it, and see people getting excited with you or appreciate the work you do. I guess that's a broader definition of success. People may say - no, as long as you're happy with yourself, that's fine. Sure. But I think we need to be a little bit beyond such a centralistic vision of life. What you are doing should have an impact. Which can be creating a new wave of research, enabling new directions, or creating products everyone buys. Success means having an impact, while it hopefully comes through doing what you like.
So it's not only about finding happiness in what you're doing but also that there is a meaning behind it for others, not just yourself.
Exactly. Yes.
What do you consider the greatest learning moments in your life? When things didn't go as you planned or something unexpected happened changing the course of your life.
Let's be very honest. I started in January 2009 at Georgia Tech. Supposedly working on nano communication networks, looking at molecular communications. Reaching the lab, I found out there is someone already working on this topic and I need to explore another one. Okay, I thought I was going to work on this. Now I'm going to be working on something else. That was not the nicest feeling. I mean, it was exciting, because the whole point of a Ph.D. program is to explore, learn, and eventually create knowledge. But the first step is to create the topic we're going to work on. My advisor said: "Josep look, you can take more courses on communications, but why don't you take courses outside your comfort zone?" That's why I took the course on carbon and molecular nanoelectronics - a small course taught at Georgia Tech.
The first day, with maybe 14 people in class, the professor asked us to introduce ourselves. Everyone was from the realm of nanoelectronics, nanophotonics, mechanical engineering, and I'm a communications person. Why are you here, the instructor asked. Well, my advisor told me so. Professor Azad Naeemi who was teaching this class at Georgia Tech was doing research on graphene for wired interconnects. In that course, we mostly learned quantum physics and quantum nanoelectronics which was in 2009. We had to prepare a final project for which I chose to design an antenna since I am a wireless communications person. My goal was to have a tiny radio for nano communication devices. The critical element to make it wireless is an antenna. During this course, I tried to combine what I was learning about quantum nanoelectronics and the properties of graphene with what I knew from Barcelona when I was an undergraduate researcher in the antennas lab. Could we make an antenna with this new material, make it very small, and see if it works as it's supposed to?
The goal was clear - an antenna with the size of 1 micrometer in the largest dimension. There are challenges if we use traditional materials, so let's use this new material people are talking about. This was in 2009. Graphene was first obtained experimentally in 2004. So in 2009, it was still an early material. As part of the class project, we combined EM equations with some electronic equations to describe this material. Eventually, it turned out we could make an antenna that would work well at terahertz frequencies. I had the class, but then I had my research progress meetings with my advisor. And it came to a point when this seemed to make sense. Meaning that nano communication networks can be based on molecular communications following the path of biology, or on electromagnetic systems. Not at microwave or even optical frequencies, but right in the middle - terahertz frequencies. And that was the kickoff for my Ph.D. and for everything else that happened through the years. As a side note, in 2010 Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for obtaining graphene experimentally and characterizing it for the first time. By the end of 2010, many groups started working on graphene and its applications. Our advantage was that we have been doing that since 2009 and for a very specific application - wireless communications.
That's what really set the beginning of my Ph.D. Many times students wonder what they are going to work on when joining my group, wanting something specific. And I say: "Look, if I tell you exactly what you are going to work on the first day of your Ph.D., I might be losing options. I might be eliminating or missing the creative part from your side." So I tell students not to rush into narrowing down their topic and deciding what to do. Don't expect me to tell you, it's part of a learning process. If I already knew what you were going to do for the next four years, it's probably not exciting enough. That was a big aha moment.
Today's world pushes you to do things quickly, be productive, and be specific. Which is quite contrary to what you're trying to do. How is that working out?
We're not supposed to, but very often we are evaluated based on how many publications per year we get out, how many grants we get in. On the other hand, I'm telling my students to take as much as they need to come up with something. I agree, it seems contradictory. When I started as an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, I received good advice from my advisors, saying: "Josep, now you're going to become an assistant professor, you're going to be an independent faculty. Many people will want to work with you. But remember, you only have 24 hours a day. You cannot go crazy and say yes to everyone. You will have to accept to work only with people that you really want to work with."
The other advice I got from other colleagues is not to rush into hiring students. A great first Ph.D. student will make your tenure process very smooth. Otherwise, the first Ph.D. student can make your tenure track very hard. Perhaps, you may even not succeed. With that in mind, starting as an assistant professor, you still do a lot of the work yourself. You cannot think that you're going to hire top stars to work with you. No, you're the last person on the list of a department. The only people who want to work with you are those who didn't get accepted by other faculty or maybe they really like your topic. But let's be honest. When you join a department and you start getting emails "You're my dream professor..." after the first week of tenure, literally having defended your thesis a week before... How can I be your dream, professor?
Knowing I still need to continue doing most of the research myself, let's start testing students. What I told students was not to rush and try to narrow down what they wanted to do at the beginning. Try to explore, to learn. The most beautiful part of research is the discovery, reading, and having the time for it. Sometimes the students feel like they are wasting their time and I tell them no. By the time you have a topic and you're writing papers right and left, you will miss the quality time, the freedom of just going and reading. A professor from UPC, Eduard Alarcon once told me - every time you read a paper you create a bubble of knowledge. You read another paper, another bubble, etc. Reading is creating knowledge. The process of doing research is learning how to connect that knowledge. And I think that was a very good thing to say. And that's what I've been telling the students. Read, take your time, and try to create knowledge. Then we'll see how to connect it and eventually, you will be able to connect it. It takes time, yes, I agree. This is how I approach Ph.D. students. Because getting a Ph.D. is a long process and there is no point in rushing things. Once you create many bubbles of knowledge and you learn to connect them, the ideas will come, and the publications will come.
