Meet Mentor DaleSpam — Biomedical Engineer & Mentor

Meet a Mentor: DaleSpam

Meet a Mentor is a fun series to help you get to know your wonderful Mentors better. Constructive questions and comments are welcome!

About DaleSpam

Today we meet: DaleSpam.

Give us a brief history of DaleSpam

I have moved around a decent amount during my life: Arizona, Indiana, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, Utah, Ohio, and North Carolina. With all of that, I consider myself a Texan currently living in North Carolina.

I did my undergraduate work in Texas, taking two years off to serve a mission for my church. At the time I started, my school was one of only eight universities that offered biomedical engineering at the undergraduate level, so it was a good fit. I met the woman who later became my wife there in Texas just a few months before I went off to graduate school in Ohio.

Ohio was a pretty big culture- and weather-shock from Texas, so I vowed to head back south as soon as possible. I kept in touch with her and went back to Texas frequently that first year. We got married, she moved up to Ohio with me, and it took me a while to finish graduate school — by the time we left we had three children.

My research in grad school was on magnetic resonance imaging pulse-sequence design. During that research I established some good connections in industry; those contacts made it fairly easy to get a job quickly, and they had a position open in North Carolina. So we moved back south, had one more child, and have been here ever since.

Why did you choose biomedical engineering as your field of study?

Engineering is in my blood. I have five generations of engineers in my family. I never felt pressure to do engineering, but I was naturally interested in something that was both creative and technical, so engineering was a natural fit.

I became interested specifically in biomedical engineering after attending an SBME conference with my dad during my senior year of high school. He was presenting at the conference (he is a chemical engineer) and we made a college visit out of it. During the conference we watched a presentation from a group of NASA engineers on a lower-body negative pressure device for exercise in microgravity. They mentioned a specific design challenge; I leaned over to my dad and told him how I would solve it, and later in the presentation they revealed they solved it the same way. I was hooked after that.

What were some of your biggest challenges while at university?

With three kids, finances were without a doubt the biggest challenge. I had a stipend from my research advisor, and on the side I tutored physics and calculus and helped with administrative tasks in the lab. With all of that we were able to make ends meet. We were officially under the poverty line the entire time, but had a comfortable life and finished without substantial debt.

Career & Education

Can you tell us about your career in medical imaging?

When I first left grad school and went into engineering I was a “Collaborations Manager.” My company is heavily involved in extramural research partnerships. My job was to work with those research partners and make sure their research could progress on our equipment. I also would take particularly promising projects and feed them back to the developers in the factory.

After a couple of years I was promoted to a management position. Now, I do the same work and also lead a team of other scientists with similar responsibilities. I have been doing that ever since. I find that my communication skills (verbal and written) tend to be much more important than my technical skills.

How is your MBA going? What do you plan on doing with it?

So far it is going well. I must admit I went into it a little “cocky” — I thought, “If I can do engineering then this business stuff will be trivial; I’ll spend 20 or 30 minutes a week on it and easily get it.” The concepts aren’t that hard, but there is a lot of work and a ton of reading. It surprised me how much effort it has taken.

Mostly I want the MBA to improve my capability in my current role. I have decades of training on the scientific and technical aspects of my job, but I have been navigating business- and management-related aspects by instinct. My instincts haven’t led to major blunders, but the focused training on business methodology has already been beneficial.

Science Interests

How did your interest in Relativity come about?

I think my interest in relativity came from finally “getting it.” Relativity was one of the subjects I did not understand at first, so when I finally understood it the sense of accomplishment was that much stronger. I didn’t study it regularly; it was all self-study and took about seven years from first exposure until I finally understood it. The key, for me, was the mathematical framework of four-vectors and drawing my own first spacetime diagrams.

What topics in Relativity are you most closely watching?

I was very interested in Gravity Probe B, but felt rather disappointed by the results. I’m also interested in two theoretical developments, though I don’t see much progress on them: a test theory of general relativity applicable to strong fields (as opposed to PPN), and a coordinate-independent (tensor) formulation of a special-relativity test theory.

If you could have lunch with a living physicist, who would it be and why?

Leonard Susskind. I have really enjoyed his video lectures on YouTube. He just seems like a fun person to hang out with.

Personal Life & Hobbies

What martial arts are you interested in and how did you get started?

We attend a Korean martial arts school where the primary arts are Taekwondo and Hapkido. My two oldest kids are second-degree black belts in Taekwondo, my third child and my wife are first-degree black belts, and our youngest is a red belt. I am currently in training for my first-degree black-belt test in Hapkido, which was scheduled for May 2014, and my three older kids have started Hapkido as well.

We started the school for the older three kids for Taekwondo. I was never terribly interested in Taekwondo, but at one testing day I saw Hapkido people testing and thought it looked interesting. Hapkido includes punches, strikes, and kicks similar to Taekwondo, but also “soft” skills like sweeps, throws, joint locks, and breaks. It seemed more well-rounded and focused on self-defense rather than forms, which appeals to my practical side.

Now our whole family does martial arts. With four kids, if everyone had separate activities we’d spend all our time driving from place to place. Here we can all train together, each at our own level and pace, and get a good workout. Prior to this I wasn’t particularly athletic or active, so it’s been an enjoyable experience. When I’m away from training for a while I physically miss the activity — I feel stronger, more fit, alert, and healthy than at any previous point in my life.

What are some of your favorite movies, books, and musicians?

I like country music, which probably isn’t surprising given my Texas roots. For books I enjoy science fiction, especially Robert A. Heinlein and Orson Scott Card. For movies I tend to enjoy superhero films and comedies, although I’m not that picky.

Thanks for participating, DaleSpam!