By Fiona Rawsontile, Dec 2015
I think I could say that whoever knows Dr. Chen,
personally or professionally, would agree that his career, while still in a
young and aspiring stage, is purely legendary. I’m excited to find out what I’m
going to learn from him today.
Fiona: After you have graduated from Purdue with a
Ph.D., you worked in industry for five years. Why did you decide to go back to
academia?
Dr. Chen: I was asked this question by many of my colleagues and
students. The truth is that the research lab I was working in was dismissed during
the last economic crisis. The company deployed all the researchers to product
departments as R&D engineers, including me. However, having been “spoiled”
by the freedom offered by the research lab, I was unable and unwilling to adapt
myself to the life of an ordinary engineer. So after nine months, I quit and joined my
current university. The manager did not even know I had a Ph.D. until my resignation,
or maybe they simply did not care.
Fiona: When people talk about your achievements,
they often mention your wife, who’s an equally accomplished engineer in the
same field. How would you describe your professional relationship with her?
Dr. Chen: My wife is my (without “one of the”) best partner in my
career. We had the same Ph.D. Advisor at Purdue, and now we are working in the same department of our
institution. As a couple, we simply 100% trust each other in all aspects. (Fiona
commented: That can be boring sometimes.) For example, you never need to worry
about if your editing on her draft would harm her feeling. I think both of us
benefit significantly from this mutual trust, which makes our collaboration
extremely efficient.
Fiona: Do you two discuss about work at home? Who
wins more often when disputes occur?
Dr. Chen: Yes, we do discuss about work at home. We have many
divergences in our work, but we always manage to reach an agreement when attending
to the students. Neither of us always wins, though my wife claims she is the one
who often gives in (which is questionable, in my humble opinion).
Fiona: “Love does not consist in gazing at each
other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” (Antoine de
Saint-Exupery) Related to the last question, what do you think is the overall
condition of engineering women in industry or academia, in terms of competence,
promotional opportunities, peer recognition, etc.?
Dr. Chen: Women are normally considered as “minorities” in
engineering. Under this presumption, the current systems of both industry and
academia provide women engineers and professors with many additional
opportunities. In fact, I think academia offers even more than industry through creating special programs or
considerations in hiring and research funding. A female engineer or professor
is also more visible (say, easier to be noticed or remembered) during daily
working contacts. Nonetheless, female engineers and professors often encounter
more difficulties when being considered for administrative positions.
Fiona: Do they tend to be better or worse than
men with regard to certain skills?
Dr. Chen: In academia, my observation is that female professors
are more aggressive (of course, not everyone) than their counterparts in
industry. I am not sure whether it means that academic life is harsher, or only
the “aggressive” women would choose academia. I don’t see any difference
between male or female engineers from technical perspectives, but apparently
female engineers take more responsibilities for their families than male
engineers. That may explain some of our observations.
Fiona: Your 35-page single-spaced CV told me you
must be a genius as well as an extremely busy person. How could you find time
for serving as journal editors, conference organizers, panel reviewers, and
numerous service and dissertation committees, while maintaining high productivity
with several ongoing federally funded projects (there are 14 manuscripts under
review at this moment!)? Do you have secrets in time management?
Dr. Chen: You have to prioritize them and attend to the most
important tasks first. Not everything is equally important and their value
alters at different phases of your career. I work hard, of course, but in
academia almost everybody (if not all) is working hard. If I have any secret, I
think that is probably motivating my team effectively: my students participate
in writing proposals, coordinating meetings with collaborators and funding
agencies, and helping with many administrative and logistic duties of mine. Through
learning from these extra activity, they become well prepared for the “cruel” society they will be facing upon graduation.
（插入作者高妹/Fiona的话：向大家推荐我正在连载的玄幻---武打---佛道---言情故事《魅羽活佛》，晋江链接：http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=4880087 故事简介：鬼道中的魇荒门，七个师姐妹都以绝世美颜著称。然而这次的任务中，二弟子魅羽却要化作一个中年油腻肥秃僧，卷入佛国、道门，和修罗界的斗争. 还要让咱们古往今来文采武功都称霸天下的帅哥活佛，对她一见倾心，矢志不渝。）
Fiona: Considering the short duration you have worked
as a college professor, the number of students and postdocs you have trained is
impressive. Do you mentor them on an individual basis or rely mostly on lab
culture and peer supervision?
