Education
I attended Cornell Univertsity College of Arts and Sciences, and was a physics and math major. During my time there, I developed new experiments (in coupled oscillations) for the freshman physics lab, and received an NSF grant to perform summer research at Harvard on the Kapitza-Dirac effect. I was active in Native American programs there, trying to get a commitment from the University to develop programs that would attract Native American students to Cornell, since there were very few of us on campus at that time (three, to be precise). When presented with a selection of graduate schools to attend, I chose Princeton.
I entered the PhD program at Princeton University, and sweated my way through the qualifying exams. Upon passing, I selected for my thesis an experiment in experimental general relativity - basically designing and performing experiments that would (hopefully) provide data to eliminate some of the various competing theories of GR at that time. David Wilkinson (for whom the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe - WMAP - is named) and William Wickes were my primary thesis advisors. During my time there, I developed some novel technqiues to measure the mass to light ratio of "primeval galaxies", those galaxies so far away (and back in time) that they cannot be resolved as points, but rather just contribute to a diffuse glow. This is referred to as the "extragalactic background light".
Post Doctoral Work
I accepted a post doctoral position at Kitt Peak in Tucson, Arizona, working with Roger Lynds. There I concentrated on array detectors - CCD's (the type commonly used in today's digital cameras) and CIDs 's - Charge Injection Devices that offer improved performance at high light levels as well as non-destructive readout. I continued acquiring data for the extragalactic background light During my first year in Tucson, I was approached by a team at Caltech/JPL, and moved the family to Pasadena. There I worked on general relativistic tests using spacecraft, and designed experiments for the ISS. All in all, life in southern Cal;ifornia did not sit well with me, and I accepted a position at the University of Michigan.
Early Academic Positions
The University of Michigan
Life in Ann Arbor was quite pleasant. The faculty and students were stimulating, the research first rate, and I got to travel to Tucson to use the telescopes twice a year. Over 2 years I was thesis advisor for 2 students at Michigan, and had been nominated to become department chairman when I was approached by a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He had a large NSF grant in experimental general relativity and a dedicated solar telescope for the task, and wanted me to come lead the effort.
The University of Arizona
The dedicated solar telescope at the U of A had been designed to enable tracking of planets and stars in superior conjunction with the sun - that is, when they pass behind the sun relative to the Earth. Our goal was to detect the gravitational deflection of starlight. The task involved significant engineering efforts in optics, electronics and software. After 2 years of work, we successfully acquired the image of Venus during a conjunction, and were able to just make out the cloud structure as the planet's image passed across the bright solar limb using a specially cooled CID camera (see Post Doc position at Kitt Peak above - it all ties together!) We did not succeed in setting any new limits to the deflection of starlight at that time.
My IBM Career
IBM Tucson
IBM had opened a large facility in Tucson, and through a personal network, I was approached by a manager there to consider taking a position as a staff scientist, with much better pay and lots of toys. I accepted, and had a fruitful couple of years developing new simulation algorithms. I became a first line manager and was given a department to conduct exploratory research in the development of holographic data storage in crystals (see the patents and publications lists for sample results of that work). We enjoyed some rapid success and gained high visibility in academic circles, including MIT and Yale.
After a couple of years, I moved to IBM's Research Division in Yorktown Heights, NY. IBM's Research Division is populated largely by PhDs and is run very much like a university, with graduate students and post docs and a great deal of academic freedom.
IBM Yorktown Heights (and Yale)
I was given a small department in Yorktown, and called it "Exploratory Devices" - we conducted research in a variety of topics, including optical interconnects, LCD display technologies, printing, and, of course, holographic optical data storage. The last item led to the addition of Matthew Bashaw to the team as a graduate student from Yale - he spent a couple of days per week at IBM, and the rest at Yale. I was on his committee and similarly spent time at both IBM and Yale. As an Adjunct Faculty there, we developed impurity-doped bismuth silicon oxide and continued moving the holographic data storage field forward.
After 2 years, I was selected to be placed on a fast track for executive preparation, and sent off to IBM Headquarters, where I was given the responsibility of managing a fund to encourage research and development within IBM that would have a positive effect on manufacturing. The position was a two year position, after which time I returned to Yorktown Heights at the executive level, and asked what I wanted to do. I chose to begin commercializing technologies within the IBM patent portfolio, and was given freedom to choose any technologies that I liked. My first choice was the atomic force microscope, for which its two inventors in the Zurich lab of IBM Research received the Nobel prize. I was given executive oversight over the technology, and this included four teams scattered around the world - one in Yorktown Heights, one in Boca Raton, one in Zurich and one in Sindlefingen. I also chose to engage with IBM's legal department as I tried to enforce and negotiate more lucrative licenses to small companies that were using the IBM technology as the core of their business. During this time I learned (the hard way) the lessons of entrepreneurship. The effort was effectively a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM, and we had products and customers as well as licensees to manage into a profitable enterprise. As expected, the effort experienced all of the trials that new comapnies encounter, from patent issues and licensing to product development, sales and support.
It was during this time that we moved to Boca Raton, this time to be close to the engineering team.
The Creation of Gate Technologies
Through some accidental social networking, my resume made it to the desk of a headhunter, Rick Morgenstern, in Boca. We became friends and discussed many technology topics, such as the authentication of a person over the Internet. After a couple of weeks of additional conversations, we decided to launch a technology commercialization business together. Rick and I would be co-founders, and he would make introductions so that we could raise some angel investment funds that would enable me to leave IBM and dedicate myself to a purely entrepreneurial effort. Soon I was on the phone making arrangements to visit universities in search of novel technologies that needed commercialization. During this time, we obtained the assignment of some technologies to Gate directly, one of them related to optical catalysis that struck me as promising.
Gate allowed me to meet inventors all over the country, each with their own specific technology and interests. Some were easy to license or commercialize, and many were not worth pursuing. During this time, I continued thinking about the authentication problem, and encountered some "close" solutions that always seemed lacking in some critical way. The business grew as it provided technology search services to large corporations. After about four years, I suddenly had a creative insight into how I might solve the authentication problem. I quickly submitted two patent applications, and Rick and I together developed a third as well. We then began the task of seeking funding to create products out of the technology.
Digital Authentication Technologies
With a business plan in hand and a concept for getting various segments of the government interested in protecting their computers with physics-based random numbers with location awareness. After more than a year of trips and phone calls to DC, Rick arranged a meeting with Richard Clarke at the White House. By the end of the meeting, our cell phones were ringing and we had a request to return asap to meet with the Defense Information Systems Agency. Within a couple of months, we had funding for a proof of concept demo. Over the years, this grew to many contracts and totaled more than $27 m in contracts and open contract vehicles.
RIT
Back in 2001, Don Boyd, VP of Research at RIT, had tried to convince me to take a position here, but the business was at too delicate a stage. I applied for a position in 2007, and arrived at RIT in the summer of 2008. The business is doing well, and we are very happy here in Rochester! My current research includes a NASA funded effort leading a portion of the Mars colonization effort, as well as an NSF funded project on optical catalysis of methane gas. There are positions for students posted from time to time, so please check the "positions" tab of the home page!