I approach master students slightly differently. They usually come with a very strict timeline, having one year left in the department. They need to get a master's thesis in one year. We try to assign them a project for which we already have a problem and we also know the solution. So mostly, I think of a master's student as someone who can help me or a Ph.D. student implement the answer to a known problem. If a master's student decides to stay for a Ph.D., most likely I will give them a problem and they find a solution. If he or she becomes good, by the time they come to me with the solution, they will tell me, you know what? This solved this, but this is the next problem I want to solve and this is how I'm going to solve it. At the moment a student can identify the problem and an answer, they have become an independent researcher. They don't need an advisor anymore - that is when they graduate.
That sounds like a very sensible and nice way to lead students, especially from their side. Because the stories of Ph.D. students burning out are piling up all the time. And it's become very obvious why. So it's great to see that someone really does the right thing.
Eventually, they will get very busy, but because they are the ones that see - oh, I want to do that and get a paper. I want to do that and get another paper. And I want to come over the weekend to test that. Sure, I am not going to stop you. But it should never be by me pushing them. At most, it should be by encouraging them. Sometimes, joking with other faculty, I feel like a cheerleader. Meaning I'm not here to yell at people. I'm here to cheer people on and tell them, look, let's do this and if you want to do it, I'm going to help you and make sure it happens.
A positive reinforcement tends to work better than negative in the long run, anyway. Outside work, what do you enjoy doing to unwind and recharge?
Very good question. I enjoy cooking and correspondingly eating. When I moved to the US, in the first few months I was super excited to try so many different types of foods. Being in Boston, you could try food from anywhere in the world and I was not used to it. That was very exciting. But after three, or four months I realized that I started missing the type of food my mom would prepare. So I asked my mom for recipes and I started cooking and people around me seemed to like it. That was the positive reinforcement. I would say my free time was usually full of cooking and hosting friends.
When I joined Georgia Tech, during the first year we were supposed to pass the qualifying exam. The day before the exam, I was tired of studying and checking things so I decided to cook for the lab. So for my qualifying exam, I cooked a typical Catalan pastry for the Easter period, a specific fried dough. Similar to churros but instead of being long, they are balls. I cooked that for the lab, people came over, and we had a good time. The next day I had the exam and after a month I got an email from the school congratulating me on the highest score this year. So they're giving me an award. I said, wow. Positive reinforcement - cooking is a good therapy. And some of my friends told me that - Josep, you don't realize, but you use cooking as your therapy, as your relaxation. And that was true. I think cooking is fun, it allows you to be creative, too. Of course, I look at recipes, but I tend to not go and measure exactly what you put in the recipe. I tend to go with the feeling. I continued doing that and still today I have many friends over. There is another thing that I do in my free time.
And my students know because when I'm in my office, either I'm working, or if I need a break, I would most likely just open my favorite cars blogs or YouTubers that work on cars. I really like cars. Unfortunately, as a faculty, I cannot buy the cars I would like to, but hey... I will still drive my reliable Japanese car to get to the office. Or here in Boston, I actually take the train. It doesn't make sense to try and drive in the city. There is a public transportation system that works reasonably well.
Interestingly you mentioned that being in academia, you cannot buy the cars you want. Is that just because it's not paid well enough?
The starting salary of the students graduating with a Ph.D. from my group and who go to the industry is probably comparable to the salary I have today after ten years of working in academia. Starting salary in industry with a Ph.D. is easily twice the salary of a faculty in academia. If you want to be rich, going to academia is probably not the path. Unless you see academia as a path to create intellectual property and eventually convert it into patents and go through a startup path, which many of my colleagues do. Or go through licensing deals, etc.
The good side of the story is that in academia, at least for now, we still keep tenure. So we know that unless we do something terribly wrong, we are the ones to decide how much we want to rev up the engine every year or not. In industry, independent of what you do, you go with the market. And the market may change. This may mean that suddenly you're 40, you may lose your job, and you need to start from scratch somewhere else. If you asked me what car I'd buy today, probably a Lamborghini would tick the right boxes. I make sure that all my students know in case one of them becomes rich :)
Are you spiritual in any way? And if not, what are your life's bigger-picture beliefs?
I'm spiritual. In Spain, I was raised Catholic. I still try to go to church on Sundays. When I was in Spain, I used to play the pipe organ in the church during mass on Sundays. I never went to the conservatory. I never went to a music school. Most of my friends would learn how to play the guitar. My sister played the guitar in the church. But I was never interested in that. So the person who was playing the organ in the church said, Josep, do you want to learn this? I said maybe. So he gave me a book and a few lessons, and from there I became good enough to provide the base for the guitars and voices to shine. I think of the organ as a very powerful, deep instrument that sustains everything. And then on top, you do all the things you want. A question I was asked many times, especially when I was younger and I was still in Spain is - how come someone so smart can believe in God? Well, you know, that's something that happens. And that's the whole point of faith, right? So that's how I feel. That's how we are at home.
What does the balance between work, family, friends, and hobbies mean in your case?
I like my work and I used to tell my friends that the research I do is like eating ice cream. I know I like eating ice cream, and I know eating ice cream all the time is not healthy. So I try not to eat ice cream all the time. I don't mind doing it most of the time. I might be missing other things and I would say for a while that was the case. When I was a Ph.D. student, my work would be to do research, maybe go to the gym every now and then, cook for my friends, and then repeat. Then I found my wife and she was always good. She was very generous with the time saying, look, we understand that when there is a deadline, maybe the day before you don't get to sleep much, or at all.
But the beautiful thing about being in academia is that despite being busy before a deadline, after that you may have some freedom. You may have the opportunity to travel. So I try to find balance, but it doesn't mean that every day I have this many hours of work and this many hours of leisure. There are days filled with only work and there are days with only leisure. Now we have a child, and maybe I shouldn't say that, but if our daughter cannot go to daycare because she is sick, I cannot work. At the beginning I thought, oh my God, she cannot go to daycare, so I cannot work. But I immediately realized that, if she cannot go to daycare, it's great - I cannot work. Meaning I have a relevant excuse to cancel some of the meetings and spend time with her, which is good. I think it's a good reason for not working and not feeling guilty about it at the same time. And it's not that I feel guilty because someone is pushing me. I sometimes feel guilty because it's me who is pushing, it is self-driven.
