Page 72 - Fall2020

ASK AN ACOUSTICIAN
But Professor Robert F. Lambert, a prominent member of the ASA who was on the faculty there, had a position available for a project on the acoustics of porous media. The subject seemed interesting enough and helped to pay for rent and frozen pizzas. I only gradually started thinking of myself as an acoustician. Maybe it took hold because it was cool to learn about noise control and decibels. Maybe because it connected with my liking of music. Or maybe I just got hooked when I went to my first ASA meeting in 1986. In any case, I became interested enough in acoustics that I decided to attend the Penn State Graduate Program in Acoustics for my PhD. It was at Penn State where I really dove into atmospheric acoustics and the connections to meteorology, thanks in large part to my PhD advisor, Dennis W. Thomson, and later when I was a postdoc with John C. Wyngaard. After a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MA), where I worked with George Frisk among many other outstanding acousticians, I returned to Penn State briefly as a research faculty member. I have been at ERDC-CRREL for about
17 years now and an Army researcher for 24 years.
What is a typical day for you?
I generally keep a conventional work schedule, although I do travel a lot for my job. Until recently, one of my kids would typically drop me off at work on their way to school, and I would get a ride home whenever my kids or wife could pick me up. Going to a conference now and then to listen to other people talk about their interesting research really helps to recharge the batteries. Sometimes I also get to go to field trials where there are tanks, helicopters, and loud explosions.
Like many scientists later in their careers, I spend a sub- stantial amount of time now on administrative tasks: overseeing research projects, making presentations, writ- ing reports and proposals, attending project meetings, and budgeting. Hopefully these efforts help to free up my colleagues to have their own productive research careers. When I am directly involved in the research these days, it most often involves numerical modeling and other com- puter programming. Although I may not be keeping pace with Stephen Hawking’s late career productivity on black hole theory, I can still crank out computer code.
How do you feel when experiments/projects do not work out the way you expected them to?
Of course, it can be a real frustration to expend time and effort on an experiment that doesn’t work out or
on a derivation that leads to a dead end or to tracking down and fixing a bug in a program. On the other hand, when something does not yield the expected results, it often provides a valuable opportunity to reassess your assumptions. Acknowledge the unexpected and ask why it happened. One of my pet peeves is the seemingly oblig- atory “Good agreement was obtained between the theory and experimental results...” statement at the end of many papers, even when the agreement is not particularly good or there is no objective criterion for assessing the good- ness of the agreement. The implicit assumption seems to be that papers are worthy of publication only if there is good agreement. But results that do not conform to our expectations can help us recognize knowledge gaps and lead to important advances.
Do you feel like you have solved the work-life balance problem? Was it always this way?
It has always been important to me to be a good parent as well as a good scientist. It hasn’t always been easy, though. After leaving the office, my work often does continue at home. I have been quite fortunate that my family situation generally allows me to focus on work when it is necessary. (Or when I want to attend an ASA meeting!) But I do view maintaining a work-life balance as important to emotional and physical health and thus to long-term career success and enjoying life.
Familial considerations were prominent when my wife Nancy (who has an academic background in biology and math) and I decided to move to New Hampshire and I took the job at ERDC-CRREL. Northern New England has been a wonderful place to live and raise a family. We imitated the natives and learned to cut and split wood, tap maple trees, and cross-country ski. We raised four children, with the last one just about to head off to college. So now we are entering a new phase in our lives. Some of my best memories were going to my kids’ school activities and coaching their soccer teams. I am also an avid gardener and read a lot of books, particularly nonfiction about history and culture.
What makes you a good acoustician?
My successes, as I see them, usually come from “asso- ciative thinking”: recognizing connections between problems and synthesizing those connections into solu- tions. I’m not brilliant. But I do try very hard to formulate ideas logically and present them in a clear way. This prob- ably stems from my liberal arts education, which I think
72 Acoustics Today • Fall 2020