Dr. Chen: We have two types of meetings – weekly 1-1’s and small
study-group meetings. We have only one general group meeting per semester
because it is hard to find a meeting room for 40 people and such a meeting is often
inefficient. With a hierarchical personnel structure, senior students help me
mentor the juniors. I monitor students’ research progress through 1-1 meetings,
which I try my best to protect even considering my busy travel schedule, as
well as weekly reports. I usually tell them what I want to see rather than what
they need to do. They figure out the details by themselves or with other
students. Luckily, our group is sufficiently large so that they can always find
an expert to answer their questions. I have never laid off any students (so
far), but our peer pressure is huge with so many productive members. In short,
we run as an efficient team, in which individual genius is not critical.
Fiona: Now that all of you students are productive
and competent, can you tell which ones are more likely to succeed as scientists,
which ones should aim at industrial leadership? Has anyone disappointed you
with his/her decision?
Dr. Chen: First of all, not ALL of them are productive or
competent. People like to imagine that we have different requirements of
personal characteristics for scientists and industry leaders. Unfortunately,
this presumption does not hold. There are common personality traits shared by both roles:
persistence, diligence, teamworking … I am happy as long as my students become
successful, be it academia or industry.
Fiona: Hollywood likes to portrait us scientists as long
gray haired nerds who have little idea about how the society outside our labs functions.
Tell us about the online bookstore you cofounded as a college student. Are you
still participating in the management? Do you have plans for other types of
business in the future?
Dr. Chen: I quit from the online-store business around 2004 and am
no longer a part of the team. Since then, many of the people I worked with have
become important figures in the Chinese Internet industry. That was one of my
most valuable investments in terms of personal connections. In China, there is
a popular saying, “Personal connection is the first productive force”. Although
meant to be a joke, it does state a truth that your reputations and personal
connections are vital for your career, and I carefully maintain them. In
addition, if you have gone through the whole process of building a startup, you
would know whom you want to work with, what you can and cannot do. I like trying
new things, and I will experiment with some kind of start-up in the future. In
fact, I think we have already come up with some good ideas, and we’ll see.
Fiona: Entrepreneurial mindset is currently a hot
topic in the engineering disciplines. For students who are still pursuing their
degrees, do you think it helps to bring up their awareness of industrial
opportunities, risk management, etc., or would you rather have them focus on
basic engineering skills, e.g., signal processing, without being overly
distracted?
Dr. Chen: Although I started my own company when I was a M.S.
student, I am generally against the idea of sacrificing your study for commercial
opportunities. I still remember when I told the advisor of my M.S. thesis how
“successful” my start-up was, he said, “I agree with you that you might have learned
things that extend beyond the scope of school, but the reason we still need education
is that other things, some of which are essential in the make of a scientist or
a businessman, can ONLY be taught at academia.” Those are the words that will
be kept in my mind forever and shared with my students.
Fiona: Would you also like to share the experience
of organizing the concert for two famous singers at Tsinghua?
Dr. Chen: Ahha! Jian Li and Jie Miao are very famous now, and I’m
happy to have witnessed their growth in our young age and early stage of their
career. I was the producer of that concert, and I still consider it as one of my
proudest accomplishments. You wouldn’t believe we only spent RMB12000 organizing
the whole concert, and I still owe one of the two singers RMB2000 for the
recording tapes we used.
Fiona: Did the concert bring back enough gross to
cover the expenses?
Dr. Chen: No. If I remember correctly, the admission was free
because ticket pricing would have taken a long time to be approved. You can
imagine how hard it was to get a ticket. Many famous singers and musicians
attended the concert: “Lao Lang”, Gengxu Lu, Xiaosong Gao, Jie Li … After the concert, we had an
exclusive party for the rest of the
night in a pub named BlueJay in the university neighborhood. I met Jian and Jie
again at the 60th anniversary party of the department I graduated from, and we
were glad to see all of us doing well in our own careers.
Fiona: An experience like that would certainly be
remembered. Could you have become an artist yourself?
Dr. Chen: My mom has a B.S. degree in music, but I failed to
inherit the talents from her. I enjoy art and music, but I don’t want to pretend to be an expert.
Fiona: Your research covers the areas of embedded systems,
memory and sensing, nano-devices, etc. Which topic do you think has the
potential of making the largest impact?
Dr. Chen: As computer engineers, my wife and I have started gaining attentions for our research on emerging memory technologies. We recently shifted to brain-inspired computing, which is believed to revolutionize the computer industry by allowing computer to “think” like a human being. We are still far from this ultimate goal, but we have already seen light above the horizon. I’d like to use the following sentence to summarize our research: “I imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the difference between humanity and technology fades, where the soul and silicon chip unite.” (Raymond Kurzweil, “The Age of Intelligent Machines”)