For most people it is the case too - it's ourselves who are creating that pressure to succeed, keep going, and do everything all the time, be productive.
Yeah, I think we put too much pressure on ourselves sometimes, honestly.
What does it mean to be successful at work for you?
I graduated from Georgia Tech ten years ago. In the last ten years, I've been on a tenure track. At the University at Buffalo, I got tenured in the fifth year. Then I moved to Northwestern where I am now. In three years I was suggested for promotion. So in ten years, I went from being a Ph.D. student to a full professor. That has been quite a trip. I never worked thinking that, oh, I need to work for my next promotion. I work because I like it and because I want to have an impact. But in the process, you realize that things like promotion happen and that's great. You get some awards. Some of them are internal, some external. Last year I got a few awards still within the young researcher category. This was interesting because if you are a full professor, how can you be a young researcher? Many definitions of a young researcher are up to ten years after your Ph.D., which I was. I guess everything happened very quickly but it lined up like that.
Not many people can jump to an assistant professor position right after the Ph.D. without a postdoc. I was able to do that because my advisor provided us with great training. He would ask us to help prepare proposals, which was a way to learn how to write proposals. He would ask us to help in the organization of conferences and workshops, so we could learn how those things work. By the time you become an assistant professor, you know that you are ready, and honestly, compared to other people who did a postdoc, I always felt very well prepared. So being successful means that you see your work is having an impact and your peers and research community appreciate it. Whether it is in the form of citations of your papers or awards. You may feel fairly accomplished yourself, but if no one cares about what you are doing, maybe something is missing.
Yes, maybe. It is definitely extremely rare that someone would get tenured without one, two, or three postdoc positions. Especially since one can find articles on the topic of being trapped in a postdoc circle. Being tenured relatively young, what would you say are the other components of getting tenured without a postdoc?
At the very least I can think of two things. The first one is being focused. In other words, the topic I've been working on has been an evolution of the topic I worked on as a Ph.D. student. That is not necessarily for everyone. Especially because when you start on a tenure track, one of the questions you get many times is - how are you going to differentiate from your advisor? If you continue working on the same topic, it's likely your advisor as well, so people will ask about the novelty of your plan. I was focused on continuing with a line because it was going to grow. I expanded to another topic. It was not a totally different topic - still in the context of nano communication networks. Looking also into optical frequencies, not just the terahertz frequency. I was able to use the same type of tools, and the same reasoning, but change some of the elements to conceive a different idea. Strictly speaking, I've been mastering the tools I have been able to apply in different areas, but always within a focused vision. If you look at what we do in the lab, it's everything terahertz with a few projects in optics.
Other people will jump on a different topic because it's hot that year. But to write a good proposal you need to have preliminary results. If you write on a topic today because it's hot, people who have been there already will have a stronger proposal and anyway, how much preliminary work will you be able to do? Then you say, okay, so I tried. This proposal didn't work, but now that is the new hot topic and they start working on it. And send another proposal but will they have time to work on preliminary results? Not really. To be focused means you work on something and you try to align it with what is needed, but always being able to claim preliminary results. To be able to claim you have expertise on what's needed, which is important. I had friends who unfortunately didn't get tenure because they were doing that. They were doing topic hopping, sending maybe ten proposals a year on ten different topics. How can one mind make deep technical contributions on ten different topics a year? Honestly, mine cannot. Some people succeed, but I don't think that's a recipe for success. If you are convinced about a topic, go deep with it and eventually the funding will come.
We started talking about terahertz for nano applications. Then we open it up to terahertz in general - nano applications, macro applications, and for many years the question was whether it would work at all. The common narrative was that terahertz communications will never work. The frequency is too high, the technology is not there, the channel is not there. But we kept working. And eventually, it worked. In 2019, right after 5G was approved, many companies said, oh, now that millimeter wave is done, we want to jump at what's next. What's next? Terahertz. Who's doing terahertz? Oh, these few guys. One of them was my group, which gave us an edge. Has there been a change in the last few years? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean I gave up on the topic. Focus on what you're doing, maybe diversify a little bit, not to put everything in one topic. But don't go to ten different topics - then you cannot focus or do much. The other equally important element is to build your network of collaborators, but also the people who go to the same conferences, who publish in the same venues, and who you may find on the same panels because they can give you a valuable external view on what you're doing. When you focus, sometimes you go too deep and lose context. So it's good to have people who can help you unfocus, to look at the bigger picture. The network is also the people who will help you with nominations for awards, getting that conference organizing committee membership you want, etc. At the end of the day, if people know you, it will be easier for them to write good things about you.
What is the role of creativity in research?
I think that's the main thing, honestly. I can think of at least two types of research. One that has a new idea for which you don't need complicated math to prove it. The other is along the lines of 'let's just make things look complicated'. We all know what the final result is, but let's derive a complicated mathematical proof for that. If I already know the result, it's not new. To me, that's not research. It happened to me when I was a student, and sometimes it happens to my students. I value an idea a lot especially when what one is proposing is something new, not obvious. But when someone explains it to you, you will say wow, that's smart. That's the type of research I'm looking for and that means creativity. Opposed to papers that contain 20 pages of equations but the final message is that two plus two is four. I already knew that. I understand that in an academic society, the more papers you publish, the better. And with some of the venues, the more equations you have, the better your paper is. Well, I'm not aligned with that vision. What we want to do is to show new things and the simpler the proof, the better. No need to complicate things.
Well, of course. I mean, simplicity is a sign...
You see, you say of course. But sometimes we get papers rejected because there are not enough equations or the derivation is too trivial. Are you judging the idea or the methods to get to it? Once I explain something, it's obvious. But no one has thought of it that way before. And I didn't need tons of equations to do that.
