Interview with Michael Isaacson

Featured Engineer

Michael Isaacson

Michael Isaacson - Narinder Singh Kapany Professor of EE at UCSC

Additional Titles: Co-director, Center for Sustainable Energy and Power systems

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

I actually started out in Physics. My undergraduate degree is in Engineering Physics from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (an engineering degree) (1965). My PhD degree is in Physics from the University of Chicago (they don’t have an Engineering School). But I was always interested in electrons and electronic components. My thesis involved electron optics and building/designing electron microscopes. My first position was in the Biology Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Then I went back to the University of Chicago as a member of the Physics faculty and the Enrico Fermi Institute. There I again was involved in building and designing scanning transmission electron microscopes for imaging individual atoms. From there I moved to the School of Engineering and Applied Physics at Cornell University (which is in the College of Engineering). Moving more into the applied area, I got involved in developing electron beam nanolithography tools and moved into near field optical microscopy, getting patents on devices for super resolution microscopy.

At Cornell I was the Director of the Keck Foundation Program in Nanobiotechnology and a member of the graduate fields of Applied Physics, Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering.

From Cornell, I left for UC Santa Cruz in the new Jack Baskin School of Engineering, in the Electrical Engineering Department, thus continuing my move towards an interest in using fundamental knowledge to solve practical problems. I think engineering is changing, and the boundaries between the traditional disciplines are getting fuzzy. For example, mechatronics, bioengineering, information engineering, etc. What is important, is the problem that needs to be solved, and that doesn’t fit neatly into one category.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

I have no favorite, whatever is needed to solve a problem.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

Again, I have no favorite. I use whatever gets the job done.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

When I was at the University of Chicago, building an atomic resolution scanning transmission electron microscope in the 1970’s. For Angstrom spatial resolution, the electron beam can not deviate from it’s path by more than a tenth of an Angstrom, which means eliminating all ambient AC magnetic fields. This means significant magnetic shielding to get fields below a fraction of a milliGauss. The last stmbling block was realizing that the elevator in the building which was next door to the room in which the microscope was in, created a magnetic field when it went past the floor, since the current llop waqs closed when it crossed the stell cross bars. Since this was irregular (ie, only when someone took the elevator past the floor, it took some time to figure it out. the solution was to work at night (less elevator traffic) and shut off the elevator when we were doing single atom imaging (a solution which the building engineers were not particularly enthused about).

What is on your bookshelf?

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
Feynman’s Lectures in Physics
Born and Wolf, Principles of Optics
Terman, Electronic and Radio Engineering
Changing the Conversation, National Academy Press
Lectures in Nuclear Physics, Enrico Fermi
Electromagnetism, Panofsky and Phillips (Melba Phillips was on my PhD committee)
A Course in Modern Analysis, Whittaker and Watson
Methods of Mathematical Physice, Courant and Hilbert
Quantum Pharmacology, Salem and Salem
Molecular Biology of the Cell, Bruce Alberts, et.al./ To Engineer is Human: the Role of Failure in Successful Design/. Petroski.
Invention by Design: How Engineers get from Thought to Thing: Petroski
Max Born, Atomik Physik
list not all inclusive

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

No tricks, just think analytically and carefully. Most importantly, understand the limits of the equations and software that you use for analysis.

What are you currently working on?

Optimizing local renewable energy microgrids for local energy generation. The problem is that people are trying to build huge renewable energy farms (ie, wind or solar) where the wind or sun is optimal. That is usually where no one lives, so they have to get the power to the places where people do live. But most places have, wind and sun and if you are on the coast, waves. It is just that they are not individually optimal. The trick is to look at a renewable energy system which has a combination of these sub-optimal sources and try to optimize the system rathert than the individual components..

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

I think there has to be an increase in the discipline of power engineering in this country. Most of the programs closed down with the advent of the dot.com era. But energy is critical and almost 50% of the engineers in the public utility arena (those who supply us with electricity, so we don’t have to think when we plug something into the wall, that the electricity will come on) will retire in the next decade. Thus, there is a great need to revitalize the energy produxtion arena, and that is a big compenent of electrical engineerinng. In addition, in the area of safe food and water supplies, the need for electrical engineering is critical in developing the sensing and control devices needed to assure safety.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Electrical engineering is very different from what it was a century ago. You see electrical engineers solving problems in biology, medicine, computing, energy, food saftey, entertainment, transportation, etc. The things we expect EE’s to know when they graduate are an order of magnitude more than they neede to know just a half century ago. And you have to throw in the social skills that are imperative for any technology to be accepted. I think the challenge is to realize that the BS engineeing degree in 4 years, may not be possible in the future.