A little about me:
I'm a native Iowan - born in central Iowa, graduated from high school in Riceville (an little burg in north central Iowa). Yes, I did grow up on a farm, and I spent my formative years cleaning pig pens, picking up rocks, and shoveling corn. I didn't like those jobs too much, so after high school I decided to get myself...
Sum hire edgikashun:
My Ph.D. advisor at UCSB was Herbert Kroemer. My graduate research work involved using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to grow quantum wells made of the semiconductors AlSb and InAs. The work was great fun, and a nice side benefit was the fact that the Pacific Ocean was about 50 yards from the front door of the engineering building. Unfortunately, you can't stay in graduate school forever. So in 1990 I started teaching electrical engineering and doing research in various semiconductor-related topics at ISU. I discovered that having a real job can be almost as much fun as being in grad school. Now, if we could just find a way to get to an ocean a little bit closer to Ames...