Yes, sometimes academics tend to get lost in the details unnecessarily. Could you highlight the most memorable collaborations you had and their impact on your research?
Indeed, collaboration is critical. You want to collaborate with people with whom you have something in common but also differ from. You want to collaborate on a given topic, but you don't want to work with someone who can do exactly the same things you can do. That doesn't bring anything to the team. If anything, it will bring problems because it's going to be difficult to separate who's doing what. So I always try to collaborate with people who don't do exactly what I am doing, but with whom I can converge.
When I joined the University at Buffalo I was doing terahertz communications at a time when people were telling me this would never work, there are no devices, the channel is horrible... Why are you even trying? My goal was to work with people who could help me build those devices so I could show that the devices work and use them to show the channel is not that bad. Despite being a comms person, I was not working with other communications and networking people. I was working with a material scientist, Professor Eric Einarsson, and Professor Jonathan Bird, who is now a department chair in Buffalo and was a nanoelectronics person. People would say, you're a comms person, you work with comms people. No, I work with a material scientist and a nanoelectronics person. Why? Because they could create the materials and use them to create the devices I wanted for my comms project. That was a very productive collaboration.
We got papers, we got funding, and it was great! My position when working with them was applicational - I would say this is what I want to do and I need their particular expertise. Another very productive academic collaboration has been with Professor Daniel Mittleman from Brown University and Professor Edward Knightly from Rice University. I knew they were working on terahertz and they knew I did too, but the collaboration started because Dan Mittleman is a physicist working on terahertz technology and Edward Knightly is a networking person. To bridge physics with networks, you need the comms, which was my part. They reached out to me saying they need me for this project thinking that together we can complement each other. And honestly, this was one of the best things that happened because I could learn physics directly from one of the top terahertz physicists - Daniel Mittleman. Besides communications, we could talk about networks at terahertz frequencies by learning from an actual expert and very well-positioned person, which was Edward Knightly. I have some collaborations with the industry, but they have not been on the same level.
I also had a collaboration with the US Air Force. For four summers at Buffalo, I spent 2 to 3 months as a visiting faculty at the Air Force Research Lab in Rome, New York. They have a visiting faculty program and some of my colleagues at Buffalo have spent many years going there. Literally 20 years back-to-back working with them. So they told me to consider working with them, that they might be interested in terahertz. Through the department connections, I managed to join the US Air Force as a visiting faculty. At that time, I was working with Dr. Ngwe Thawdar with whom we shaped the critical capabilities of terahertz for the applications they needed. This collaboration led to many projects. Many faculty thought I worked with the Air Force to get their money. There was no money at the beginning. They paid my summer salary and we worked together and got ideas. And eventually, it evolved into more. This experience helped me to learn to properly sell my work not only in the nano-domain but in the macro-domain and with some applications that became obvious later on. People say I have many papers with that program manager. Well, I had many papers with him before he was a program manager. He was a researcher and we worked together over four summers.
You mentioned you collaborated with the industry too. What do you work on?
We work with different companies in the sense that they sponsor small projects. But perhaps the most productive industry collaboration we have right now is with Keysight Technologies. The experimental capabilities I have in my group are an integration of devices from Keysight, Virginia diodes, and NASA JPL. In the beginning, I was reaching out to Keysight when I had to buy things from them - it was a customer-seller relationship. But eventually, they realized that the things we were doing with their hardware added value to it. In other words, every time I demonstrated what we could do, as an integration of all the pieces of equipment from different vendors, they realized it was a selling point for them.
We were also using their devices beyond what they thought they were capable of, taking things to the next level. So at some point, we changed the relationship to a collaboration. For the last couple of years, Keysight Technologies has been one of the sponsors of our institute - the Institute for Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern. It's not that they just give me money or something. My students are on weekly calls with their engineers developing some of this equipment. So we're learning from and influencing one of the world's largest equipment manufacturers, which is very exciting.
You're an editor on multiple research academic journals. What are the responsibilities of being in the role?
I am the editor-in-chief of Elsevier Nano Communication Networks together with Massimiliano Pierobon, my Ph.D. buddy and a very good friend. This journal was created by my advisor in 2010 and when we became senior enough, he handed it over to us. Which is very nice. As an editor-in-chief, I get to see every paper that gets submitted and we do the first prescreening. Some papers are clearly out of scope and authors are trying to squeeze it to make it fit in the journal. I think I do the authors a favor by getting back to them right away, writing this paper will not fly through here, try to find somewhere else. Sometimes I make specific recommendations - try this other journal or try that journal etc. If the paper is within the topic but when I scan through it and see that this is going to be a pain to review because the quality of the presentation is not what it's supposed to be. The use of English is not correct. In this case, I also send it back to the authors and say this is a paper that could fit, but you really need to bump up the writing style. If not, the reviewers will not understand your work, it will be rejected, and you will have wasted three months. For the papers that are within the topic and look quite reasonable, I pass them down to the editors. Usually, I pick an editor with expertise related to the topic. Through the years I've learned that a good editor is not necessarily someone who has published a lot on the topic or who has many awards on the topic. It is someone who spends the time looking at the paper and identifying the best reviewers for that topic.
Looking at the editorial board of Nano Communication Networks, you will see that there are many system professors and young people in the industry because they are the ones who end up spending good quality time helping the paper. This is another thing that we emphasize to our editors. If a paper has a good idea, even if it's not in its best shape, our goal as editors is to help the authors shape it into the form in which it deserves to be published. The work shouldn't be about - oh, this paper should be rejected because it's not good. There should always be feedback. As an editor-in-chief, I pick editors and assign papers after filtering them. I'm also an editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications and Scientific Reports by Nature. In this case, the papers have already been prescreened. Those that I get from IEEE Transactions on Communications have been carefully picked. I know the topic and many times I even know the work of the authors.
