 A Chat with Dr. Alan Doolittle  by Andrew Kerr January 2007 Dr. Alan Doolittle is a Georgian by birth. While the journey from Clayton County to Georgia Tech may not be long by measurement of miles, it was an epic journey academically, emotionally, and spiritually for the Electrical and Computer Engineering professor. I chatted with him by telephone on Januay 10, 2007. Q - Where did you grow up in Georgia? A - I was born in South Atlanta, South Fulton hospital. I grew up in Clayton County, which was at the time I was born fairly rural, and slowly as I grew up became part of the suburbs. I went to Riverdale Senior High. It's still around, in Riverdale, Georgia. My parents retired down to Henry Country, which is on the south side of Atlanta, which is where I live. My wife was from Henry County, in Stockbridge. Q - What was it like growing up in rural Georgia? A - I was playing out in the woods continuously. My mother would call us in for dinner, the typical southern yell where your voice would carry a half a mile or more. I rode bikes, motorcycles, trapped pigeons, whatever else you might get into. [Laughs.] Q - Tell me about trapping pigeons. That's something I'm not familiar with! A - In a cornfield, obviously, people don't want the birds eating the corn, so the farmers would let you trap as many pigeons as you wanted. You build a wire trap which consists of just a wire basket with a tunnel to the middle. The pigeons find their way in but because of the wire tunnel in the middle they never can figure out how to get back out. Q - Pigeons are not very smart birds. A - Not very smart at all. Q - Did you play sports in high school? A - I did for a little while. I ran track and played basketball for 9th and 10th and part of 11th grade. Q - Why did you quit sports in 12th grade? A - [Laughs.] Interesting story! I don't know if I want this printed or not--it's kind of embarrasing, but I guess it's OK! My coach came to me in 11th grade and he told me that I was the hardest working player that he had ever been around. Then he went on to say, "And it's a shame you have no talent!" [Laughs.] What he went on to say was I needed to apply the same amount of effort to something else. So I went from being largely a C student before that time to an A, A/B student after that time, largely on his direction that I needed to change focus. I was not going to make it to college on an athletic scholarship, so I needed to get there some other way. My first two years in high school were atrocious, but the last two years I actually started showing up for school. I ended up getting a scholarship to a local junior college and paid my way through Georgia Tech after that. Q - So was the main problem that you were skipping school? A - We didn't really see the value of an education. My father didn't graduate high school, but he's the smartest person I've ever been around (my father worked with computers for AT&T). And out of that I gained a lot of ability. He wanted me to go to college, but there was no precedence for it. I was the first one to complete college in my family. It really wasn't, not just in my family, but in the entire south, it just was not an important thing to do at that time. I guess now people do view it as more important. But people didn't view it as that important while I was growing up. Q - Do you think this reluctance to go into college is a reflection of the types of industry in the state? A - Well absolutely. If you look even today at how much technology is in Georgia, other than around the Atlanta area, that's grown up in the last 20 years, there's almost no technical industries here. There is not much in the way of mainstream semiconductor fabrication, for example, which is what I do and work on. Q - Do you think that anti-college attitude has been squashed today? A - I fear that it's not, and I'll tell you my experience. I had a group that came up and visited Georgia Tech, and we gave a presentation. In talking with the teachers that came, these were the very best chemistry and math students from this particular county, and talking with the students and the teachers they let me know that only 2 out of the group of probably 20 planned to attend college. And that was just striking, that these were supposedly the 20 best in the county from various different schools, and yet 2 out of 20 planned to attend college. It's just disconcerting that the best talent that Georgia possesse is not necessarily choosing to go into college, or specifically into technical fields. Q - So you mentioned the coach who dissuaded you from focusing on athletics. Was that the main thing that turned you around, or were there other factors? A - There certainly was for me a spiritual experience that I had in the 11th grade that changed my attitude toward a lot of things There's also a couple of very important teachers that influenced me. I had a guidance counselor who told me that because I'd made a D in algebra I wasn't going to be able to take trigonometry, because I wasn't capable of doing the work. I took offense at that and took the class anyway just to show her that I could. That trigonometry teacher was very inspiring and ended up pulling a lot of strings not only to put me up into the higher level trig, but eventually into a calculus program which was very helpful for me in my future career at Tech. Q - How far do you go back with your GIFT teacher from last summer, Kaye Sheets? (Read an article about her summer work here.) A - When I was little, a teenager, Kaye was my youth pastor's wife. So I'd known her and her family for quite a long time. And more recently she's a member of the church that we go to. She's done a lot of really good work with what I would call "at risk students." Q - Considering your own background, do you identify with those