A Research Career that Blends Curiosity and Problem-Solving
An interview with Joseph Shaw, PhD
Meet Joe:
Joseph (Joe) Shaw is a distinguished professor of Optics and Photonics and Electrical Engineering and the director of the Optical Technology Center at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana in the United States. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alaska, a MS in electrical engineering from the University of Utah, and a MS and PhD in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona. Joe is a fellow of the optics and photonics professional societies Optica and SPIE and is currently serving on the SPIE Board of Directors.
Joe has designed an impressively diverse career that allows him to do both engineering and fundamental science in his lab, plus a wide range of consultant activities outside the lab. He places great importance on collaboration with industry and on preparing his students for the industry careers most of them will have.
I first met Joe through an interaction on LinkedIn where we seemed to disagree about some overlapping aspects of our careers. But as we continued the discussion, we discovered that we were strongly aligned on our views about the importance of training scientists for careers outside academia. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to learn more about the amazing work that Joe and the team at Montana State University have done to build an academic environment that is strongly and productively coupled to the local industry community. I’m very pleased to share Joe’s story here.
Below is an excerpt of my interview with Joe to discuss his career path so far. (Look for the full interview to appear in my forthcoming book, Shaping the World: The Privilege of Being a Scientist in Industry)
An excerpt from our conversation:
Dave: How did you come to your current position at Montana State University?
Joe: In 2001, I made the very difficult decision to leave the great job I had at the NOAA Research Labs in Boulder, Colorado. I just loved working with those people, but I left because I had an opportunity to go back to Montana where I was born and where I really wanted to live again.
I was recruited by a very interesting trio of professors at Montana State University (MSU), a physicist, a chemist, and an electrical engineer. These three guys had worked with another physicist to form a small group that they called the Optical Technology Center. They had two explicit goals when they established that center. One was to connect people from their three departments to grow optics research and education, and the second was to encourage economic development and create jobs for the laser and optics people that were being trained there. Before then, pursuing a job involving lasers or optics meant leaving Montana.
That resonated strongly with me because I had experienced a similar challenge when I left Alaska. I knew that one of the only ways I could get an engineering job in Alaska was to work for the power company as an electrical power engineer, but I just wasn't interested in doing that. So, I made the hard decision to move ‘down to the states’, as we call the lower 48 states, and make my way. Boulder was a pretty good place to do that, but I felt Bozeman was an even better fit for me.
At the time nobody talked about Montana State University being important in optics, so I felt I was taking a huge risk for something I thought would fit me well. But I believed in their mission, and I could see the seeds of something that could be much bigger, and I wanted to be a part of it.
After three years, the founders appointed me as the director of the center. That put me in a role where I was talking to companies every day, as well as talking to legislators about how the university research and graduate programs have driven the formation and growth of these companies. And that’s what I’m still doing today. I retained my faculty position, so I have two different jobs that are highly synergistic.
Dave: It sounds like that role is a good fit for your interest in the applications of science.
Joe: Yes, I’ve always been more of an engineer or applied scientist than a pure scientist in terms of the research that I do. My research group is a bit unusual, because it contains an interesting blend of disciplines - things that electrical engineering students can get a degree with, but also things that physics students can get a degree with. My group is a hodgepodge of electrical engineers, physicists, optics people, and I’ve even had a few computer scientists and mechanical engineers come through my lab. It's very interdisciplinary and strongly driven by curiosity.
When I came to MSU, I brought with me the skills for developing optical remote sensing instruments that I learned at NOAA. My work at NOAA was driven primarily by their mission of studying climate science through sensing of the atmosphere and ocean. But when I came here to MSU, I realized that once you know how to make an optical sensor, you can solve all kinds of bizarre problems for people. Since that realization, our work has become extraordinarily broad. I'll give you a couple of examples.
At NOAA I’d developed some experience with airborne lidar for mapping fish schools. Here at MSU I adapted that knowledge to build an airborne lidar we used to map spawning locations of invasive lake trout at Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park. What makes that project interesting to me is that it's an interesting optics problem, but it is also helping preserve the ecosystem of a place that I deeply love.
We've also gotten involved in precision agriculture. I've never lived on a farm or been much of a gardener, but I've found several opportunities to collaborate with the MSU Agriculture College where we provide the imaging, and they provide the agricultural expertise.
And right now, I'm doing a big river ecology project where we provide the optical measurement expertise to collaborate with a team of ecologists. I don't know anything about ecology or much about rivers, but that project gets me out into a very beautiful part of nature, so it's very much a win-win situation for us.
Dave: It sounds like you have some very applied projects in your group. Do you also have fundamental science projects as well?
Joe: We have a pretty broad spectrum of activities in my research group. Many are very applied, but some are just curiosity-driven research. I look out at the world and observe many things that make me think, ‘What causes that to happen?’
You might be aware of the book that I've written called Optics in the Air. It's about explaining the science behind optical phenomena we observe in nature like rainbows, halos, glories, and auroras. That book comes from the scientist side of me, but also from my photographer roots. That's a part of me that I can't let go of, so there's always something going on in my group that's just trying to answer one of these fundamental questions. On those projects we are being scientists.
But our biggest funding sources usually come from developing the optical systems, methods, and algorithms for solving practical problems like the interdisciplinary projects that I described. On those projects we are being engineers.
Those practical problem-solving capabilities also open the door for industry collaborations. For example, one of our PhD graduates, who graduated shortly before I came to Montana, started a company that manufactures hyperspectral imaging systems. We collaborate with them on developing new calibration methods for their imagers and show them how we're applying the imagers in various applications, such as river ecology. Because we are using their products, we can suggest features that would be really useful, or suggest a measurement we can do for them that might enable a new application. We’re currently starting a new instrument development collaboration that we hope will launch an entirely new product.
This is the nature of the collaborations that we have been building. It's been a lot of fun, because we get to do the basic science when we want to, and we also get to solve practical problems and do something useful to help the world.
Dave: You paint a very interesting picture of an academic career, Joe. I went into industry because the academic careers I witnessed seemed boring to me. Your career is a great example of a much more dynamic academic career than I ever imagined as a grad student.
Joe: I love that I can indulge in two things that are very important to me. I want to inspire people to see the beauty in nature in addition to simply understanding it better, and that is the pure science side of me. But I also want to train them to solve practical problems, and that's the practical engineering side of me. It's very important to me that I am training people for the industry jobs that many will have.
I know people who only work on one side, but I think they are missing out. Stepping out of academia to work with industry, or vice-versa, is a challenge, because we work in different ways and pursue different goals. But working across cultures is always difficult. That’s true for work cultures as well as geographic cultures. But tremendous value can come from it. I've learned that if we agree on some goal that we can both embrace, then it works out just fine.
Find Joe's LinkedIn profile here.