My work is to look for reviewers. Some reviewers are working on the exact same thing, so sometimes they may try to make sure the paper doesn't get accepted so they can publish it first. It's usually not the case, but you want reviewers to be working in the same area, while at the same time, they should be fair and share your values. The goal of a reviewer is not to make the authors feel miserable but to help them get the paper to a state where it can be published. If they can do that in two months, you let them do a review. If they need more than two months, you end up rejecting the paper and tell them to address all comments first and then come back. I used to be a reviewer for many venues. Then the editorial work came in and I realized it's difficult to do a good job both as an editor and a reviewer. So I ended up prioritizing being an editor and I recommend my students or younger colleagues to help as reviewers, knowing that eventually they will transition to being editors too.
Do you also have to contact external reviewers?
Yes, nano communication networks is still a relatively niche topic. The next level of connectivity is not to connect you through the internet, or to devices, or to other people with devices in their hands. Perhaps the craziest thing I'm going to say today - the next level of connectivity is to connect the cells in your body. Whether it's your brain or different functionalities - either to recover the capabilities that your body has lost or to enhance capabilities. And that's what nano communication networks are at the end of the day. To learn how to make extremely small devices communicate, which are potentially going to be in your body. All the people on the editorial board have published in this area under different flavors. Sometimes it's electromagnetics, optics, molecular, neuroscience, etc. Editors need to go and find reviewers.
Sometimes an editor may help with a review, but many times it's going to be other people who are not on the editorial board. Not everyone is on the editorial board because we renew it. I don't know how much longer I will be an editor-in-chief. I think for a journal it is healthy to renew the team. Of course, the more years you remain in the position, you have a better idea about the people on the board. You know that one editor is very good at one type of paper, but maybe not at another type. You know which editors are trustworthy, but at some point, you need to pass it on and let other people have this opportunity.
What are the biggest challenges of being an editor of a journal?
The main challenge is to find people who can commit the time for this. At the end of the day, being an editor or a reviewer is an unpaid job. It's part of your duties as an academic, but you don't get anything out of it. With so many possible venues to publish in, meaning all of these need reviewers, it's hard. For example, yesterday I woke up and most of the 10 to 12 emails that I received were review requests. And this happens to everyone, so it's difficult to find people who are willing to commit to the time. Mostly not because they don't want to but because they don't have the time. So we are increasingly going towards younger reviewers.
When I was a student, I could review 1 or 2 papers, or my advisor would ask me to share my thoughts. Today, when I reach out to reviewers, I explicitly say if you cannot commit, but you have a postdoc or a senior graduate student, someone who has been in the field for a while, I'll be happy to pass the review to them. Usually the Ph.D. students, by the time they are close to graduation, they are the real experts on a topic. They are the ones who have looked for every possible related work and tried to position themselves. When someone asks me to review, and it's someone I know, there is always a dilemma. Should I say yes so they don't get angry knowing that I will probably be late? Or should I be transparent and say I could tell you yes, but I'm going to be late, why don't you find someone else? I really appreciate it when a potential reviewer answering no to the invitation suggests someone else instead - that is very helpful.
When some reviewers read a paper, it seems they take it as their mission to find a way to reject it. And that's wrong. The goal should be to find out how this paper can be accepted. If not, how can we help the authors to make a paper that can be accepted? We don't need to go into a review with a point-and-shoot mentality. We need to go into a review with the mindset of 'let's see how we can help'. Those are the reviewers you want to keep when you find them.
You say that you don't get anything out of being an editor, but it's considered an honor and service to the community, is that so?
Yes, part of our work is teaching, research, and service. Being an editor or a reviewer is a service. If there were no editors or reviewers, no one would publish. There would not be research worth doing, so it's a necessary element. The problem is when, instead of 20% of your time, it takes 40% of your time. So it's about finding a balance. What could be a potential reward for an editor who's handling many papers, or a reviewer who consistently turns in outstanding quality reviews aiming at improving the work? I don't have an answer to that. I guess that we have not implemented a vehicle that could be interesting.
The 'shooting down of a paper' is in a way the premise on which the prestige of journals is built, isn't it?
We usually look to publish in journals that have the highest impact factor (IF). IF is a measure of how many times in the last one, three, or five years a paper was cited on average. A good paper gets cited. In an ideal world, good papers get cited independently of where they are published. It is also true that some people will not even read a paper, but because it was published in a very good venue, they will cite it. It will give them credibility. So it's a little bit like that. The goal for a journal is to publish good papers and ideally quickly. People want their work to be timely.
If turning a bad paper into a good one takes two years, it is not good even if the reviewers try to help. So that's when the editor steps in. You still need to try to improve a paper and it's up to the editor if the improvement can happen in a month, which is a minor revision. Or two months, then it is a major revision. Or more than two months, when you say I'm sorry you cannot continue with us. We have papers in Nature, and we have one paper in Science and other high-impact journals. The quality of reviews when we submitted there, even with the papers that got rejected, has always been high. You can tell the reviewers have spent the time. Many times the rejections happen at the editorial level, and the paper doesn't even go out for review. In some of the top-profile journals, the editor-in-chief is paid for the work. That's the difference. It's no longer a free service, but it's still a service from generous people who get paid.
So they are professional editors and that's their job. In the case of the nano communication networks, how do you handle the ambition to increase the impact factor while at the same time not publishing everything?
For Nano communication networks it's Massimiliano Pierobon and myself who serve as editors in chief. This allows us to share the load and also have internal discussions. When some papers come and I think this is not ready even after a round of review, many times we make decisions at the starting point. This journal gets between 200 and 300 submissions a year, which is not that many. It's a healthy number, but not as many as top journals. Every time I get the paper in after having the administrative checks, it comes to me or Massimiliano. The first thing I do is scan the paper - it needs to be aligned with our relatively niche topic. It's not communication networks. It's not nanotechnologies. It's the intersection of nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, and communications.