students? A - I do. I see that there are just a few decisions in my life that if I had made the wrong decision my life could have turned out dramatically different. And I'm very, very happy with the way that my life turned out! So I feel compassion for young students who are perhaps not making the right choices. Q - When did you decide you wanted to go into engineering? A - One of the classes that I took in high school at the end of my senior year was a physics class, and I had a very good physics teacher who did some work with lasers, and I thought that was interesting. So I thought I might want to go into something to do with lasers. Now I don't do really anything with lasers, but it was just a general technical field of optoelectronics that interested me. Q - You went to Clayton on scholarship, then transferred to Tech. What was your journey like from then on? A - I graduated undergraduate from Tech in '89, and there was a graduate research fair. I met up with my future advisor, Dr. Ajeet Rohatgi, who was into solar cell research. He is a regent's professor here in our department. I guess we just had similar interests and I studied with him and got a PhD under him. My wife was pregnant with our first child and was in law school, so for me it was not the right time to leave Atlanta. Which was pretty much what I had originally resigned myself to do, because again there was just not much in terms of technology jobs in Atlanta. I had an opportunity to work with a professor as a research engineer after graduation named April Brown who's now the department chair at Duke University. That was a good choice, as it turned out; I thought I'd shot my career by choosing to stay in Atlanta and choosing family over career. But working with her was a great blessing. I was hired from that position into an assistant professor's position here. Q - When you originally arrived at Tech, did you feel like an alien? A - [Laughs.] Absolutely alien! The junior college I went to was a very good junior college, but there was no time pressure on tests at all. I recall one calculus exam, I was given 3 1/2 hours. Pretty much everybody in the class took 3 1/2 hours to take the exam. When I came to Georgia Tech the work level per class was similar, but you had more classes and you had timed exams where you had 50 minutes to do pretty much the same amount of work that I'd been doing for hours. And my first double e [electrical engineering] course, I did miserably on the first two exams. I ended up making an A in the class, but I had a terrible time adjusting. I remember at one time I went up to the top of the library and looked over the campus just to psyche myself up that I could conquer this place--that it was not better than me! Q - How did it go, making friends? A - You develop study groups and friends very quicky. My best friend from the junior college transferred with me and we both graduated with highest honors in the same time period, so we didn't have that big of a problem adjusting socially. Q - I want to go back to the spiritual awakening you mentioned earlier. That sounds very interesting. A - I had been raised in a religious family, but had not really had a personal religious experience. For me, it was the experience of realizing that God was a real God who spoke to me and cared about me, as opposed to some far-off being that was wanting to beat me over the head with a stick! And that he had a fatherly love for me, that he wanted what was good for me...That realization, and some personal experiences that I prefer not to share, were deeply convincing that there was a God and not only was there a God but that he cared for me. And that changed my attitude toward not just school but life in general, that I felt like I had a purpose. Q - Faith and science are popularly portrayed as being at war with one another, which is why I find your views refreshing and inspiring. A - What happens a lot of times is that religious students view science as the enemy, and science often is taught in such a way that religion is the enemy. The truth is that they can co-exist. Everything we have in life is at some point accepted by faith, and even some of the theories that we have in science, unproven theories, we have to accept them as "reality based on flimsy information." Q - I have to admit that when I visited your website I was a little lost trying to understand the research that you do. Your GIFT Teacher, Kaye Sheets, tells me that she worked on increasing the efficiency of tiny, nano-batteries. I guess I'll ask you to start from there! A - What Kaye worked on is a very specific topic in a much more general umbrella of topics that I cover. For the most part my work is in developing advanced semiconductors that can perform tasks that modern-day semiconductors cannot perform. One of those applications is photovoltaic, or solar, cells, but that's only one application of many that these new materials can perform. The materials we work on are coming on line for a variety of applications. High power, high frequency transistors that have a power density of about a hundred times the current state-of-the-art are possible now. While I don't specifically work on laser diodes, some of the materials that we work with are used in the same materials that are coming out in the new Blu-Ray DVD disc. They can store higher density information. Students might relate to that in the newest X-Box for example. We do work with what we call solid state lighting, which is basically trying to replace light bulbs with white light emitters which will last five to ten times longer than a lightbulb, and be much more efficient in generating power. A local company here in Atlanta just licensed the technology we have produced for that. Q - What's the difference between a light bulb and a white