There are not too many things that fit in that intersection. Maybe a quarter of the papers that are submitted are not aligned with this scope. In that case, we get back to the authors right away and let them know their paper looks interesting, but this is not what the readers of the Nano comm want. For the papers that stay in, we probably have an expert on the topic on the editorial board, which is what we have been trying to do. You need editors-in-chief who can be on top of things, but you need reliable editors who are experts in the different flavors of nano communication networks. Through the years, we came to a point where we have a good editorial board. The editorial board gets renewed - they stay with us for two years and two more years renewal. After that, it is healthy to let them go. After some years they can come back. You don't want to have an editor staying there forever, which applies also to the editors-in-chief. So we renewed once, and now we are on our second and potentially last stage. It's not good if the same people are always handling the same journal, editors, and reviewers.
Sometimes you need fresh ideas. In Nano comms networks we try to be timely, to have expert editors who can decide if a paper moves forward or not before going out for review, and to identify reliable reviewers. Through COVID, many things got delayed. People had to learn to work with the kids yelling in the background and things like that. So we've always been aware of the time constraints for everyone. For a journal that is not in the top tier group, you need to make sure the people know you exist. Nano comms networks has existed for more than ten years and it is fully indexed. We have had an impact factor since 2017. All this is good, people know we exist. But for the newcomers, we need to do that. Usually at conferences or when we give talks, we mention this too. If you like what you see, you can find more by looking into our journal.
Why do editors and editors-in-chief need to be rotated?
Even if we all try to learn and be open to the new trends and flavors, we all have our preferred areas - there are the things I work on and there are the other things. We need to make sure that the journal is open to everything. For example, the nice thing about working with Massimiliano is that he focuses on molecular and biological communication networks, whereas my focus is nanophotonics, nanoelectronics, and electromagnetic communications networks. Between the two of us, we cover pretty much everything in Nano, so we see the big picture. But even if I consider myself a young person with ideas, there are younger people with maybe even better ideas. Or there may be more seasoned people with similar experiences wanting to step in and I'm fine with that. I think it's healthy.
Ideas in what sense?
Maybe ideas to increase the number of high-quality submissions. Or better ideas to have fidelization of your reviewers - when they see a review invitation from you, they say, oh absolutely, I'm not turning them down. We're trying to do everything that can be done, but maybe there are things I am missing.
Getting 10 to 12 emails asking you to review something, how do you handle that, knowing the pressure from both sides?
It has been evolving. Initially, I was afraid to say no. I'd try to do it and allocate a huge amount of time for it. At some point, you need to start being more selective. Not because you don't want to do it, but knowing I'm going to be late, it ends up delaying the overall decision on a paper by a month. That makes me feel bad. When do you feel worse? Telling you cannot review the paper or having someone chasing you for a month till you finally do it? You realize that it's better to be transparent from the beginning. Many times that's what I do these days.
If a paper is within my area being exactly what I'm doing these days, I probably can review it in 3 or 4 hours and I'll accept it. If a paper is related to what we are doing, but I think that someone in my group can do a better job, I will write to the editors saying I could review this paper, but I don't have the time. If you trust me, you can ask directly the person in my group who can do that. Being an editor myself, I appreciate when I am given alternatives. When I am asked as a reviewer, I make sure to provide alternatives, it's just a fair game.
Many of my students are international and some of them aim to stay in the US after graduation. When applying for a green card, being a regular reviewer for good journals and conferences is a great thing to have in their CV. It means other people trust their opinions. The first time I ask one of my students to review a paper, we'll both do it. They will review it and I'll do the same. Then we'll sit together and see how to structure it and if we identified the same things. Once I see the student can do reviews himself (seeing also my reviews), I feel comfortable recommending them to do it directly. That gives value to them, I do my job as an advisor, and I have one less review to do myself.
You are definitely a great supervisor to have! The single-blind peer review system has been around for a while. Besides digitization and everything speeding up thanks to the Internet, not much has changed. Are there any changes you would like to see in the current publishing system?
That's a very good observation. The system seems to be the same, and if anything, gets overcrowded. Imposing a double-blind system, or even triple-blind (where not even the editor knows who the paper is coming from) is happening increasingly often. Because unfortunately, the system does not always work. There have been cases of major conferences in which the whole system was rigged - I'll accept your paper if you accept mine. Even with a double-blind system, people shared the titles of their papers among themselves... I would say journals have not evolved as much as peer-reviewed conferences - some of them use double or triple-blind systems.
After collecting reviews, an in-person or Zoom discussion among the reviewers takes place - the reviewers get to know each other. Many times during those discussions some may not speak much despite having been either in favor or against accepting a paper. That can mean they may be afraid to reveal themselves. Or if someone is really trying to convince everyone a paper is good, you start thinking. Why does this guy have a personal interest in this paper? We need to be a little bit more objective when we evaluate. A paper will get published when it's a new topic and it's technically sound. Or when the topic is not new but presents a solution improving performance by a significant factor. A third type of paper, which I really don't like, is when the topic is not new, the solution is not new, but they put so many equations in that the reviewers didn't understand or dare to understand. But no one dares to say - why did you use so many equations to tell me that two plus two is four? And such papers get published too. Reading these papers, one thinks - I'm lost through the math and the results literally say two plus two is four. Some people like that type of work. I personally don't.
These days people are afraid that ChatGPT can write a paper for you. Instead of thinking of the bad part, I think that we could add the fourth reviewer - an AI-driven tool because it has indexed every single paper in Google Scholar. The tool can make sanity checks on the novelty of the content. You need to be very careful but new things have been tried at the conference level and the discussion phase has been good. Many conferences allow a rebuttal. After receiving the feedback after a panel, you send back your answers as you would in a journal and there might be a follow-up panel. For journals, we're still stuck with reviews. Usually, there's no discussion between the reviewers, because when should we do that? Conferences happen once a year, so it makes sense to put all the reviewers in a room and try to discuss. Journals get submissions any day of the year. How would you pull that off? It's not easy. There are ideas about work to be done, but let's see who is the brave one.
In terms of the ChatGPT, I doubt it can write a sensible paper. After all, it is condensing a database of information it has access to into a probabilistic sequence of words. It doesn't do reasoning as such.
As of today. Yes.
My understanding is that a large language model will never be able to do reasoning because it's beyond probability.
There have been cases of papers fully written by the equivalent of ChatGPT that got published, but of course not in top venues.
But those must have been in social sciences, weren't they?
No one was deriving new equations. Yes, you're right.
Are there any more effective, or different ways to spread research results compared to written papers you can think of?
Today, there are too many publications. There are so many journals, conferences, workshops... If someone wants to publish that two plus two is three, they will find a venue for it. And that's a problem. For example, as a first-year Ph.D. student, you're supposed to look at the state of the art. When it's based on 20, 40, 60 papers, or a hundred, that's okay. You can classify them and go in-depth with those you like. But when the starting point is a thousand papers and every day 10 or 20 more come in, your first year of Ph.D. is a disaster.
At least in the US and Europe, things are changing. We don't judge a research group by how many papers they publish. We judge the impact of their papers and what they say. But that's not necessarily the same everywhere. Looking at the university systems in different countries you will see many of them rank and evaluate the faculty by how many papers they publish. And that's a problem. They may say 'We look at citations'. That's a much better approach - you're looking at impact, but that's also something that you can bias. If you publish 40 papers a year and your friend also, you can cite each others' papers in every paper. This is an extreme example, but it's possible. It's very easy to game the system. Maybe publications and citations are not the only thing. Here in the US, it's common to measure the productivity of a faculty by how much funding they get. And I think that is a good first step because to do things you need money. Another indicator is what you do with the money. Bringing a million dollars every year is one thing. But the outcome needs to be something with an impact. It can mean training Ph.D. students who produce patents or publications.
Patents are another indicator that in academia wasn't taken into account much. The usual way is for academia to do fundamental research and then companies build on that and create patents. This has changed quite a lot. Today, all the universities are eager to make sure that intellectual property is not benefiting just some, but also the university itself. We do research because we like it, but that research needs to have an impact. Meaning that society needs to care. How to measure impact in society? If it's not citations, it could be patents, companies, or products. As an academic, it's how many people you have impacted. The very first ones you impact are your students. So that could be another indicator.
You have been tenured relatively younger than most, what led to that achievement?
I graduated ten years ago and I went straight from the Ph.D. program to an assistant professor. I believe the main thing while being a Ph.D. student was that my advisor made sure I was familiar not just with doing research, but also understanding the funding cycle. Trying to understand the different funding agencies, and maybe help with proposals he was writing. The other was understanding the cycle of publishing not only as an author, but also the role of an editor, reviewers, and conference organizers. And getting closer to graduation, I was involved in the meetings. Maybe take care of the conference website. But still, I had to join all the meetings for the organizing committee members, where you would hear a lot of things. So by the time I graduated and joined Buffalo, I was ready to hit the ground and run. And that felt good. You always learn and you have to learn a lot, but I could tell that I had received good training. One I'm now trying to pass down to my students.
They help me when I need to write a proposal. I share with them how the reviews work. And when they are ready, they officially get to do reviews. They see what we are doing for conferences and workshops, and how they can be helpful. Looking at all my work, you see it's very focused. We primarily do terahertz communications to be used in nano or macro applications. Every year you understand how many things you didn't understand the year before. When people tell me I am an expert on terahertz, I always say I know quite a lot. But the way I'm going to explain something this year is different from the previous one because now I see a different angle or perspective. The good news is that if you have only one core topic and you keep going around, eventually you'll get a 360-degree view. And if needed, you'll get the full spherical view of your problem. This will make it easier for people to classify you. When people will ask if Josep should get tenure, they will say, oh yeah, Josep is the terahertz guy, right? Yeah, he has consistently been in these conferences, in that journal, he's a good reviewer, and he even got best paper awards... A part of the growth process is creating an identity.
Some people like to work on many different topics, and as long as they can dedicate enough time to them, it's okay. The complicated cases are when people try to jump on top of every topic without having the time to spend on it. This leads to evaluation along the lines of "yeah, I see that he has been all over the place. I don't really know what he's an expert on." Part of the process of getting tenure is being recognized by people who don't know you. People who have not written papers with you, have no funding with you and don't work with you. They need to be able to tell a story about you despite that they don't know you.
Seems like you understood the building blocks of the academic career quite early on, which is what enabled your quick advance.
Having good mentors around is important and your Ph.D. advisory is one of them. But in the department you have colleagues who are usually willing to help, so listen to them. During the last four years at Northeastern, I went from an associate professor to a full professor. This has to do with continuing the things that I learned before, but also listening to and observing successful people, and seeing if their path to success is the one I want to take. Because there are many ways to succeed. Some are successful because they are aggressive and driven. But also people who succeeded thanks to being understanding, and accommodating, and who grow because people eventually get to like them. We do have many references around us, look at them, and talk to them. When the junior faculty reach out to me, I'm always happy to share how it worked for me and what I think. They can take it or not, but I'm happy to help.
Do you teach courses? Is it included in your professional evaluation?
Yes, here at Northwestern my workload is supposed to be 60% research, 20 to 30% teaching, and the remaining is service. Because I have a large research group, right now 10 Ph.D. students, I only need to teach two courses per year. I like to teach one course every semester, so it doesn't take too much time. Some people like to teach two courses per semester and then they're free. I like teaching so I don't mind teaching the whole year one course at a time. So, yes, I do teaching and I'm evaluated for that.
Do you have particular career goals, that once reached, you will move on to something different?