light emitter? A - The light coming from a light bulb is what we call white light. It contains all the colors in the visible spectrum--plus a lot of heat, which is infrared radiation. What solid state lighting is attempting to do is to replace that lightbulb with a semiconductor that will emit light when you drive electricity through it. These devices have existed for quite some time as single colors. You see these little indicators on computers or even on the taillights of cars, or are now showing up in traffic lights, that are red dots, or green dots, and the materials that we work with have been commercialized (not by us; this is other people's work) to show blue. So now we have all the colors in the spectrum. We can mix these colors together and get white light. Most of the time the way people do this is to take blue light, which has a lot of energy, and absorb that onto a what's called a phosphor material, which converts that single color into a whole range of different colors. That's the same sort of technology as is in a fluourescent tube light: there's an arc through the tube, through the gas, and high energy photons of light are absorbed in the phosphor, and it converts that high energy light to low energy light of many different colors. What we're trying to do is to eliminate the need for the phosphor. In this new technology that we've developed we use new semiconductor materials to avoid that extra step. In theory it should make it cheaper and potentially more efficient, although we're not yet at the point where we are actually more efficient. Q - What's a semiconductor? A - The best way to describe it is that semiconductors are the materials than are the basis of all electronics and all optoelectronics. They are the the things that do the switching in your computers, that emit and absorb light, that admit light in a light-emitting diode (LED) like you see in a traffic light or a tail light of a car, and that absorb light in a solar cell. It's the base material that can change an energy form from electrical to optical and vice versa. What Kaye worked on for me was a small subset of the overall work that we do. Our whole focus is to develop these materials that can make possible a whole range of new devices. She worked on one specific device, but it requires us to do a lot of research to perfect these new materials and really engineer them, lay the atoms down the right way, literally one atomic layer at a time, and stack these layers of atoms up to construct and engineer custom-made materials that don't occur in nature. Q - How do you figure out the recipes for new materials? A - New materials are often studied first by computer simulation, and then by experimentation, just trying various different combinations of ways to lay these atoms down, in what we'll call epitaxy system which are the systems that grow these semiconductors. Then you check their properties. You do a range of different materials and you find some materials have useful properties and other materials have properties that are perhaps not as useful. Q - And how do you put down a layer of atoms? A - There's actually a variety of commercially available tools. The technique that I focus on is called Molecular Beam Epitaxy, MBE for short. It's one of a few techniques where you can control the construction of these semiconductors down to literally a fraction of an atomic layer. These are the same tools that produce 60% of the transceiver chips that are in cell phones. Basically 60% of them are produced by one company up in South Carolina, and what they're manufacturing these devices with is this MBE technology. Q - What will be the impact of this sort of research, say, five years from now? How will we see it in our lives? A - I see that in the next five years there will be dramatic improvements in the solar cell conversion efficiency, which is a measure of how much electricity you get out of a solar cell compared to how much light is incident on the solar cell. We're already seeing a company in California that is already over 40% efficient in their solar cells. It may be possible for us to greatly exceed that number in the next few years. Q - That would seemingly have huge repercussions on the energy industry! A - It would also change the way that we look at power in general. Instead of having centralized power generation, what you would have is "distributed power." Each house might have a bank of solar cells on it (this is very long term, this is not five years out), and each house would supply power for part of the neighborhood. Whatever power they weren't consuming in their house they would sell back to the power company. When they need the power they would draw from the power grid and then whenever they don't need the power they could sell it back. This would of course change the way one would create the infrastructure of developing countries, in that you build a house and you put a power source in the house. The one thing that's common to every location in the world is that it gets solar radiation. Q - I see on your website that you play guitar. Electric or acoustic? A - A little bit of both. I do enjoy it, it's a form of relaxation. I typically make up my own songs as opposed to playing other people's stuff. When I had this conversion experience I spent some time in a band for a little while, when I was a teenager, and I have a good number of songs written. Q - And I also note that you like classic cars. A - I've got a Corvette that I'm rebuilding, I've got it torn down to the frame and I'm rewelding the frame to strengthen it up so that I can put in a larger engine and beef it up. Me and my son are doing that as a joint project. He's probably the only 8 year-old that I know who knows how to weld! Georgia Performance Standards (-- Show --) |