That's a very deep question. Usually, when you become an assistant professor, many people will say your goal is to get tenure. My advisor and colleagues tell me, no, that should not be the goal. The goal should be to do a great job. Keep doing what you love, which is research, and tenure will come. And that's what happened. The same when I got tenured. Okay, your next goal is to become a full professor. And again that should not be the goal. The goal is to continue doing good work and things happen on that basis. As an associate professor, you are purely focusing on your research and teaching. As a full professor, people want to see a leader in you. Someone not only doing good work but also someone others can look up to and who is also in different services outside and inside the university. I have had people tell me that I always came across as a very research-oriented person and recently I have had different roles.
For example, I'm co-director of two new master's programs at Northeastern. So I care about teaching, but also about making sure there is a path for our students. Since last summer, I've been the associate director of our institute (the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things), which is not just a title you put in your signature. It comes with extra work you have to do for the department, institute, college, and the university. At some point, you realize your research is going, which doesn't mean that all your papers get accepted. Absolutely not. We get papers in and we get papers out like everyone else. We have proposals in and we have proposals out. Some get accepted, some don't, like everyone else. But once that's happening and you start to see the bigger picture of where you are... That it's not just you and your group. It's the department, institute, university, or even the whole educational system. That's when you're seeing, there are things you don't like and things you would like to change. Then you jump in and say, okay, maybe I should start doing this type of service too. When do I think I will stop? It's hard to tell. Someone asked me what would happen the day that terahertz is everywhere and in your cell phone? Then my job is done. Right? Then I can move on and maybe become a department chair or a dean. I will have solved a research problem, now let me solve a bigger problem - where there are humans involved. Every time there are people and feelings, the problem is much more challenging.
There are some memberships and fellowships that I'd like, but those are long-term goals. Having talked to one of the senior leaders at the university recently, he said in ten years I went from Ph.D. student to full professor, institute associate director, editor in chief of a journal... Putting it in perspective, it looks like a lot, but it didn't happen all of a sudden. It was progressive. I'm 39 years old, so what's going to happen in the next ten years? I don't really know. I'll continue to do my work and evaluate the opportunities coming my way, and I will see. If I get to the point where my research is done and there is nothing else to do... I know I will disappoint some people by saying this, but I don't think I will jump to a totally different topic because it's cool or something. There are so many opportunities to grow with a topic.
My advisor was extremely good at identifying hot topics before they were hot. And he would usually turn them into hot topics. I work on one of them. But he worked with different students on different topics, which was his strength - identifying and making sure a topic became hot. Once it was, let's jump to the next one. We worked together on a topic people were saying didn't make sense. And now that it's hot, I'm happy with it. The day it's not hot, I may not be popular anymore either, but that's okay.
Seems you're trying to be here and now, focus on what's in front of your nose, and the rest will fall in place one way or another.
Yes.
I looked into your thesis and there was an interesting part describing all the future potential, the work to be done, and a roadmap. Looking back on where you are now, have your ideas come to fruition?
Some things we managed to achieve. Some are closer, but we're still not there yet. The field of terahertz communication has grown a lot, but more towards the macroscale than nanoscale. Strictly speaking, my thesis was on nanoscale applications, and only at the end, I wrote we may be able to do macroscale. At the macroscale path, selling terahertz as the next technology for Wi-Fi or cellular networks has been easier than selling it as the technology enabling intra-body, in the brain, or independent embedded systems. One of the reasons is social acceptance. When you tell people you're doing devices that may be placed in their body, some get uneasy. Whereas if you say you're giving them a faster cell phone, they will say sure, okay. The ideas have evolved faster towards the macroscale which is good. I do believe, however, that the nanoscale can still give us a lot of things. And that's what should be next.
The moment that the big telecom companies like Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, Ericsson, or Nokia are doing terahertz communications, should an academic group be doing the same? If the industry has hundreds of employees working on it, as a research group we have little to do. From the academic perspective, I need to be looking at crazier topics. As terahertz technology becomes more common (not saying it's ready to be in cell phones) and every big company has a group on terahertz, I need to look for what's crazy. What is that? To come back to the nanoscale. The main challenge for the nano part is the fabrication and integration. But that's something the material and nanofabrication scientists need to solve and they are doing extraordinary work. The vision of what we can build is there for the macroscale. For the nanoscale, it's getting closer.
A little over a year ago, I started getting strange messages on LinkedIn, email, and Twitter from people saying: oh, you will be judged, God will judge you, we caught you, you're going to die. Really ugly things. What have I done? It turned out that there was an online streaming show doing conspiracy theory type of studies that somehow managed to link crazy theories about COVID and the vaccines carrying graphene. More precisely, graphene antennas communicating at terahertz frequencies to control people remotely, including from satellites. And they know who's behind all of this, showing my face. Of course, they went through my publications and saw the work on graphene, nanoantennas, and graphene nano transceivers. Separately, we worked on macroscale terahertz Wi-Fi type applications, but also space-based internet applications of terahertz. And of course, this is funded by the US Air Force. So the Department of Defense is behind everything. Some people are very creative. That's why when talking about the nanoscale application of terahertz, I need to assess the room and see if I can say what we want to do or not. It makes for a perfect Hollywood movie.
Sure, to say the least! I depleted the list of my questions, so thank you very much for being generous with your time.
Absolutely. Thank you for asking me questions that made me think. Sometimes, when I need to explain something, it's when I really learn it. Answering some of your questions made me realize the things we did. I was running a sort of research on myself. So thank you.
Oh, you're welcome.
Photos are courtesy of Northeastern University ©
#GradSchool #ECRchat, #research, #AcademicLife, #PeerReview, #AmReading, #PhDchat, #MakePublishingGreatAgain #Frelsi #publishtoflourish #ScholarsShare #PublishOrPublish, #Professor, #AcWri
You can comment when you sign in.